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The official countdown can now begin.
ABC has announced that Lost will return Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 8/7c.
ABC will have three hours of Lost action that night, with a recap show at 8pm, followed by 5x01 and 5x02 from 9-11pm.
This is a small satisfaction for those of us with hiatus fever, but just think, in 73 days it'll be over!
4x03 "The Economist" was yet another fabulous episode, and now just for you, we've found more fabulous extra content directly related to this episode.
The first is from DocArzt, who had obtained a pre-release version of this episode. Being a trusted and upright member in good standing of the fan community, he didn't spoil or leak any details beforehand, but now that the episode has broadcast, he noted a few differences in the earlier version and the final cut. One of these differences was a deleted scene as Miles, Kate, and Sayid come upon the Sonar Fence on their way to the Barracks. What happens there is surprising, to say the least. Read all the details at DocArzt's personal blog here.
The second is the third Official Lost Podcast for this season from ABC. It features Naveen and Michael E. talking about The Economist. Listen to it at ABC's Lost podcast page here, or use the direct m4v link for iTunes here.
Enjoy!
WGA show-runners will report back to work Monday, according to Patric Verrone, WGA West chief, at a special press conference held today at WGA West headquarters in LA. (link) This action is in advance of a 48-hour special membership vote to be conducted Monday and Tuesday to end the strike action. That vote is itself in advance of a 10-hour membership vote to ratify the new writers contract.
But the bottom line for Lost fans, WGA negotiating board member and Lost show-runner Carlton Cuse will likely be among the show-runners returning to work tomorrow. So we'll await word from ABC's building 23 at the Disney lot tomorrow, as we assume he'll begin work reassembling the film crew and cast in Hawaii, and the post-production and writing teams in Los Angeles.
Popular Lost blogger DocArzt has posted a fascinating video "behind the scenes" from the set of 4x01 (link), from a set of ABC Medianet promotional material that most more mainstream news outlets don't really use-- most simply use the stills to illustrate articles. He's been showing us the promotional stills too, for example here are the stills for last night's episode 4x02 Confirmed Dead. Yes, these have mostly been available on Lost-media.com, but it's good to have another source.
And by the way, in case you have missed them, the Official Lost video podcasts are back, two new ones for Season 4 so far, both narrated by Kris White rather than Carlton and Damon. The most recent one features Lost costume designer Roland Sanchez and the mysterious Lulu the dog. Check them out at ABC's Lost podcast page.
ABC's enormous investment of three hours of prep for the Season 4 premiere has paid off with a bonanza 16.1 million viewers. Devoting four hours of primetime to one show was in some sense a big risk: 2 hours of a caption-packed enhanced-version rerun of the previous season's finale on Wednesday, and an hour of a recap clip show before the premiere. But in the barren strike-crippled scheduling landscape, it was a smart move.
I had read with some worry Lisa de Moraes' gloom-and-doom prediction in The Washington Post that the Lost premiere would underperform. She noted that conventional wisdom anticipated that original programming, such as the new episode of House in November, and of course American Idol would do very well due to lack of competition in strikeland, then points out that both have turned out to be ratings disappointments.
She further predicted that Lost's Season 4 premiere would perform well below its most recent ratings last May at 14 million viewers, that in itself being a big dip from Lost's all time peak of 20 million.
Luckily her prediction was wrong. The 16.1 million figure from last night (albeit below the S3 premiere viewership of 18.8 million) was an extraordinary affirmation of ABC's strategy: 3 hours of recaps to encourage new or casual viewers, and the Grey's Anatomy timeslot, which further comes with the bonus of not competing with the Idol machine. Also, did you notice the "It's never to late to start watching Lost" tagline? Obviously one prong of ABC's strategy is to garner new viewers, and with Lost's complex storyline, these efforts are necessary, and apparently have been effective. The road to joining as a new viewer is even better lubricated when we add the fact that today's new Lost viewers have New Media options at the ABC.com website: they can view streaming full episodes in HD going back to Season 1. In fact, underlining this importance is that for the first time, viewers can watch streaming downloads of both "catch-ups" programs: The most recent clip show as well as the enhanced version of 3x22. Adding the Oceanic TV ad to Eli Stone (which immediately followed Lost), and retaining 11.6 million viewers, was the icing on the cake.
Good job, ABC, and good job Stephen McPherson. And for fans, Lost's current role as a major anchor for the network bodes very well indeed for the future of the franchise. Now let's hope for a speedy resolution of the WGA strike (we might hear something next week), so that at least some of the rest of Season 4's planned episodes may yet be recovered.
UDPATE FEB 5: See how Lost fared against the Superbowl and other fare during the entire week's ratings at Zap2it: Week Jan 28 - Feb 03 2008
DocArzt from Thetailseciton.com dropped me a line about finding an article in Mediaweek that quoted Stephen McPherson, who is of course the president of the ABC Entertainment Division. He's the one who that back in July of this year had an assistant call Damon Lindelof in the middle of an ABC TV Critics press conference back a day before Comic Con 2007, so that he had the okay to leak information on a now well-known casting spoiler for Season 4.
Well the current news is that he was chatting about ABC's lineup for Season 4, and the female viewer demographic, and the point is that Wednesday nights seem full with other shows. He also specifically mentioned ''Lost'' as a "wildcard asset", meaning we may see Lost broadcast almost any night, maybe (or maybe not) the Monday 8pm slot that has been rumored lately.
The Mediaweek article is mostly a long snore on demographics, so instead hop on over to DocArzt's summary at Thetailsection here.
