Lost: Season 4

Well, my wife will be happy.

 

They are going head-to-head vs. The Office and Grey's Anatomy? This seems like a dumb idea. These three shows are just going to eat each other's viewers. Put them in all different time slots and all would probably dominate their slot.

 

Lost and Grey's Anatomy are both on ABC. That kind of makes it hard for them to go head to head. Besides, I thought Grey's was on Wednesday.

 

Cannot Wait!

 

Latest Lost Info

Because of the Writers Strike, the plans for Lost season 4 have changed. Season 4 will run on Thursday nights at 9 p.m EST.

Originally Season 4 was set to begin in February and run without repeats until May. Now it will start January 31, 2008 and run 8 episodes. Previously, Lost was set to run until 2010 with 3 seasons of 16 episodes each. Now we may have a short season 4 and a long season 5.

Lost adds new cast members for season 4. The season 3 DVD set was released December 11th.

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I'm am soooooooo ready for this show to come back

 

ABC has been fairly dumb in how it's treated LOST for a while, even if this move isn't so bad.
Like others mentioned, American Idol KILLED them, especially during S2. Last year, they made the poor decision to push the show into the 9 pm CT slot to dodge Idol and suffered even more for it. The worst thing you can do with a struggling show is keep shifting its slot, and that's what they're doing now. I thought all along it needed to move to Sunday.

Couple that with the producers teasing the audience to a ridiculous degree with their "you can't figure us out" routine.....

All that said, I think they're finally getting things back on track. The final third of last season was fantastic. I hope that they aren't making a bad move airing an incomplete season this spring.

Evan

 

Shortened season doesn't sound good

Rocket River

 

I think I'd rather wait until next year and get a complete season than to get half a season this year. That's coming from a huge, huge, huge LOST fan.

Watching Season 3 on Bluray is the shiznit. It's really nice.

 

It beats having no season at all(i.e. 24).

I got it last week. It looks and sounds amazing. Great job by Disney as usual.

 

So Dharma and the numbers were explained in "The Lost Experieince." It was a really cool explanation too IMO. Any thoughts on that?

 

Good point - for some reason, I was thinking one of them was on FOX. Grey's is on Thursday this season opposite of the Office. I'm still hoping the strike ends sometime reasonable and other shows will be new in February as well, but yeah, they may be going against just Office repeats.

I've never understood why shows move timeslots so much though. NBC did this with West Wing and killed the show. If it's popular on x night, leave it on x night!

 

What was the explanation for them?

 

Unless the DGA just pooches it, the strike will probably be over some time in February, perhaps a little earlier. In my opinion, based on what I've been hearing and seeing.

Of course, that would just mean "Lost" will be changing time slots again, but they may still be able to get back to shooting and get episodes in the can in time to not have a gap (or not much of one if there is one).

 

Is there any progress on the strike at all?

 

From what I understand, they've mostly resolved the monetary issues (where the union had a legit gripe, I thought). Now the union, represented by a garment worker's union attorney (???), is striking over wanting more people under their union (reality show writers, for example). Every report I've seen about it is that the union's rep has no clue what he's doing and it's mostly his fault and this strike should basically be over if it weren't for him. Whether that's true or not, I have no idea (where is Mr. Paige?).

 

I have no love for David Young (the WGA executive director), but the desire of our elected leadership to expand jurisdiction to cover reality and animation predates the hiring of Mr. Young.

Certainly keeping the jurisdictional issues on the table has allowed the studios a bit of a public relations victory as it has allowed them to paint us a little bit crazy and our leadership to be over-their-heads and striking for reasons that seem insane.

However, we've still never come anywhere close on the financial issues. They're offering the hated home video rate for downloads (with an exemption that they can, by fiat, proclaim anything promotional and pay nothing at all) and have offered a flat $250 residual for streaming television shows on the Internet (for comparison, the broadcast residual for a television show rerun is over $20,000).

We countered with a streaming formula that would pay roughly $600 per 100,000 streams, and the studios walked out before we countered on downloads.

So, the studios aren't going to negotiate with us any more (even though we've filed an unfair labor practice claim against them, but those things take forever to get resolved, so it's immaterial to the strike itself).

The Directors Guild of America is going to begin negotiations on their contract with the studios after the new year. The DGA is expected to be far less militant than the WGA has been, and there's a very good chance that they will make a deal within a couple of weeks or so after they start negotiations. And because all the Guild contracts with the studios include a "favored nations" clause, whatever they get will be offered to us. If it's good enough, we'll take it (though we'll hem and haw about it because it won't be as good as we had hoped). If it's not good enough, we'll keep striking some more and probably be followed by SAG this summer (they're pretty militant, too).

The thing is, it appears that the studios always wanted to negotiate with the DGA first, so they just kind of let us sway in the wind, offering deals they knew we wouldn't possibly accept and always finding an excuse to break off negotiations. That way, they get to make a deal with the "weak sister", the Guild that never goes on strike. And, as a bonus, they get to make us look a little crazy AND punish us for striking.

The DGA gets to look like heroes for making a deal when the WGA couldn't and letting everybody get back to work.

 

*bump*

Season kicks off in a couple weeks.

I'm still not looking forward to how this 8 episode arc will end. It's not going to be a shortened season - it's going to be a season cut off abruptly half way through. That's a serious waste. Can only hope that this means 8 episodes will air in the fall before a 16 episode run in spring of '09.

Also, I'm fully convinced that the LOST creaters have based the vast bulk of the island and what is off of Stephen King, in particular the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower is the same concept as the island (not yet revealed), toss in The Langoliers and insert smokey the monster as Pennywise from IT. The connections are astounding.

Evan