The best thing that ever happened to the show Lost, other than being put on the ABC schedule in the first place, was the announcement this week that the show's producers and ABC have set a definite end date for the series: May of 2010, 3 seasons away.
I've talked about this before, but this is not at all the American way of doing television. It's expected that as long as a show is getting acceptable ratings and all the participants are willing, it's going to stay on the air. The problem, obviously, is that most series ae beginning to repeat themselves after a few seasons. This leads to situations such as MASH running three times as long as the war it was about, or the 13 year-old ER now having nearly shed all of its second generation of stars.
ER and Law & Order have proven relatively immune to aging because of the constant cast changes and because they are workplace dramas with an almost inexhaustible supply of potential plots (which is not to say neither show has ever repeated itself). ER is essentially a soap opera in all but name, and a good soap can run forever. But no series genre is hurt more by the demands of TV to keep the ball rollin' than the serialized mystery series. You cannot keep viewers on a string indefinitely--even with a series like The X-Files, which had great self-contained episodes and where the central mythology episodes were always a minority, people eventually lost interest because they sensed they were being strung along. Twin Peaks had the opposite problem: we found out who killed Laura Palmer relatively early on, but they kept the show going anyway to diminishing returns. But the very reason shows like The X-Files resisted answering questions was that once you start doing that, you're inexorably moving towards the end of the series, and neither the producers nor Fox wanted it to end (the stars were another matter).
The decline in the ratings for Lost were dramatic enough that the producers could tell themselves that unless they began to take steps to tie up some threads, give some answers, and provide an obvious light at the end of the tunnel, the decision to end the series would be made for them--and so would end the chance to conclude the mystery on their own terms. Now that they know there are only 3 seasons left, plotting is made so much easier. Instead of saying, "Well, we know Character X to die exactly 30 episodes from the end of the series, but since we don't know when that will be we can't very well prepare for that yet," now they do know that answer.
With this set date for the show's end, fans can look for answers to begin outnumbering new mysteries before long, and possibly a bump in the ratings. Lost really has improved its quality during this second half of season 3, and I think there's reason to believe this will continue. The other half of the announcement regarding the 2010 end date was that Lost won't even try to run episodes in the fall as it did this year, meaning the final 3 seasons will be 16 episodes in length (this is the programming strategy that 24 pioneered a few years back). In other words, Lost has already run about 60% of the episodes it will ever run. There's not much more time for the introduction of new hatches or submarines or folks like Nikki and Paolo who were so bad that the other characters were making in-jokes about their irrelevance.
Now, on to our new project: convincing Fox that the 24 format is played out.
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