February 2, 2007

HAVING JUMPED THE POLAR BEAR:

Get Lost!: The series returns to finish its third season and producers promise the next 16 episodes will pick up forgotten storylines (ANDREW RYAN, 2/02/07, Globe and Mail)

If viewer devotion still determines the life and death of a TV series, Lost is cutting it close.

Even the most dedicated Lost followers were chagrined by the conceptual shift when the series returned for its third season last October.

The common complaint: The hit castaway drama was now focused overbearingly on the storylines involving the characters Jack, Kate and Sawyer, who were the unwilling guests of the strange group known as the Others; everyone else seemed to fade into the idyllic tropical scenery. For the first time in the show's three-year history, U.S. ratings dipped.

The next step was more egregious: After only six new episodes, ABC put its hottest show on hiatus and launched the rookie drama Daybreak in its Wednesday-night timeslot. Daybreak struggled desperately for several weeks before ABC pulled the plug. The network filled the hour-long void with reruns of According to Jim and The George Lopez Show. Lost fans, meanwhile, were left to quietly seethe and await the show's return.


That they didn't grasp that Hurley and Locke were the two best characters leaves one with little reason to believe they can revive the series.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2007 8:00 AM
Comments

I just started watching this series yesterday during a day off, and it's terrific so far. Sorry to hear that it wanders away from what appears to be working.

Posted by: Matt Murphy at February 2, 2007 8:15 AM

They killed off all the interesting characters and left us with Peyton Place, The Lost Years.

This is it for us, get interesting or get lost.

Posted by: erp at February 2, 2007 9:13 AM

Lost had me hooked at the start. Then the writers decided to play esoteric mind games with the viewers, and added violence for shock value alone. Just cheap writing and melodrama.

I won't be watching.

Posted by: John J. Coupal at February 2, 2007 9:20 AM

I'll give them the rest of this season to recover, but I sure haven't been waiting in suspense for the past few months. Hey, guys--we didn't get hooked on an action show. Get back to what you were doing right. But the previews don't look at all promising in that regard...

Posted by: b at February 2, 2007 10:35 AM

Man of Science, Man of Faith in Season Two is the point at which you think they know what they're doing. It's mostly downhill from there, though the Hurley episodes are always good.

Posted by: oj at February 2, 2007 10:59 AM

A bit o/t - but a similar thing is happening to "House" this season? We turned the last episode off and will give them one more week to get on track before it's deleted from our DVR recording list. Laurie looked decidedly lost in his heart to heart conversations with a patient. If we wanted heart to hearts, we'd watch Dr. Phil, not Dr. House.

Posted by: erp at February 2, 2007 1:46 PM
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