The strike’s not over yet, although with a tentative deal having been struck, all reports indicate that it could be done by Wednesday. Which means the networks have begun figuring out what a resumed TV season will look like. A Bill Carter article in today’s New York Times looks at what we will and won’t see and when. The salient point for many Tuned In readers:
Another of television’s most popular serialized dramas, ABC’s “Lost,” will probably cut its planned 16-episode season to about 13 episodes.
When this possibility was first floated, I was immediately against it: run the show in the summer if you can, hold the remaining 8 episodes for fall if you must, but don’t suddenly force the show to cram the story into five or six episodes at the last minute. (As Carter notes, there is still the chance some shows would run into the summer. Maybe ABC feels it would lose too much ad money by running a Lost finale in June, when fewer people are watching TV.) But I guess there’s one reason to be optimistic, which is that the original series ending deal the producers struck with ABC (three 16-episode seasons) meant that the series would run longer than the 100 episodes the producers had originally envisioned. If we assume that there’s a certain amount of padding or optional material that’s been added to fill the seasons out, then maybe it’s just a matter of un-padding.
That may just be wishful thinking; once you’ve conceived a 16-episode season, whatever your original plans, you’re probably going to lose something important by shaving two or three episodes off the season’s second half. On the other hand, I want more Lost, so what are you going to do?
What say you, Losties? Would you rather have 13 episodes right now, or 8 now and 8 in the fall?