‘Lost’ is Unveiling Itself
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January 30, 2008 – 10:40 am
Here is the problem for ABC: In “Lost” it has the show with perhaps the most compelling continuing story line in television history, one whose resumption this week has been hotly anticipated by its devoted fans.
But especially because the writers’ strike has stripped ABC of most of its other hit series, the network would love to find a way to restore the still substantial “Lost” audience to near the blockbuster level it reached when the show first became a phenomenon more than three years ago. During the show’s first season it averaged 18.5 million viewers an episode, a figure down to 15 million by the third season.
That is “a big challenge, though a fun one,” said Michael Benson, executive vice president for marketing of ABC Entertainment. He added that it was a little like saying, “Let’s ask people to pick up Chapter 13 and start reading.”
That is one reason ABC has made this “Lost” week, with four hours dedicated to the show, split between Wednesday and Thursday nights. The four hours include an hourlong clip recap on Thursday night at 8, Eastern time, leading up to the first new episode at 9.
The “Lost” onslaught begins on Wednesday night at 9 with a replay of the mind-boggling two-hour May finale of Season 3, which pushed new buttons on the show’s fabled character-flashback technique — chiefly the flash-forward button. Little of what happened in that episode is likely to mean much to those who have not followed the show’s labyrinthine plotline, stuffed as it is with interconnected back stories and sci-fi mind games. Trying to counter that expectation, ABC decided to transform the finale into what may be the first network show with added pop-up context. As Mr. Benson put it, maintaining his literary theme, “I kind of call it the Cliff Notes version of a TV show.”
“Lost” follows a group of oddly connected plane crash survivors on a South Pacific island marked by mysterious qualities and populated by possibly malevolent inhabitants.
ABC is labeling its revamped finale “Lost, Enhanced,” and it will include explanations of characters and events that will slide up in a bar of text at the bottom of the screen. So if Jack (Matthew Fox) is in the middle of a confrontation with Ben (Michael Emerson), Mr. Benson said, the running text commentary may explain that this is not Jack’s first encounter with Ben, or that Ben was first known as Henry Gale.
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