Sometimes I have ignored my better judgment and stood by the creators of ABC’s desert island drama, Lost. While the online fanbase bitched about slow-moving plots and endless mysteries, I have long believed that these guys had an idea of what they were doing and where they were going – and I also just didn’t find the plots to be that slow-moving. Now my support feels justified, as producer Carlton Cuse, when talking about the end of Lost to Variety, mentioned The X-Files, saying it was "a great show that probably lasted two seasons too long…That show was a bit of a cautionary tale for us.”
That’s exactly what I want to hear! The kind of people who have gotten heavily into Lost tend to be the same kind of people who were into The X-Files, and we’ve all felt very burned by how that show turned out. So it’s very heartening to have Cuse say that ABC and the producers are talking right now to figure out a conclusion for the series. "It’s time for us to find an endpoint to the show," said Cuse. "It’s a struggle for us, because we don’t know if we have three years, four years or more to go. If we had an endpoint, then we could figure out where everything goes."
The show was originally envisioned as five seasons, but Variety mentions that the cast has been signed to seven, which makes it quite likely that the show will go that long.
In other great Lost news, ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson told Variety that next season, the show’s fourth, will see the network running all 22 episodes straight, much as Fox does with 24. That probably means that Lost will end in the summer of 2007 and not be back again until January 2008. This is a massive sea change in the way networks are doing business, and with two of TV’s biggest shows moving to this format, I think it’s safe to say that the old-fashioned Fall season premiere model is just about dead.