So the big TV news is that the rights for Lost have switched from Channel 4 to Lost. According to Mediaguardian, Sky’s paying £20m which, if I read the story right, is for seasons 3 and 4. So that works out at around £500k an episode. That’s pricey.
Channel 4, it seems, had the opportunity to match the Sky bid but declined to do so. Sky come out the winners.
It also seems that Sky might start broadcasting the new series as soon as next month. That’s just about doable since ABC is playing the series as a block of three from earlier this month, and then an uninterrupted run of seventeen from mid-January. Sky could probably start their run to tag onto that with episodes airing perhaps only hours or days after they have in the US.
Of course, Sky-less viewers are the people who are going to miss out, with DVD boxsets likely to do well for Buena Vista. But at the back of your mind, you have to worry that Lost was running the risk of losing viewers anyway. More questions keep getting asked, but few answers have been forthcoming, and with ABC keen to keep new episodes coming, there might never be answers as producers dig themselves deeper and deeper into holes that no plotting will let them out of. It’s the old Twin Peaks problem.
Another new US series that looks quite good, Jericho, shares that problem. A small town seems to have survived a nuclear attack. What’s happening? At some point we’re going to need to know. Yet the economics of US TV mean that mini-series are quite limited and running something for thirteen weeks and then just ending it is not an answer. Although if I think back to a big mini-series like War and Remembrance – the Robert Mitchum WWII epic – that ran for 12 episodes. How it was programmed in the US, I’ve no idea, but in the UK it largely aired weekly sometime at the weekend as I recall. If it’s been done in the past, it can be done again. In that instance it was a war story that was always going to end when the war finished.
With all the ongoing series that have been launching in the States this season (Vanished, Kidnapped, Jericho, Heroes, etc), that might be something to consider in the future. A finite ending for the viewers that remains in sight. If someone told me that Lost was going to wrap up in May after a roller-coaster of a storyline, I’d make sure not to miss another episode. But with no end in sight, and the programme moving to Sky, I suspect many will bid it farewell.