Hot on the heals of last night’s big audiences for the end of the first series, we now hear that C4 are going to start the second series “in the spring”. This is a smart move for them. I was amazed that they held off for as long as they did in the first place, and I know that there are plenty of people who never watched the programme on C4 at all but, ahem, downloaded it, or bought the US DVDs which have been on sale for some months now (broadly speaking the full series is cheaper than the half-season boxes we get in the UK).
The problem C4 faces is that episode 10 of series 2 aired in the US last night, and plenty of people are getting ahead via that route. If they held off too long, then they’d lose a good chunk of potential audience. It’s even worse now that more people are aware of Lost and we know very quickly via the internet how far we are behind.
I suspect that we’ll actually start to see DVDs in the UK for season 2 (season? series? interchangeable?) before the US if only because the 2-part releases are profitable for the distributors, whereas in the US, the second season boxset will probably arrive sometime around September in time for the third season. Of course, only at that point will there be much in the way of decent extras to put on the discs.