Schedule for ABC’s Lost Changing Again?

This season ABC’s acclaimed series "Lost" is on at 10 p.m. instead of 9, and the decision to push the series forward an hour to a later timeslot for a more mature audience hasn’t really paid off in any significant way. Then, the decision came to go on hiatus for three straight months and come back to a nonstop spring season in February. And, the second half running forward with no repeats is refreshing, especially when some networks (FOX and The CW, for example) are running one or two new episodes followed by three weeks of repeats or some other kind of vexing programus interruptus.

According to Sci Fi Wire, "Lost" star Naveen Andrews said that he believes "Lost" may be heading in the direction of just starting the season in January and foregoing the hiatus and rerun speedbumps all together.

"Lost" going nonstop is a good idea, but it’s a borrowed one. FOX’s "24" went nonstop from January because the show was such a runaway success and the real time format lent itself all too well to a schedule that was blissfully free of interruptions. While "24" did it because the show gets better every season, "Lost" may be implementing the same strategy to keep ratings from getting worse.

Fans don’t seem to be the only ones looking to the earlier episodes of the series to recall its brilliance. Andrews said this, which sounds as optimistic for the show’s beginnings as it does ambiguous for the show’s future; "I loved the first season. Now I'm really proud of it, and I put it up there with the work that I'm most proud of, and we'll always have it. They can't ever take it away. It'll always be there. And, you know, I'm not a writer. It's their choice to do what they want to with that show, and they will."

The show has gone downhill since the beginning half of the second season, and where last year there may have been one great episode to every four mediocre episodes, this season seems to have one great episode to every six or seven. The ratio is dropping out of the show’s favor, and altering the schedule for a serial show in favor of a regular pace and constant momentum to keep stories and characters flowing is only half the battle, because the plot has to flow too. As do the answers, I might add.