Comments on: LOST renewed (and thoughts on TV season structure)

By: Lost finale | K-Squared Ramblings

Lost finale | K-Squared Ramblings — Thu, 24 May 2007 16:54:35 +0000

[...] months until next season. *sigh*

By: aeryncrichton

aeryncrichton — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:36:37 +0000

Oh, Farscape had a whole lot fewer viewers, not to mention two foreign companies (the French company whose name escapes me at the moment that owned the Sci Fi Channel, and the German EM.TV which owned Henson at the time) teetering on the brink of bankrupcy who wanted to be shed of a show that was costing them a lot of money to make. None-the-less, Sci Fi had trumpeted the two-season deal with a lot of fanfare as being something to enable the producers of the show to plan the story out over two seasons and really do it justice….which sounds a little too much like what ABC is saying to make me entirely happy.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:43:19 +0000

I imagine Farscape had fewer viewers than Lost and cost more to produce, at least in special effects.

By: aeryncrichton

aeryncrichton — Mon, 07 May 2007 19:10:02 +0000

Yeah, my first thought was, "I hope ABC is better at honoring multi-season deals than Sci Fi was." But Farscape-cancellation-inspired skittishness aside, I think this is a good thing for "Lost." Knowing they've got an end point will allow them to structure the story to get where they want it to go, when they want it to get there. It should make for better storytelling. I've only seen the first 8 eps of this season of Veronica Mars, so I can't speak to how they've handled the shorter arcs, but I suspect they've done the best they could with not being sure how long the season would be. I actually perfer the way British and cable shows have significantly shorter seasons -- usually 13 episodes for a dramatic series. It's long enough to play out arcs, and short enough to keep the writers from wandering around in filler. I'd actually like to see networks go towards a shorter length. It seems to me (optimist that I am) that with fewer episodes to pay for, they might actually be willing to pay for an show an entire season, so the creators would actually know what they're dealing with (as is now the case with Lost).

By: Kelson

Kelson — Mon, 07 May 2007 19:00:21 +0000

One place where it did work is in setting up the players for the second arc (no spoilers, please!) during the first. That provided both a sense of continuity and a sense of connection that I actually thought was missing from the season 2 arc, particularly early on, before Veronica started piecing together the lives of the victims who had never appeared on the show before.

I’m waiting a few more episodes to see how I like the one-shot approach, but the multiple-arcs structure works well for me.

By: Stacy

Stacy — Mon, 07 May 2007 18:07:12 +0000

I still have to say that I don’t think Veronica Mars has been all that successful with the this third season. When a show builds itself on a season-long arc format, it has a very hard time switching out of that format. Heroes was fortunate in its choice of format at the beginning.

The other alternative is to simply do fewer episodes so that viewers frequently have a chance to catch up on the arc. I’ve been pretty happy with series from HBO that limit themselves to 12 per season, but provide a solid arc.