The initially wildly popular show “Lost”, which has quickly become a wandering storyline where weeks are wasted on ping-pong battles and Alfred Hitchcock styled gaspers, has finally been given a timeline. ABC has announced that “Lost” will have an additional three seasons until its conclusion in the 2009-2010 season. Each future season will consist of 16 episodes played consecutively each week for a total of 48 future season episodes. Combine those with the remaining two this season and there are now just 50 episodes of “Lost” to go with 67 episodes already, well, down the hatch. 16 episodes per season will represent partial installments for typical season long shows which run for 23 episodes. When comparing those numbers it shows that ABC really only has about 2 seasons left of Lost but are instead dragging it out into 3 partial seasons.

“Lost” executive producers/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson described the scenario:

“Due to the unique nature of ‘Lost,’ we knew it would require an end date to keep the integrity and strength of the show consistent throughout and to give the audience the payoff they deserve,” McPherson said.

Lindelof said having the end point in sight was “incredibly liberating. Like we’ve been running a marathon and we actually know where the finish line is for the first time.”

Lindelof and Cuse said they’ve had “a road map for the series with all the major mythological milestones and the ending in place” for a while.

“What we didn’t know was how long we had to play the story out,” Cuse said. “By defining the endpoint we can now really map out the rest of the series in confidence.”

Lindelof and Cuse go on to detail that they had envisioned “Lost” as a 100 episode series. This new arrangement with ABC will extend that vision out to 120 episodes. Also of note, a show typically must reach 100 episodes to be considered for syndication.

I’m glad they’ve set the deadline on this show. I loved it the first two seasons and then quickly started to hate it for the first 19 episodes of this season. It wasn’t until the past two weeks that I’ve been able to renew my interest. Let’s see if it can keep it going for 50 more episodes. If not, I’d fall back to the whole ‘make Lost a comedy‘ idea.

Source: Yahoo! News