TV Q&A: ‘LOST’—JACK BENDER

Thanks to Andreas over at the Lost Blog for finding this very interesting interview with Jack Bender. Here is a small snippet from a much longer article which you can read in full at the link below.

We’ve heard that next year you guys will have a later kickoff in the season to help wrangle some of the scheduling problems early on.

BENDER: That’s the word. Although we haven’t heard officially, the word is it’s going to be more in the formula of “24” and those shows where we come on later and we’re on straight through because everyone was so pissed off that it happened like it did last year. I have to say that our first few episodes…look, any show where you’re doing 23 episodes, it’s difficult to keep the bar as high as we keep it on every single episode, and certain episodes will satisfy the mythology sci-fi people and certain episodes, like the Hurley episode that was just on, will satisfy the feel-good people who just want our people back on the beach triumphant. So every episode isn’t going to satisfy everyone, but in order to keep the bar up, we certainly feel like the episodes this year have been good, even though the rap critically was that they were inconsistent, the first six.

I think one of the reasons we ended up getting hit with that was that a lot of it was the fact that we only had six and then we were off, which meant they could only look at those six. So there is no question that that idea was not a great idea. The network, ABC and other networks are scrambling these days, I think, figuring out how to keep their audience, how to keep the television business going because these shows are expensive. And even though they sell worldwide and we’re the biggest show in the world in terms of worldwide sales and all of that, they no longer have to wait for a hundred episodes to syndicate. But it’s still the network game and advertisers and ratings and the demographics still kind of rule everything.

So next year…that was a long way of saying that the plan next year is for us to come on later and to go straight through, and I think that’ll be probably good for everybody.

Source: Wizard Entertainment - Full Article