Strike Splits Lost Season
With the airwaves likely to be dominated by reality programming and reruns in the months ahead, Lost fans still have something to look forward to.
In the wake of Fox's decision to postpone the seventh season of 24 indefinitely, ABC has taken the opposite tack and decided to air the eight episodes of the castaway drama that were completed before the writers' strike, show runner Damon Lindelof said Wednesday.
But don't expect too much resolution before the series goes dark once again—the final episode, Lindelof said, will end in a cliffhanger that won't be resolved until the strike concludes.
"It's as much of a conclusion as, say, Ana-Lucia and Libby getting shot," Lindelof told E! Online TV columnist Kristin Dos Santos.
"An eight-episode season is an incomplete season, and I am not going to try to spin it any other way."
After wrapping up its third season in May, Lost was slated to return to the air with an uninterrupted, rerun-free 16-episode stretch, but obviously the strike has thrown a wrench into that scenario.
"I can't look the fans in the eye and tell them we're executing the original plan anymore," Lindelof said, adding that the storyline will likely have to be tweaked to accommodate the change in schedule.
The partial season is expected to kick off in February.
With the strike in its fourth day, networks now look likely to run out of fresh programming far sooner than anticipated, with most shows expected to be forced into reruns by Thanksgiving.
The networks had initially estimated that a backlog of finished scripts and completed episodes would keep most shows on the air into early 2008.
However, with many show runners refusing to cover nonwriting tasks on their series, including casting, editing and directing, production has stalled entirely on a number of prominent shows.
"When we're off the job, pretty much everything stops," Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry told the Los Angeles Times Wednesday.
Stars continued to turn out to show their support for the writers, with Ray Romano and the casts of shows including Ugly Betty and General Hospital taking their turns on the picket lines in L.A. Thursday. Robin Williams, David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, Tim Robbins, Roseanne Barr, Holly Hunter and David Hyde Pierce were spotted New York.
Meanwhile, speaking out in opposition of the strike Wednesday, former Disney chief Michael Eisner called the protests "insanity" and "too stupid" while warning writers they were giving up real income in the hopes of securing digital revenue that studios do not yet have.
"For a writer to give up today's money for a nonexistent piece of the future, they are misguided, they should not have gone on the strike," Eisner said at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media and Money conference in New York. "I've seen stupid strikes, I've seen less stupid strikes, and this strike is just a stupid strike."
With no new talks between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers on the horizon, Industry watchers now fear the strike is likely to continue well into 2008.
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