Tuesday TV Thoughts

Tomorrow night is the first new episode of Lost in three weeks. I understand that networks can't make a show for each week. We all expect to see reruns or have a show preempted once in a while. When you watch a sitcom, it's really no big deal. When you watch a hour-long drama, it's still not so bad. However, spacing out episodes of a show that plays as if it were 20 one-hour chapters of a single work is borderline sadistic.

I have to give credit to the people responsible at ABC and Fox for scheduling Alias and 24, respectively, to start late in the season and play with no repeats or breaks. Those shows, like Lost, are bound to suffer from extended periods of downtime during a season. Want to see people being driven insane by a television show? (Must resist temptation to say "force them watch Hope and Faith"...too late) Go to a board online for any of these shows after a cliffhanger or an especially intense preview and see how patient people are.

You could go right now to a Lost board, like The Fuselage, and see people desperate to know what happens in tomorrow night's episode. You see, the promo for the episode showed several people carrying what seemed to be a body wrapped in a blanket. Is someone dead and, if so, who is it? No one knows yet, but there are only about 45-50 people on the island and a half-dozen of them were in the scene. By my math that still leaves a good 40 or so people to choose from.

These are not shows like Seinfeld. That is one of the greatest shows to have been on television, but if you miss an episode, you can catch it later. If tonight's episode is a rerun, you can watch and laugh again. There's no suspense built for the new jokes or new plot lines.

One of the reasons often given for spreading seasons out so long is "Sweeps." A few specific weeks a year, networks pull out all the stops to get the highest ratings possible. Higher ratings in sweeps weeks should result in higher prices for advertising during the show. I'm not really sure how that is supposed to work. After all, if you were an advertiser, would you base your ad placement on how a show performs during one or two weeks or would you base it on longer term performance. It seems to my unitiated in the advertising world brain that it is more logical to base your decision on the long term results. How does the performance evaluation process work at your place of employment? Does your boss track your performance for only two or three weeks a year and ignore whether you have been significantly better or worse the rest of the year? If so, where do you work and are they hiring?

Sadly, all my complaining will not make the show get here any faster. I'll just have to wait patiently and be glad that I'm not addicted to too many shows like this.

Until later...