What to Make of LOST’s 13 week hiatus?

After last week’s episode, “I Do”, the ABC show LOST will be leaving the air until Feb. 7th, at which time it will show re-run free until May’s finale.

Personally, I welcome the break. Especially during the holidays, life gets a little hectic. It’s kinda nice not to have to sit down around the tv on Wednesday nights, like a whole 1-2 hours of my week has just opened up at a time I could really use it!

However, many other fans are left wondering, “why?”

According to ABC, producers and others involved in the show, one of the reasons this is happening is to avoid any reruns. Fans in the last two seasons would get so annoyed and discouraged from watching when they would sit down on an anticipated Wednesday night only to find an epidose they’ve already seen. Why not just start later, or end earlier, in order to play all 23 episodes straight through? Firstly, they did start later than other Fall premiers. Secondly, the networks typically air shows from Sept – May, so to end three months early would mean airing from Oct. 4- early March. Also, most shows air reruns or other programming/specials during the holiday season, I suspect because rating are down as people must travel and such. Besides that, the network has tried to explain to us television-show-producing-challenged that if they were to let Lost air a straight season without interruption, they would have to take off an entire year to shoot the next season. In other words, the time it takes to shoot, edit, and so on every single week would make it so that the next season couldn’t be shot until 2008-09, and that would certainly be a longer hiatus than three months.

Still, ABC is certainly making a bet, aren’t they? Are fans loyal enough to such a complex show to weather the mid-season break? You’ll have to help me understand if you think that fans will be too perturbed to start watching again in February, because in my logic, fans weather the three month summer hiatus all the time, and yet there we are, watching the premiere at every new season! Besides, I would much much much rather take one long break than be inundated with reruns and other shows when I least expect it. It really kills the suspense for me.

So, if you ask this mama, a true LOST fan, they can take a planned break. Just give me the date and time of when I’ll get on with my LOST addiction and I will be there, with bells on. As one lost fan said, “If we can wait a few months for LOST to start we can wait a few months for LOST to continue.”

As an aside, ABC has cleverly devised a way to keep LOST fans enticed during the break, (as if we expected them not to?) At any point during each week’s new episode of “Day Break”, which will be taking over the LOST slot for the next 12 week’s, LOST will air a 30-second promotional “nugget” of never before seen scenes of the rest of season three.

Will that get me to watch “Day Break”? As I said before, I need my Wed. evenings right now, so no, I won’t begin a new addiction on that night unless it involves working or my family. (Sorry Taye Diggs- loved ya in Rent!) However, I will gladly hit up the forums to hear about any cool sightings. Turns out many people want to Boycott daybreak and others are defending it, saying that it’s a pretty cool show and that if we don’t support the network’s decision to do LOST this way, we will go back next season to not knowing whether this week LOST will be new or not.

If I find out the “nugget” from last night, I will come back and add.

Next Wednesday I plan to divulge any spoilers I can find, true or otherwise, so for those who don’t want to read them, don’t come here that day!