Expanded Lost Finale

[Forever Xena]

'Lost,' 'Idol' Finales Will Square Off
(Wednesday, March 30 03:34 PM)
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Good news for "Lost" fans: The first-season finale, originally planned as a 90-minute episode, is expanding to two hours.
Bad news for "Lost" fans who also watch "American Idol": The season finales of both shows are now scheduled for the same night.

ABC confirmed Wednesday (March 30) that it's planning to air the two-hour "Lost" finale, which will answer at least some of the questions about the plane-crash survivors and the mysterious island on which they're stranded, on Wednesday, May 25. That's the final night of May sweeps and the 2004-05 season.


It's also the night that FOX plans to air the two-hour finale of "American Idol." Past finales of the singing competition have drawn big audiences -- last year's clocked in at 28.8 million viewers.
But ABC has at least some reason to think "Lost" will still draw an audience that night. When the show aired opposite the two-hour Wednesday premiere of "American Idol" in January, it drew more than 19 million viewers (to 26.7 million for "Idol") -- one of its biggest audiences of the season. Original episodes of the two haven't aired opposite each other since then, as the Wednesday "Idol" moved to its regular home 9 p.m. ET. ("Lost" airs an hour earlier.)

Officials at ABC had no comment on the scheduling other than to confirm that it's correct.

The expanded "Lost" finale -- co-creator J.J. Abrams had previously said that the final episode would run 90 minutes -- will push the season ender for "Alias" back to 10 p.m. that night.

Lost-TV.com

[Lesa]

If I don't have to work that night, I'll be choosing Lost over Idol.

[Forever Xena]

Well AI dont show in Sweden , so I wont have a problem

[Lesa]

Aren't you lucky?

To be fair, Fantasia Moreno was a great find by AI.
That girl's got a great voice and a lot of heart.

[Forever Xena]

April 11, 2005

Lost Finale is Super-Sized

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer and supervising producer on ABC's hit series Lost, told SCI FI Wire that the much-anticipated season finale will clock in at three hours and give fans everything they love about the show. "In terms of epic storytelling and shocking destiny, you ain't seen nothing yet!" Grillo-Marxuach said in an interview. "We were going to do a two-hour finale [over two weeks], and then ABC asked if we could do 90 minutes [the second week] so they could schedule it against American Idol. Carlton [Cuse] and Damon [Lindelof, who co-created the show with J.J. Abrams,] did an amazing job on the finale script, and their first draft came in a little long anyway. [ABC] looked at it and decided to do a two-hour. So 'Exodus Part 1' will air on May 18th, and the epic saga that is 'Exodus Part 2' will air May 25th. The final two hours is so full of incident and character and shocks and scares and drama, all the things that people love about Lost, that it would have been silly to cut things out. So we've got a 25-hour first season! We busted our butts on it, but it's not going to feel like it's been padded. We are very proud of it."

Grillo-Marxuach wrote five episodes in the freshman season and confirmed that he would return for the second season, which begins production in July. Reflecting on his efforts this year, he said, "'... In Translation,' which I wrote with Leonard Dick, is my favorite episode this season." The episode revealed the troubled backstory to Jin, played by Daniel Dae Kim. "It was such a great character piece for Jin. Daniel's performance was fantastic. I don't think it's our flashiest episode. There are episodes that have more incidents in them, but it was so emotional and was so much a closure for me, because I wrote the first episode ['House of the Rising Sun'] about Jin and Sun. My dad even wrote me an e-mail after that episode telling me he was proud of me."

As to what the castaways will have to endure next season, Grillo-Marxuach said: "The second season is strictly top secret right now. Damon has alluded to his ideas about what the second season is going to be like, and once the first season is over, we are going to begin secret summit meetings to start bashing out how it will lay out over the course of the season. Come May, we'll have a lot more information about what's going to be happening. But our masterminds are very much at work on what that second season will be about." Lost airs on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT.- SCIFI WIre