Let’s recap a few things before moving on with this post. Lost, one of the hottest new shows of the season the year it debuted, and a still fairly popular show in its second season, began to lose its audience when ABC started running a zillion reruns instead of new episodes. In response to the annoyance of fans, ABC then decided to put Lost on a big, long hiatus instead of showing reruns. The result? People forgot about it. It bled even more viewers.
Now, these same programming geniuses at this same network give us the remake of V, which is actually a pretty good remake. Their game plan? To show four episodes during November sweeps. Then to wait three months and show the next four during March sweeps. Because a three-month gap isn’t going to affect viewership in any way, shape, or form, right?
So, instead of the moment where I got to shout, “Yes! Lizard baby!” at the scene where the human who is unknowingly engaged to a V first hears the news that the stick is blue (and let us avert our eyes to the successful interbreeding of lizard and human species; after all, this is television science fiction, emphasis on fiction, and nobody really expects it to be, you know, scientific), um, I lost my train of thought. Oh. Right. Next March, I may actually be one of only six or seven hundred people who will tune in to see how the series picks up, because I desperately want to see the modern retelling of this classic, classic scene from Bad Science Fiction of the 1980s (skip ahead to about 1:50 for the full effect):
Yes! Lizard baby! The scene that brought peals of laughter when my friends and I watched in in the 80s. I want to see that lizard baby, brought up to date, but I gotta tell you—I’m probably going to forget to set my DVR unless ABC plugs the hell out of it on my soap operas again.
Really. What genius thought it would help the show by going on hiatus?
Regarding Lost – I actually think the long breaks between seasons, in addition to shortening them to 14-18 episodes instead of 23-25, allowed for much more concise and interesting storytelling. Viewers are used to breaks between seasons, even long ones – it’s the three of four weeks of hiatus after every couple of episodes midseason that drove me crazy.
As for V – given what I’ve seen so far, I remain cautiously optimistic, but so far the show has failed to overwhelm me, or indeed whelm me at all. So I don’t mind the long hiatus that much – I figure November was basically one long pilot episode, and now that the show has a solid viewership this probably won’t happen again.
And by the way: yeah, the show is definitely sticking it to Obama’s Hopenchange, and I love every second of it. About time the Left got a taste of of the crap conservatives have been eating for eight years, even though the criticism is incredibly veiled and mild in comparison with “Bush is the Devil!!!”-like subtlety we’ve gotten used to. Remember how Clancy Brown, CIA spook extraordinaire, had to teach poor Sayid to become a torturer? Because heaven knows Saddam’s regime or the Iraqis would NEVER stoop this low!
As for the scene above – damn, I didn’t remember it being this funny.
Give “V” some slack here. It always takes a few months for the diversity advisors and community liaison officers to properly vet these things.