The Light At The End Of The Wormhole
First The Sopranos will be done in a couple months. Then Lost announces the end is in sight.
Now it's been confirmed that Battlestar Galactica has only one more season to go.
No surprise--ratings were down and the show isn't cheap. But it's also the right thing to do. Starbuck found Earth and they've just about revealed all the Cylons. Anything beyond one more season would be stretching things out.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:00 AM
2 Comments:
That's pretty stunning. "Three more seasons" (Lost) is prudent. "One more season"? Wow!
Question: Have the ratings dropped for both shows significantly? I heard that BSG ratings dropped this year, and they thought one reason was all the breaks, so they are planning on running S4 without any breaks. This is pretty similar to Lost's plan as well.
When Babylon 5 was on the air in the mid-to-late 1990's, heavy arc shows were rare. In the last few years they have become highly popular, with Lost the poster-girl for an addictive heavy-arc show.
Is it possible that ratings and surveys might have indicated that the time of heavy-arc shows is passing? They do take a lot of commitment. (They are the anti-Law & Order, which you can watch random reruns on TNT whenever you want, without any worry of missing anything.) Maybe the spell is wearing off?
Ratings were down on both BSG and Lost significantly this year. (Of course, you could claim that ratings for series TV in general was down significantly).
However, BSG, being on a cable channel, never had ratings that huge to begin with. I don't know how much less it costs to produce than a network show, but it can't be that much cheaper. (By the way, some are saying there might be more than one more year now. I still hope it's just a year--better to have a strong finish; I already felt the stretching last season. When you're getting closer to the end try to avoid stand-alone episodes. Even B5 had problems in that it had to force two seasons into the fourth season, so when it got a fifth season, it didn't really have anywhere to go. Almost better it ended after the fourth year.)
Lost, even with the drop, is still a significant hit. It's still rated in the top twenty, and only 3 ABC shows rate higher. It also sells more DVDs that any other show, gets more downloads, and in the coveted 18-49 democraphic is in the top ten, perhaps top five. It's also watched around the world. So my guess is ABC would be glad for it to run as long as they think it's viable, and the producers wanted an end.
As to arc shows, I don't know if it's a fashion or just the quality of the shows. I suspect the latter. A genre can seem dead, but suddenly a hit changes everything. In the mid-80s, with Dallas and Dynasty, I remember everyone saying prime time soaps are in and sitcoms are dead. Within a few years the reverse was true.
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