Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

New Zealand fans of the tv drama Lost will unfortunately have to wait a little longer to see the final season of the show, according to a post on Throng.

The final season of Lost begins on February 2nd in the United States on ABC. Hopes were raised last month that TVNZ was going to screen the opening episode less than half a day after its American premiere, after information in the broadcaster's Planit ad schedule.

The official response from TVNZ was that tapes of the episodes cannot be contractually released by the distributor before the show has been broadcast on ABC in all US time zones.

TVNZ told Throng that such a turnaround was just too tight for the distributor to "physically take the tape to a completely different location and feed them to us via Satellite in real time."

The network also says there would be issues timing out the schedule, promoting the show, and adding captioning in just a few hours.

These excuses are somewhat acceptable, although still disappointing. The NZ television premiere of Lost's final season has been scheduled for a week later, on February 10th. However that is still a big improvement on the 6 month+ delay that New Zealand viewers used to faced for US shows.

The one hole in TVNZ's excuses is that ABC is launching Season 6 of Lost with a double episode, whereas TV2 is apparently only playing Episode 1, following the premiere its new show Flash Forward.

That will put New Zealand fans 2 episodes behind America. One wonders whether TV2 could have overcome the problems outlined above with the breathing room of just a single episode? I suspect the gap between overseas shows and their New Zealand broadcast dates will continue to close in this high-tech, download-heavy era...

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lost: Even More Season 6 Pics, Trailers & Parody Videos (screenrant.com)
• LOST in 8 Minutes and 15 Seconds (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
• No sequels, spinoffs for `Lost' (seattletimes.nwsource.com)