The Writers Guild and Studios Make a Deal! (So Do We Get a Full Season?)

The three-months-running, TV-killing Writers Guild strike might be over by the end of the weekend - which means we might possibly be getting more than eight episodes of Lost this year.

After a couple weeks of "informal meetings" under a news blackout, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) emerged last night with a tentative agreement with all the major studios that make up the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). They're presenting the deal to their members in open meetings held this weekend; if it gets an O.K., the writers could go back to work as early as Monday.

Let's hope. (But let's also hope the deal is good enough so that writers are treated fairly and not like the least important facet of the process. They only make all the stories up, studios.)

As you quite possibly already know, starting with the current Season 4, Lost planned three more seasons of sixteen episodes each - in order to work toward an end date so the writers wouldn't have to spin their wheels and so that audiences would get satisfying closure. However, only eight scripts were completed this season before the strike began, throwing a big monkey wrench into the plans. What would happen to the final eight episodes? Tacked on to Season 5 and aired in the fall? Aired in the summer? Discarded completely?

We still don't know for sure, but an end to the strike means we can find out, pronto. There's simply not enough time to produce a new episode quickly enough so that we don't have to wait a bit after the eighth episode, which airs March 20th - the quickest they could get a new episode onto airwaves is probably about a month later. In their most recent issue, Entertainment Weekly mentions:

Grey's Anatomy could start filming by early March and complete roughly four or five new episodes before the season ends in May. Lost faces a similar situation.

If they can optimistically finish five new episodes before the season normally ends in May, I don't see any reason why ABC wouldn't be able to deviate from the norm a bit and let them finish out all eight final episodes from April to June. That's the best, most simple solution at this point, but we'll see. Let's just hope the strike actually ends first, right?

TAGS: Season4, Strike
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