The final numbers from Wednesday show LOST losing in the 9pm face-off with power contender Criminal Minds in the demo share, but winning with a tenuous 200,000 more viewers. Naturally the news has LOST fans shaking in their boots. Don't worry about it. LOST historically comes in behind crime drama, but hasn't had such a competitor in its time slot until now. Remember that Damon Lindelof actually foreshadowed this in the past weeks Podcast at lost.abc.com. Lost's viewership is still a strong 17+ Million and the good news is the drop off from premiere to second episode was much smaller than year. Following the reveal of what-was-in-the-hatch, a record five million viewers tuned out and pretty much stayed out for the remainder of the season.
In addition, the summers "LOST Experience" game proved to be a successful piece of advertiser bait for ABC, if not a little underwhelming for the participants.
The bottom line is, LOST's numbers still put it in the phenomenally successful bracket for the type of show it is, but it is no surprise that the juggernaut of TV ratings, the crime drama, might start to overcome it. I'm sure if CSI were put up against LOST, LOST would come up short consistently.
On the speculative side, one could look at the ratings as a sort of popularity contest amongst the characters. So far, we have revisited small groups in equal time. First Jack, Kate, and Sawyer; then with Glass Ballerina Sun, Jin, and Sayid; with next weeks 'Further Instructions' we catch up with Hurley, Desmond, Locke, Eko, and Charlie. Who knows, if the numbers come up maybe we could see a bit more of Mr. Locke this season.
