According to Broadcast (subscription required), Lost‘s ratings on Sky One have dropped to just 863,000. Given Sky paid £975,000 for each episode, they’re probably beginning to regret their decision.
Incidentally, did any Lost fans pay for Sky just so they could watch the show? Informal chats have ascertained that no one I know stumped up the cash necessary, but how about the rest of the UK?
It’s episode five of Day Break – or at least it was last Wednesday but I’ve been away – so even though it might be cancelled soon, time for The Carusometer, I think.
The show started off reasonably well, with an adrenaline-heavy first episode that was perhaps a little too serious for its own good. The second half of its double-bill wasn’t quite so interesting, and the third episode continued in the same vein.
However, things picked up by the fourth episode, in which a new sort of format emerged. As well as being less po-faced, our hero (Taye Diggs) begins to take advantage of his constantly repeating day to help fix his partner’s love-life. It seems that now all the supporting characters have been introduced and fleshed out, the producers might be planning to devote subsequent episodes to a single character to find out what’s going on with them. It’s something that worked quite well for the fifth episode, too, which had some strong writing and clever use of sci-fi fave Adam Baldwin to come up with possible explanations for the time travel element of the show.
The producers are also judiciously using screen shorthand to cut out the repetition: we now know all the things that Diggs has to do each morning to cover up for the previously days surprises, and that’s now distilled down to a montage of split-second shots.
There’s still no sign of an explanation for what’s going on and no real idea why it’s of any import, but as an action-packed, surprisingly thoughtful and character-driven slice of mindless entertainment, it’s not bad and is worth watching if you want a bit of fun that doesn’t require much brainpower of an evening.
The Medium is Not Enough has declared Day Break to be a two or “Partial Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Partial Caruso corresponds to a show with two walk-on cameos by David Caruso, during both of which he takes off and puts on his sunglasses repeatedly. There may also have been discussions about his starring in the show, but the producers wrote that off as A Bad Idea, preferring someone who can’t be out-acted by children, small animals or portions of confectionery.
M80 have been to some marketing seminars it seems. Apparently, this new Web 2.0 thing is going to be a great way to get free marketing done, with bloggers the new way to spread word-of-mouth publicity, bypassing those traditional gatekeepers and arbiters of opinion, the critics (yes, I do write for marketing mags. Why do you ask?).
Some of it you might know, some of it could well be news:
Doctor Who
Film
British TV
US TV
Woo hoo, I’m back. Let there be feasting and a national day of celebration. Or a collective rolling of eyes at the very least.
There are a couple of new things for the blog that I just thought I’d draw your attention to. First, you can now get blog updates by email. Each day, between 5pm and 7pm UK time, you’ll get sent all the new posts of the day in a beautifully formatted email. It won’t be the full post, necessarily, just the bit you’d see on the front page, but it’s quite nice and saves you from having to remember to come to the blog.
You can sign up for it here or over in the sidebar. There’s a similar email for the day’s comments, too.
Second new thing is “threaded comments”. Now you can indicate you’re replying to a previous comment by clicking on a reply link next to the comment. When the comment appears, it’ll have a link to the original comment, so everyone can see who you were talking back to.
It seems to work, anyway, although I haven’t implemented it on the preview page yet. Use it, don’t use it, the choice is yours. It just seemed nice to me, even if does slightly upset the formatting at the moment.
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