ABC dominated Sunday night with its Lost extravaganza: two-hour retrospective Lost: The Final Journey and two-and-a-half hour finale, which were followed by a special edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live. The series finale drew a 5.8 rating/15 share, marking the best Lost ratings since Feb. 14 2008. While maybe not as big as some might have anticipated given the massive build-up towards the finale, it was a significant bump for a heavily serialized show which is not easy to get back into if you have stopped following it and which barely cracked the 4 demo rating this season. The closer was up 27% from last season’s finale. The two-hour special that preceded it averaged a 4.0/13 and 9.8 million viewers. Celebrity Apprentice also had its finale on Sunday, averaging a respectable 3.4/9 in 18-49 for the crowning of ailing Bret Michaels as the winner. That was the highest 18-49 rating for the series since the premiere of last year’s cycle. The only other program to crack a 3 rating in 18-49 was Fox’s hour-long season finale of Family Guy, which averaged a 3.1/8. CBS stayed largely out of the fray with AMC’s Brooks & Dunn tribute, which averaged a 1.8/5 in 18-49. From 15:05-1:05 AM, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha To Lost (4.9 million viewers, 2.7 million of them in the 18-49 demographic) drew its third largest 18-49 audience behind its two post-Super Bowl airings.
RATINGS RATE RACE: Big Exit For 'Lost'
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That’s really not that “big” of an exit. For a series finale with all kinds of hype, it only matched its best ratings since 2008??
Anyone know what advertising was going for during the last 4 hours (the pre-show and then the final)?
Oh yeah? Wait’ll you see the DEMOs! And what a lush, prime, rich, intelligent audience the show had. All the geezers and hillbillies were watching Brooks/Dunn or Family Guy, the mental midgets were tuned into Apprentice. LOST is the thinking-man’s gold, a show the likes of which we’ll never see again. I’m richer for having experienced it, and ABC is considerably richer for having offered it. Only complaint: it ended too soon.
Close, but I actually saw some research that Celebrity Apprentice has a higher % of viewers with an income of $100K+ than Lost. Actually not close at all.
The show was brilliant the first two seasons and not that good after J.J. Abrams left. I know a ton of people that gave up on the show. This season was absolutely awful, I nearly fell asleep watching the finale.
too bad for you… is that suppose to take away from the rest of us that loved it? seasons 4 and 1 were the best.
I did fall asleep during the finale. If I knew I was gonna end up in Purgatory on a Sunday then I might have just gone to church anyway
Neither did I, it was an incredibly beautiful ending to a great show with very poignant themes about life itself. The show was never about polar bears or smoke monsters, but people finding their purpose and who they really appreciated and loved in life. Giacchino’s score had me crying the whole frakking time.
For the zillionth time, Abrams stopped contributing before the midpoint of the first season. So the connection to him leaving and the show going downhill is incorrect given your stated love of the first two seasons.
To me the big story is Kimmel’s big fat rating. This won’t stop the rumors that Kimmel will take over hosting duties on The Tonight Show when Leno’s contract expires.
Kimmel is the only late night show, except for Craig Ferguson, that I ever hear people talking about the next day. The old, grouchy Letterman is leaving in 2012, Ferguson will get that chair, and after Zucker is ousted by the new owners the despised and pathetic Leno will be a lame duck…we see now what Kimmel can do in the spotlight.
I thought Lost finale was just OK. And, yeah, the ratings were only so-so for something with that big of a build up. I still like The Sopranos ending better. What is up with ambiguous endings when people devote years to watching a show? Give us somethin’ solid, people.
Yeah, this is one of the dumbest posts on here. Your taste in late night TV is not even close to a relection of how everybody else feels. The normal ratings show this (not one following a Lost finale).
Whether or not Zucker stays or goes with the new owners, Leno will not go anywhere as long as he is winning. And he is winning. NBC would never put Kimmel on the Tonight Show. Not in a million years.
Ambiguous? This is coming from someone who actually liked the Sopranos fin…BLACK SCREEN!
In all seriousness, there wasn’t anything really ambiguous about it. Jack saved the day, the evil guy lost and didn’t escape the Island, and some of the characters got off the island. In the end, they all came together to let go and move on. Happy endings. Happy days.
Stu. Did you learn nothing from conan, do not try to angle for a job and put out wishes in the wind when you are not prepared to step up. Kimmel still has not found his rhythm and abc are saints for not canceling him.
Very emotional and satisfying ending. Anyone know what the cast is up to next? I’d say most of the regulars will never work again….just to be positive, I can’t wait to see Michael Emerson’s next move. Definitely gone miss him the most!
Problem with getting high ratings for Lost is that due to the format of the show, you really have to be watching from the start to know wth is going on, and even then….
So this isnt exactly a show you just tune into for a couple of episodes or if you dropped out in season 2 you tune in now to find out what happened.
It has had a stabilised decrease in ratings from the begining, and this is still a successful end and it’ll sell well on DVD.
Lost: Finale, the meh heard around the world!
For such a heavily serialised, dense, and labrynthian show, this is a big win.
Stu Dodd, YOU are a moron! All 3 parodies were terrible and there wasnt a peep of laughter in my home for anything on the show.
Kimmel is terrible. He’s been on the air for 7 years and aside from the Sarah Silverman/Matt Damon bit, I’ve never heard anybody talk about anything on that show.
trim down the hate dude
You need to get a better family.
The ratings were solid, especially given how much viewer investment needed to be made to keep up with the show and ultimately care about how it ended. As anything, there’ll be people like myself who loved it and people who hated it. The writers said early on that their main concern was with the characters and their redemption. On that count, the finale delivered, at least for me. There were some loose ends I wish they’d tied up, but for some of us it’ll be fun to continue to dissect it and analyze it.
I am glad the show was a ratings success so it encourages the development of compelling serialized TV. However, the finale was a dissappointment. They strove for poignant, sentimental ambiguity but instead they frustrated the audience and now, people are so confused they think the ending says the entire 6 years was an “afterlife dream,” which it wasn’t. JJ Abrams really needed to come back and be involved this season.
I think Lost would’ve had better ratings sticking to Thursday for it’s finale. Not to mention all the finales already taking place on Sunday and if I’m not mistaken, the rating system includes Canada? If that’s the case, it was their long weekend and probably had far less people watching tv. I don’t think anyone would want air a finale on the Sunday of a Memorial weekend.
My big complaint is that they never explained what the island was. They showed the early years of the island but never told us what or why the island existed. Very frustrating just like all the other seasons so in that respect why was I expecting anything else. I still want to know where the polar bears came from.
1) As explained by Jacob, the island is “a cork” that keeps the malevolence or evil or Hell trapped inside from getting out to the rest of the world.
2) The polar bears were answered in season 3. The Dharma Initiative conducted experiments on the island with animals, and kept them in cages on Hydra Island (as seen when Sawyer is trapped in the cages with Kate).
1. That is still a cop out answer. Because the island is real. How did they create there own purgatory. Why couldn’t he leave. Electromagnetism, this is why I refused to watch until the last season because I knew they were going to write themselves into a hole. This ending was like battlestar galactica except bsg was more honest. That says a lot about lost because I hated bsg ending, another cop out.
The polar bears were brought to the island by the Dharma Initiative as part of their experiments. There. Now you have some closure.
if the show has caused this much discussion, then it must be a great success.
doesn’t really matter whether you were satisfied with the final or not. you watched it.
money spent, revenue made, success achieved.