In ABC's "Lost," each character has an elaborate backstory that takes place in myriad locations worldwide, such as the Iraqi desert, where Sayid Jarrah (played by Naveen Andrews) is a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard. But, instead of shooting in Iraq, the scenes were actually filmed in the Diamond Head Crater on the Southeast Coast of Oahu, Hawaii -- overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
   "Hawaii has doubled for Korea, Iowa, Kuwait and London," says Barry Jossen, executive vice president of Touchstone TV, which produces the show. "It has such a wide array of looks. It's just one of the gifts the island has given us."
   "Lost" joins a long list of television series that have shot on the Hawaiian Islands, starting with "Hawaiian Eye" in 1959 and followed by "Hawaii Five-O" and "Magnum P.I.," to name a few.... Read the full story here. (10:19 PM)

   It's amazing how seriously some viewers get into their favorite television shows. Take fans of "Lost."
   In Wednesday night's episode of the hit ABC series, one scene involved a trap using a gas canister. A close-up of the canister shows its manufacturer's logo and name, ALS Technologies, and if you look really, really closely there's a Web address.
   After the episode, David and Linda Alvirez of Bull Shoals started receiving telephone calls, and the Web lit up, too. You see, ALS Technologies is their company.
   It's the third-largest manufacturer of less-than-lethal ammunition and riot-control equipment in the United States.... Read the full story here. (10:35 AM)

   In just seven weeks LOST will end its third season with a two hour finale that promises to deliver the series' biggest twists and turns ever. The bad news is, LOST fans will be waiting as many as nine months for new material to follow. Will a fan base as demanding for input as the LOST crowd seems to be, nine months might as well be an eternity. What, if anything, does ABC have planned to keep LOST fans interested?
   After the critical lashing of last year's 'The Lost Experience', it would appear that ABC is not considering venturing into the online game category. This doesn't mean that LOST fans won't have anything to keep them busy, however.
   For one thing, there is UBISoft's LOST video game, scheduled for release in mid 2007. The game is built around Ubisoft's famous first person shooter technology and will allow players to experience first hand some of the shows more famous locations, as well as explore never before seen areas of the island.... Read the full story here. (10:33 AM)

   Naveen Andrews, who plays Sayid on ABC's hit series Lost, told SCI FI Wire that he believes the network may be mulling a later start for the upcoming fourth season, which would begin in January and run straight without a break, a la Fox's 24. "I believe that's the plan," Andrews said in an interview while promoting Grindhouse, in which he has a role.
   This year, Lost premiered in the fall, ran for six weeks, then took a 13-week hiatus before returning in March with original episodes. The audience for the once-white-hot series cooled considerably, though it remains a top-10 show. The show also moved to a later timeslot, Wednesdays at 10 p.m., which may have been a factor in the audience drop.
   "I think they should make it sort of like what it was before," Andrews opined. "I liked it when it started a little bit earlier, because a lot of the audience are kids, aren't they? I thought, hmm."
   ABC recently announced that it was renewing Lost, but made no mention of start dates or timeslots.... Read the full story here. (9:34 PM)

   ABC is expected to finally take a page from Fox's hit show, "24" and run "Lost" episodes consecutively next year with no repeats or month-long breaks.
   "The plan next year is for us to come on later and to go straight through, and I think that'll be probably good for everybody," "Lost" executive producer and lead director Jack Bender tells the sci-fi/fantasy gurus at Wizarduniverse.com.
   "Although we haven't heard officially, the word is it's going to be more in the formula of "24" and those shows where we come on later and we're on straight through because everyone was so pissed off that it happened like it did last year," Bender says.... Read the full story here. (9:32 PM)

   For much of this season, "Lost" has been just that - lost, stuck on the other island with too many of our favorite regulars marooned and too few questions answered.
   Finally, however, "Lost" is back on its game.
   In tonight's episode at 10 on ABC, Kate and Juliet have a rumble in the jungle, and sooner or later, we're going to get to watch Locke's confrontation with his mysteriously imported father figure, and learn whether Charlie will be able to defy death, rather than delay it.
   Meanwhile, I'm still reeling from last week's show, which was clearly the best hour of "Lost" in years. The episode was like a "Sixth Sense" for TV: the sort of drama you wanted to see again - immediately.... Read the full story here. (9:31 PM)

   "Lost" actors found themselves among dedicated fans Saturday night when Lost Weekend 2007 held its fan party and charity event. From 8 p.m. to midnight, fans from as far away as Ireland enjoyed heavy hors d'oeuvres with half a dozen actors from the popular ABC TV series, "Lost."
   Sam Anderson (Bernard) and Byron Chung (Mr. Paik, Sun's father) were the first VIPs to arrive. Later, Maggie Grace (Shannon Rutherford), whose locks are now dark brown, joined the party wearing one of the most casual outfits there -- a red fitted T-shirt and blue jeans.
   Andrea Gabriel (Nadia, Sayid's love) was quite the party girl. Dressed in a little, beige silky dress, she spoke with almost everyone in attendance.
   From the beginning, Anderson held a rapt crowd about him, each fan taking their turn to have their photo taken with Bernard. However, once Daniel Roebuck (Leslie Arzt, the high school teacher who got blown up) showed up, however, the crowd that surrounded the lovably annoying scientist was equally large.... Read the full story here. (9:29 PM)

   Getting a jump in planning for next season, ABC announced on Wednesday that it had ordered new episodes for 14 programs that will return in the fall.
   They include three series that debuted this season: the surprise hit 'Ugly Betty,' the drama 'Brothers & Sisters' and Anne Heche's Alaskan sojourn 'Men in Trees.'
   Most of the other returnees are no surprises. 'Grey's Anatomy,''Desperate Housewives,''Lost' and 'Boston Legal' will all be back.
   ABC is also committed to several of its successful reality shows, including 'The Bachelor,''Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,''Dancing With the Stars,''America's Funniest Home Videos,''Supernanny' and 'Wife Swap.'
   The late-night 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' will also be back in the fall, said ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson.... Read the full story here. (9:27 PM)

   "Lost" has made a lot of changes in its nearly three seasons on the air, including two time-slot shifts and adding a midseason break. These alterations have affected the ratings, as anyone who reads a newspaper or Web site already knows. But more analysis reveals that the ratings phenomenon is a lot more complicated than it appears.
   First, the 10 p.m. Eastern time period dictates a viewership decline of 12 percent, according to a ratings spokesperson, because people have begun to "wrap up their day" by then. So why did ABC executives decide to air the show later when it returned from hiatus?
   "Moving 'Lost' to 10 p.m. this spring allowed us to get out of the path of Fox's 'American Idol' and at the same time substantially improve the numbers on Wednesday at 10 p.m. for ABC, as a lead-in to affiliates' late-local news telecasts," Jeff Bader, executive vice president of ABC Entertainment in Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail message.... Read the full story here. (9:25 PM)

   Even in death, Lost's most reviled castaways can't get any peace. In the ABC series' March 28th episode, Nikki (Kiele Sanchez) and Paolo (Rodrigo Santoro) — who were clumsily introduced at the beginning of season three and never forgiven for it — were revealed to be diamond-grubbing murderers who, in one of the series' darkest twists to date, were paralyzed by spider bites and unwittingly buried alive by show heroes Sawyer and Hurley. Response to the episode proved bitterly divided, with viewers and online bloggers — see TVGuide.com's Roush Dispatch, Today's News: Our Take and Lost discussion blog — falling into two distinctly polarized camps: Those who felt the episode was an unwelcome disruption to the show's main storyline; and those who felt it was a clever acknowledgment of fan frustration that amounted to, as Hurley said, "one of the most awesome hours of television ever." (Among the episode's many inside jokes: Sawyer's "Who the hell's Nikki?" crack, and Nikki's plea to Paolo upon seeing dead step-siblings Shannon and Boone: "Promise me we'll never end up like them.)
   For their part, producers say they expected the episode to be "good watercooler" fodder. "People hated the characters before they even opened their mouths because it felt like they were crashing the party," says executive producer Damon Lindelof. "The easiest thing would've been to forget they ever happened, like the cougar on [the second season of] 24. But that's not Lost."
   Instead, he and fellow show-runner Carlton Cuse decided to craft an episode that would serve as a rejoinder to the character criticism.... Read the full story here. (9:24 PM)

   In the last two episodes of "Lost," John Locke told a few lies, killed an "Other," blew up a hatch full of communication devices and then set off more explosives in the Others' submarine to prevent anyone from leaving or arriving on the island. It's a far cry from the weeks he spent in a hole in the ground last season, punching computer buttons, only to emerge feeling like he wasted his time.
   "Lost" mythology has cast Locke, played by the Emmy-nominated Terry O'Quinn, as the show's most enigmatic character. When Locke has his mojo, it seems, so does "Lost." In fact, the arc of Locke, and even O'Quinn's own story, closely parallel the highs and lows of the ABC serialized ensemble drama that changed television three years ago. Now, 80 days into the journey of the plane crash survivors, what most viewers intuited from the beginning seems to hold true: Locke is one important dude.
   But is he the most significant castaway? The creators of "Lost" would never say anything that definitively, but they were willing to offer a glimpse of the way they've embedded some of the series' most telling elements in his story from the beginning.... Read the full story here. (9:21 PM)

   It's always hard to give up on a bad investment. To date, there have been 58 episodes of "Lost," and I haven't missed a single one. Or, put another way, two days of my life have been devoted to sitting on my couch, trance-like, as a blur of images roars past my baby blues and lodges in the space my brain usually reserves for obsessing over less important things, like my Econ homework. Lately, though, something's been off. "Lost" is now a bloated, snowballing disaster, and I'm pretty sure it's time to cut it loose.
   If you don't already know - and at this point you're in a group less numerous than the proud owners of K-Fed's hot new album - "Lost" crashed into the public consciousness in 2004, hurling episode after episode of compelling drama to televisions worldwide, featuring the survivors of a downed airplane marooned on a mystical tropical island. Boasting interesting characters armed with snappy dialogue, "Lost" transcended the trappings of the nouveau survivor tale and somehow succeeded in creating a conflated sense of wonder and danger, while the serialized structure of each episode - wherein one main characters was featured heavily both on the island and in flashbacks, both of which worked to advance the overarching plot - was remarkably fresh.
   But the really interesting thing about "Lost" was that you never knew what was coming next, while you invariably liked the revelation. There's some sort of blast proof hatch on the island? Sounds neat, I wonder what's inside. Some loony French lady kidnaps one of the main characters? High drama!
   Recently, though, there's been a pervading sense that the creators really don't know what the hell is going on, and that they're just as surprised to find out what's happening as the audience is.... Read the full story here. (9:13 PM)