Monday, October 25, 2004

Those island cast aways will be LOST for the full season.

Those bedraggled plane crash survivors on ABC’s hit “Lost” are going to be stranded a little longer, and they’re probably thrilled. The network has announced it will film nine additional episodes, giving the action-drama a full season of shooting in Hawai’i.

Officials of the show, which has produced high ratings for each of its first four episodes, initially committed to filming 13 episodes.

Its producers have turned O’ahu’s Kualoa Ranch into a mysterious tropical island 1,000 miles from nowhere, complete with a menacing, unseen creature, a polar bear, a ghost and lots of stubbly faces.

The order for an added nine episodes — network officials call them the “back nine” — come during a week when rival network NBC canceled “Hawaii,” a cops-and-killers drama also filmed in the Islands.