Even as the show has admittedly lost a few viewers in the last couple of years, for advertisers and marketing executives, the TV series Lost, as well as Heroes, remain valuable franchises that do well in other platforms, such as marketing, online and mobile following.

A study by the Publicis Group’s Optimedia says, that shows like Lost still do well in the CPR ranking (content power rating) regardless if it was doing poorly with Nielsen’s.

Optimedia’s Director for Strategic Resources, Greg Khan, says —  It’s now about viewership and engagement on multiple platforms. We’re going to be really interested in the network’s online video strategy. We’re very interested in the cross-platform extensions for individual TV shows, which our power ratings indicate have a meaningful impact on their overall ranking.”

You can read the complete story on BrandWeek.

Did you like how Mark Pelligrino brought Jacob to life? Back when it was announced last March that he will be playing the role of Jacob, a lot were psyched about it. Did he fit the role to a T?

Mark Pelligrino has been in the acting business since the 80’s but with today’s TV audience, he is most credited for his role as Paul on the Showtime series, “Dexter”. His other TV appearances also include “Chuck” and “Prison Break”.

I guess we will be hearing more about him in the coming months as his character Jacob should be more present in the sixth and final season of the series, as we have seen…he is the key to everything in this story.

It’s getting really exciting, huh?

From Salon.Com:

The shadowy, Godot-like figure of Jacob has been one of the series’ deepest enigmas, little more than a muttered name and a profile glimpsed in a dark shack that seems to flicker in and out of existence in the jungle. The two-hour finale of the fifth season of “Lost” revealed that Jacob has dipped his hand into the lives of all of the major lostaways: helping Kate elude the consequences of her first foray into a life of crime, handing Sawyer the pen he used to write that vengeful letter to the man who destroyed his family, persuading Hurley to board Ajira Flight 316. Jacob even appears to have brought John Locke back to life, after Locke was pushed by his monstrous father through an eighth-story window. If he’s not a god, then Jacob is the next best thing to it in the universe of “Lost,” and last night’s finale demonstrated not only that he works in mysterious ways, but also that he has an implacable enemy.

Jacob seems kindly enough, but really: How positive are his little interventions? Did he save Sayid from being hit by a car or did he cause Sayid’s wife, Nadia, to be struck down? Didn’t giving Kate that lunchbox encourage her to think she was born to get away with shit, contributing to making her the borderline personality we’ve all come to know and dislike? Ben may have been better off not running into Jacob earlier, because like all the wretched daddies who populate “Lost,” this father is simultaneously meddling and neglectful, delivering lectures about “choice” while moving his children like game pieces around a board whose larger pattern they can never quite see.

Lost beauty, Evangeline Lilly is joining Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto and Zack and Miri’s Elizabeth Banks as the newest face ofr L’Oreal Paris.

Says L’Oreal President, Jean-Jacques Lebel — "On the eve of the Cannes Festival, to which I want to reiterate our attachment, L’Oreal Paris is delighted that these great stars of world cinema have agreed to represent our brand"

All these switching back and forth in time has probably confused you as to where each and every character are in the continuum. USA Today has therefore provided us a cheat sheet, so that we don’t forget where they are stuck, when Lost returns for its sixth season in nine months…

Follow this after the cut…

From USA TODAY

• Sawyer and Juliet: Aboard the Dharma sub in 1977 with the other evacuees, a condition Sawyer demanded before he’d draw a map to the Others’ camp. "Sawyer in a mature relationship with Juliet was a different sort of romantic relationship than we’ve seen on the show before," executive producer Carlton Cuse says.
• Kate: A last-minute addition to the 1977 sub manifest after she leaves Jack’s group and returns to Dharmaville. "When Kate gets dumped into that submarine, there’s a round of looks between her and Sawyer and Juliet. She’s the proverbial wrench in the romantic mechanism," Cuse says.
• Jack: Following Eloise Hawking and Richard Alpert in 1977 to the underwater bunker where they took the hydrogen bomb 23 years earlier. In the finale, Jack will try to change the future. "He is now kind of stepping up into his old ways. He’s a man on a mission," executive producer Damon Lindelof says.
• Sayid: With Jack, Alpert and Hawking in 1977 as they retrieve the bomb. Had shot, but failed to kill, young Ben Linus. "He shoots young Ben not to prevent him from becoming old Ben, but because he was emotionally tortured by this guy," Lindelof says. "Sayid isn’t thinking about creating a paradox."
• Jin, Miles and Hurley: Hiding in the jungle in 1977 after Dharma officials realize the group was pretending to be part of the Initiative. Confronted by Dr. Pierre Chang, they confess they really are from the future and Miles is his son. The humorous Miles-Hurley time-travel conversation was meant to strike an empathetic chord with viewers, Cuse says. "We put in the mouths of the characters the same kind of questions we were having ourselves: ‘Does this make any sense? Wait, what’s going on here?’ I think the audience really appreciated it when we put it in Hurley’s and Miles’ mouths."
• Faraday: Shot dead by his mother in 1977 at the Others’ camp. Before his death, he added a new wrinkle in Lost time, Lindelof says. "Faraday comes back and says, ‘You know how all season long I’ve been saying we couldn’t change anything? Well, I just spent three years in Ann Arbor and now I’ve changed my mind.’ "
• Locke: Resurrected and supremely confident in 2007 (present day for Lost), he leads the Others to meet (and kill) Jacob with Ben in tow. "Locke seems to be in very serious communion with the island and hopefully, by the end of the finale, the audience will understand why," Cuse says.
• Ben: Following along on Locke’s hike to meet Jacob. Confesses to Alpert that stunts like this are why he killed Locke. A significant question: Why doesn’t adult Ben remember being shot by Sayid or having lived with Sawyer and Juliet? The show hasn’t answered that yet, but Cuse points out: "Ben famously lies all the time."
• Sun: At the Others’ camp in 2007, where she’s hoping Locke can find a way to reunite her with Jin, who is so close (on the island) yet so far away (in 1977).

Most Lost fans who follow interviews and news article about their favorite show,  know that even the actors themselves do not have any idea how the show ends. For Season 5, here’s an interesting account to how Cuse and Lindelof, producers of Lost, was able to fool their actors when shooting the final sequences of the season, in the hopes of keeping the ending a mystery…

If you think “Lost” is mind-bending to watch, try making it.

As the anticipation about tonight’s season five finale crests (Will Jack nuke the island? Will Kate steal Sawyer from Juliet? Will Hurley’s “The Empire Strikes Back” script see the light of day?), executive producer Carlton Cuse is hoping to keep the spoilers to a minimum.

For years, Harvard grad Cuse and partner Damon Lindelof have been engaging in all sorts of subterfuge to keep would be-spoilers from outing the hallmark twists.

“We write fake scenes for actors that audition for us and create fake call sheets about who is shooting with whom in what scene,” Cuse said from his Los Angeles office. “Last season, we shot three different actors in Locke’s coffin. We shot Josh Holloway and we shot Desmond to keep people guessing.”

This year, Cuse and crew employed similar tactics for the coda. Of course, Cuse won’t leak his tricks lest they, well, leak.

If shooting alternate endings and penning phony plots isn’t tough enough, Cuse has make sure the actual show makes sense.

Which it doesn’t.

Or at least it doesn’t if you’re not willing to embrace time travel, ghosts, reincarnation and Kate’s unflappable angelic ringlets - still tangle-free after a plane crash, weekly jungle shootouts and a romp with Sawyer in a soiled bear cage.

Finally embracing its nature as science-fiction epic, “Lost” has become more complex and wonderfully geeky then ever. But it’s also shed millions of casual viewers: Season five is on track to be the lowest-rated yet.

“This season was all about time travel, and time travel is a very tricky thing,” said Cuse. “It’s like quicksand, and all season was about not getting dragged down in the quicksand. The balancing act comes in places like the season debut when you have Daniel Faraday talking about the time travel thing and Sawyer walking around with his shirt off the whole time.”

Cuse maintains, as he has for years, that the mythology (the mysteries, magic and smoke monster) is the icing on a cake of compelling character relationships. Maybe a shirtless Sawyer is the glass of cold milk to wash it all down.

It’s in this character-driven vein that he leaks the slightest of spoilers.

Follow the complete story on Boston Herald.

• Buy any two seasons of Lost on Blu-ray and save $20 off your total purchase at checkout.
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The A.V. Club: Darth Vader and the Joker were two of the bigger names that Entertainment Weekly’s readers put higher on the villains list than your character. Do you want to talk any shit about Darth Vader?

Michael Emerson: [Laughs.] He’s a great force of darkness, I guess, but how much acting goes on behind a plastic head? I’m not sure about it. [Laughs.] It seems like his costume does more work for him than mine does for me. I should get handicap points, I think.

AVC: Your character isn’t necessarily a straight-up villain; he’s sometimes portrayed as having the best of intentions. Why do you think Benjamin Linus has been so easily labeled as a villain?

ME: I don’t know. I’m happy to live with it, but I think it’s interesting that I make these best-villain lists when it’s not even clear that I am a bad guy. I think it’s something in the playing of the part. I think it worries people when they can’t get a handle on a character. I tend to play him kind of ambiguously. There is a sinister quality to him, but I think the verdict is still out about what his position is on the scale of good and evil. To a large extent, people’s interest in the character is the mystery of the character.

AVC: Because there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, it’s interesting to watch people discuss the show and say, “Obviously this person is good and this person is evil.” In the end, Hurley will probably wind up being the major villain, because nobody will see it coming.

ME: [Laughs.] Yeah, because that’ll come out of left field. That would be the last thing anyone was expecting. I’m going to make a broad statement here and say that I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic. I think it speaks to the human condition. I think we all secretly understand that we have our sins and our dark thoughts, but we put a face on it for the world. When we see villains played, we sort of perk up. We go, “How’s he doing?” [Laughs.]

AVC: When it comes to what’s going to happen next on the show, the cast is largely kept in the dark, getting scripts just before shooting begins. At what point did you realize that Benjamin Linus was going to be an integral part of the story?

ME: That really dawned on me gradually. As you know, I was originally engaged to be a guest player, to do a few episodes and go away, so I wasn’t thinking in terms of staying in Hawaii. The scenes I was in in the early going, when I was Henry Gale, they had a kind of ambiguity about them. There was a mystery in there, and no one could really figure it out. I remember one day, a director came to me—I had a line, Sayid was waving a gun in my face saying, “Tell us who your leader is,” and I said, “If I tell you, he’ll kill me,” and the director came and said, “That’s good. Let’s take it again, and this time, act as if the leader is the scariest person on Earth.” And I said, “Okay, I can do that, but what if the leader is me?” And he blinked at me a couple of times and said, “I can’t discuss that.” [Laughs.] And that was it. From then on, I thought, “Oh, I see. This could turn into something.” I’m like a slower factor on those kinds of issues; if even I can see that that’s a possibility, then it must be in there somewhere. And as it turns out, it was true. It was a great development.

AVC: Tell the truth, you were getting online and posting anonymously, “Who is this Ben Linus guy? He’s great! They should give him more screen time.”

ME: I wish I had the savvy to do that. I don’t go online much, and of course I don’t even have the sense to have an e-mail name that isn’t my own name, so I can never do any of that stuff anonymously. I’m hopeless.

The complete interview is here.

The soundtrack to the fourth season of Lost is already up for grabs and was just released today. As usual, the soundtrack features music and songs from Michael Giacchino. You can order one at Amazon.