Extra hour of "Lost" on the way

We break from our office-related "Office" post-a-thon -- yes, that totally makes sense -- to report about another Channel Surfing favorite, "Lost."

Though ABC's time-bending island mystery doesn't return until April 24, TV Guide is reporting that another hour of the show has been tacked onto the season finale.

Good news, right fellow obsessives?

Well, there's a bit of a catch.

While the "Lost" finale will be three hours total, in an unorthodox scheduling move, the first hour of the finale will air May 15. Then comes a two week break before the two-hour May 29 conclusion.

So though the "Lost" creative team successfully convinced ABC to give them three hours for the Season Four send-off, in order to air the last two hours together -- which TV Guide reports was an absolute necessity for Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof -- there's going to be a break in-between.

"We are very excited and grateful to [ABC president] Steve McPherson for working out the scheduling difficulties to allow us to make the second part of our finale two hours," Cuse told TV Guide. "Damon and I were working on the script and we just couldn't get it all done in one hour without shortchanging the story. Now the finale will have all the sweep and emotional completeness we wanted it to have -- along with, of course, answering who's in the coffin."

So, a little bit of good news-bad news? Or is one more hour of "Lost" worth a little break in the action for the much-anticipated coffin reveal?

-- Thomas Rozwadowski, trozwado@greenbaypressgazette.com