TV REVIEW: FlashForward (2009): "No More Good Days"

FlashForward -- a new series from executive producers Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer -- might more accurately have been titled "FlashBack."

While watching the catastrophic events of this new series unfold, the careful TV watcher will experience a distinct sense of deja vu for the ghosts of TV series past, notably ABC's powerhouse Lost, and the canceled ABC series The Nine.

Like Lost, Flashforward opens in media res, with utter pandemonium. A series of diverse characters (like, say, the passengers on a crashed plane...) awake to find themselves injured, confused and populating a vast disaster area. Only here it's urban. Sirens blare, cars are overturned. Someone is on fire. And a kangaroo (substituting for an out-of-place polar bear?) hops down a busy metropolitan avenue.

The presentation is similar to Lost too: immediacy-provoking shaky-cam and all. And yet, it's undeniable that these shots of a chaotic Los Angeles freeway (and skyline) resonate in this day and age: they are epic in scope and presentation, and successfully remind one of the stomach-wrenching terror of 9/11. In one impressive and horrifying shot, a helicopter hits a skyscraper, balloons into flame, and then careens down to the top of a smaller building. Where it explodes.

Clearly, no expense was spared.

Another reference to Lost also arrives early: a billboard for Oceanic Airlines is visible in the background of one shot. If you're awake, you can't miss it, and I guess that's the point. I can hear the announcer now: "If you like Lost, you'll love FlashForward!" Now, I don't mind homage, but this represents craven corporate synergy here. Marketing embedded as drama. It's sort of insulting.

Like the late, lamented The Nine, FlashForward introduces a variety of dissimilar characters going about their normal, daily lives when something traumatic and totally unexpected occurs to them. In The Nine, it was a hostage situation in a bank that affected the dramatis personae. Suddenly, life was scrambled, relationships were re-shuffled, fates were altered, and the experience "changed everything."

In FlashForward, we get a vaguely sci-fi variation on the format: a sudden global black-out -- replete with premonitions -- lasts for two minutes-and-seventeen seconds and is the catalyst for a whole new direction in life. A doctor planning suicide suddenly glimpses his future and realizes it's not his destiny to die now. An FBI agent (Joseph Fiennes) who has given up drinking sees an image of himself off the wagon...drunk. His wife, yet another doctor, sees herself in a passionate relationship with another man. Her marriage is apparently over. See? Suddenly, all of life is up for grabs...

The nagging feeling that you've seen all this before is heightened, alas, by FlashForward's insistence on hammering home the episode's salient points ad nauseum. A TV news report flat-out states (with accompanying images of destroyed European capitols...) that the black-out was worldwide. But then, a stranger watching the broadcast notes, "my God, it's the whole world!" Then, after the commercial break, Fiennes' Benford tells us again that the black-out affected the whole planet. Without exaggeration, the episode reminds us six or seven times in the first hour that the phenomenon was worldwide, just so we don't miss the obvious.

Much information is transmitted in this ham-handed, unskilled fashion, for those in the audience with attention-deficient disorder, I guess. For instance, Benford's wife, Olivia (Sonya Walger), experiences a vision of her "future lover." We see that mysterious future lover in a vision, in profile...and get a good look. Then, that mystery man appears in the present, and the episode swoops around to get a profile. The camera move triggers our memory, as does the man's physical appearance. We recognize him immediately, but that's not sufficient for FlashForward. Nope, the episode cuts back to the same vision footage we just saw, just to make sure the audience "gets" that it's the same guy.

During the commercial breaks too, the over-caffeinated voice-over announcer aggressively reminds the viewership of everything that just happened three seconds ago. Was that kangaroo -- gasp -- a clue? What is the importance of the date of the flash-forward (April 29, 2010)? There's nothing like attempting solve a mystery in which the clues have been spoon-fed to you with the subtlety of a game-show announcer calling down the next contestant.

The significance of the date April 29, 2010? Let me hazard a guess. Why, that just happens to be a Thursday night! The night of FlashForward's season finale! How convenient! In the book by Robert Sawyer, by point of contrast, the flash forward was twenty-years or so into the future, not a mere six months. I guess the makers of FlashForward are hedging their bets...

And well they should. This program is pitched so low that the creators must assume the general TV audience now consists entirely of cabbage. My concern: if they think we can't understand that the black-out was world wide, how on Earth do they think they can explain quantum theory, strange matter and the other esoteric aspects of Sawyer's novel to us?

Now, just the other day, I posted a quote by Jean-Luc Godard in which he noted that it's not where you take things from that's important, it's where you go with them. Given that philosophy, I don't mind all that much that FlashForward steals some thunder from The Nine (which nobody but me watched anyway...) or the popular Lost. Imitation is the name of the game in television more often than not. What I find much more troubling is the mind-numbing lack of subtlety on display here. This show doesn't trust the audience to pay attention at all.

As annoying as this "telegraph-and-repeat EVERYTHING" approach turns out to be, I still found aspects of FlashForward tantalizing. One character, Demetri (John Cho), experiences no vision during the black-out, and assumes that this can only mean one thing. That he has no future. That in six months, he'll be dead. Now that's a terrific wrinkle in the formula. In the episodes ahead, Demetri may literally be fighting for his life.

And, of course, underlying everything here is the exact same (fascinating) debate that informed the movie Knowing (2009): free will versus determinism. Can the future be changed? Does knowledge of the future, in fact, automatically change the future? These are fascinating notions and can make for some great TV drama. I also found the last few shots of FlashForward's pilot absolutely chilling. One man on Earth, it seems, did not black out at all. Does this mean he's not human? Immune? Protected? What? That's a very intriguing mystery, no doubt.

But I still don't have much confidence, at least not yet, that the writers of FlashForward are going to approach these concepts and mysteries in anything approaching an intelligent fashion. In some ways, FlashForward gives me deja vu for one other TV program: Brannon Braga's Threshold (2005). That alien-invasion series exhibited a great premise but by the second episode the execution of that premise had gone straight down the toilet. The whole thing lasted six or seven episodes, as I recall.

I bet Braga's hoping we all don't flash back to that traumatic experience.