Comic-Con: Sneak Peak At David Goyer’s New ABC Series, FlashForward; Dominic Monagan Joins Cast
If you could know your future, how would you live your life differently? That’s the question that animates David Goyer’s new TV series,FlashForward, which will premiere on ABC at 8 pm on September 24th. Loosely based on the book by Robert Sawyer,FlashForwardis a mind-bending, time-bending new series that takes a lot of inspiration from Lost, but with some new twists. I got the opportunity to see the first two acts of the very first episode ofFlashforward(they did not show us the ending out of respect for preventing even the press from getting` spoiled). This was the first time this series has ever been previewed in public. Hit the jump for a summary of what I saw, plus some personal thoughts.
Please note that the following contains potential spoilers for the first episode of FlashForward.
We open on a man who has been in a car crash and is slowly waking up. As he crawls out of the husk of his car, he realizes that there is massive devastation around him. Other cars have been totaled, many have been injured, some have been killed. The man stumbles around the rubble for awhile, and then we cut to:
FOUR HOURS EARLIER
We see brief and random shots that have very little meaning at this point. Then we see Mark. He’s inside an office looking really disheveled, by himself. All of a sudden, guys with guns and laser sights and sporting ominous tattoos burst in and attempt to kill him.
We’re back to the opening scene. Mark awakes and we see the first shots of the pilot play out again.This time,though, we realize that not only has Mark gotten into an accident, but everyone around him has had a blackout too. That’s why there are people injured, totaled cars, and carnage everywhere. A crashed gas tanker explodes.
Mark tries to make sense of things by jumping up on to a car to view the Los Angeles skyline. We get a spectacular hero shot as you see Mark standing amidst the city’s considerable devastation. Bystanders start reporting that this is a worldwide phenomenon. Mark wanders down a street and sees news footage of destruction all around the world. Planes and cars have crashed, some of them have slammed into buildings. Many are dead. We see a kangaroo in the middle of the city street, bounding away, an bizarre and ominous sign that nothing is normal anymore.
First some quick facts from this footage: According to the panelists, you eventually find out that everyone on the entire planet has had a flashforward, and has seen a portion of their lives that’s6 monthsfrom now. Over the course of the first season, the show catches up to those sixth months for the main characters and you find out all the interim events leading up to the flashforwards. In particular, we see that Mark has been investigating the cause of the flashforwards and the quest to find out is what animates him over the course of the season.
Overall, I was sufficiently impressed withFlashForward. It definitely had echoes of shows such asLostandER(indeed, Goyer explained thatLostwas a huge inspiration).. The pilot itself shares a lot of similarities withLost’s,such as the huge disaster, the confusion about what’s happened, and the people trying to figure out what the meaning of it all is. For network TV the production values are great and its premise is probably sufficiently inventive to maintain my interest for a season.
One of the things that has turned me off toLostis that I was never sure where it was going (I watched one season and then stopped). If people tell me that it all adds up in the end, I’m definitely willing to go back and revisit the entire series, but I’ve already wasted years of time on a pop-culture phenomenon that has introduced many intriguing plot threads and ended up going nowhere. It was calledThe X-Files.
However, Goyer was very explicit about this point and explained that the show had been meticulously planned out, right down to the “final shot of the first season.” Humorously, Goyer described the pitch-meeting for the show at ABC, where in a post-Lostworld, the executives said, “This is a cool script but do you have ANY idea where it goes.” Goyer said he told them and they said “Holy shit, they actually do.” If they can really plan a satisfying puzzle that already has a resolution, color me intrigued.
