Why watch FlashForward?

When Flashforward premiered, it drew immediate comparisons to Lost (indeed it is the network’s attempt to replace the top-rating series which is finishing its run this season) for its challenging sci-fi-based premise, its ensemble cast whose various stories would be told, alternating through the weeks, and for its powerful and visceral (if a little too Lost-like) opening sequence with crashes and panic and a harrowed protagonist running about and helping people as we are introduced to the show’s main players. It racked up big numbers in the ratings. Then, as the show progressed, its ratings plummeted.

There are a number of reasons that the show’s ratings plummeted, and most of them have to do with the way that the show has progressed since that initial, amazing pilot. Having gone on hiatus before last year’s holiday season, FlashForward resumes its first season. The question then, if this show has performed so great, and so dismally, should we still watch it? Should we hope for a second season, at the rate that it’s going?

Being one of those people that got hooked by the show from the get-go, I have to admit that I expected a lot more from it. Its premise is audacious and challenging, unique for television, and thoroughly promising. And when it started to skimp on delivering on its promises and revelations, or those revelations failed to measure up to their setups, I too was dismayed.

It starts with your usual car chase, couple of FBI guys tailing a suspected terrorist. As usual, our lead FBI guy has to be damaged in some way, and Joseph Fiennes plays recovering alcoholic Mark Benford a little too intense a little too often, taking the character beyond the limits of believability at times. Then in the middle of the car chase the “event” happens.

The “flashforward” event, for which the show is named, occurs around the globe. Everyone blacks out for two minutes and seventeen seconds. For the duration of the blackout, all of them see what they will be doing six months in the future. A doctor who wants to commit suicide sees something that makes him want to keep on living. Benford sees himself in the FBI office looking at the investigation board of Mosaic (what the investigation on the flashforward is called) as a group of gunmen come for him, Benford’s wife sees herself having an affair. Benford’s AA sponsor sees himself with his daughter who supposedly died in the second Gulf War. Benford’s partner Demetri doesn’t have a flashforward.

How great a starting point is that? And from that premise the basic seeds are planted. We will be seeing people’s visions, whether eerie or uplifting, as they go through the trauma and recovery from the event.

Therein lie the expectations for the show. It must regularly deliver flashforwards that are surprising and will keep viewers guessing, while at the same time providing them with meaty movements in the foreground. But as the show slogged through its first few episodes, it seemed that everything was just running by the numbers.

An interesting episode with a Nazi convicted of war crimes who uses his flashforward to buy his freedom was intriguing and particularly effective, as it brought to the fore moral questions about how the Mosaic investigation was to be conducted. In their desire to prevent another event from happening, and in Benford’s desperation to avoid the future where his wife cheats on him, what were these people willing to do?

However, after some good initial episodes the show seemed like it was just going back to the well and the well was drying up. There wasn’t much new or novel to run with. It started sinking into melodrama, and a number of the episodes were bogged down very heavily by the recurring talk of Mark Benford’s battle with alcoholism.

It seemed that the show had lost its sense of urgency. It was becoming content with telling the mundane stories of its characters. This would have been fine if these characters stood out as rounded, real characters. But since the show’s premise is so high concept, it necessitated working in broad strokes with the characters, so that the focus could be on the development of the main narrative. But with the main narrative stuck in the mire and the focus shifting to generally uninteresting characters (mopey suicidal doctor quickly comes to mind as one dude who I wish I didn’t have to see so often, mopey AA Dad with supposedly dead daughter is another, mopey special kid, mopey babysitter, mopey…well you get the idea what these characters are like) the show was floundering. Even glimpses of the diabolical physicist played by Dominic Monaghan failed to deliver much dramatic impact as his character became less and less menacing and more, well, irritating.

Then came a game-changer. One of the characters, in a beautifully shot moment of self-sacrifice, proves that the future can be changed. Even though these characters had seen into the “future,” that future wasn’t set in stone, as was proven by the man’s death before he could live that future. It’s a heart-stopping sequence, one of those moments when you feel that things will never be the same (or at least hope so, especially with the way that the show was failing to deliver the thrills that the show it hopes to become, Lost, did with such regularity; Lost had its own problems through the course of its run for sure, but pacing and surprise were never among them, while FlashForward seemed to be grasping constantly for a direction).

Along with the revelation that the future could definitely be changed, that in effect fighting against the events witnessed in the flashforward was not futile, and that human agency still had something to do with the outcomes of things, there was new life breathed into the show. Adding further to the show’s sense of urgency was its employing more action scenes, like the ones earlier in the series, rather than the melodrama which it had chosen to focus on.

FlashForward, at this point, works best when it is working in broad strokes, pushing forward its central narrative, and throwing in enough action to get the adrenaline pumping. It has to strike the right balance between these things and its development of characters.

Further, the characters really have to become more nuanced. But their development should coincide with developments in the central narrative, not overtake the central narrative, as the show has often allowed. We do, at a certain point, have to care just as much about these characters and their lives as we do about the investigation itself.

What makes FlashForward interesting to me is that it shows this ongoing conflict between fatalism and the power of human agency. Things happen, things are pieced together by the visions of the future. Why bother living if you can’t change what’s coming? And at different times the show takes all power from its characters and lets things happen to them. Then, when it’s all fate, how can we really care about what happens?

But then they get a taste of control and suddenly we can root for the characters again. Suddenly, we can envision their struggles as epic, as these characters struggle to fight the future, to rewrite what has not only been written, but what has been shown to them, or to the world.

And thus we see the potential of this show. Its conflicts can be small, its characters can move at the level of melodrama and stereotype, but if it can find some way to elevate these conflicts, to turn them into symbols, to make them mean more, to transform them into metaphors of us, of our own lives, of our own struggles, then what happens to these characters will mean so much more to the viewers.

A show that could bring in deep philosophical questioning, like questions of existentialism and fatalism, while at the same time discussing small human conflicts and interspersing good action sequences between, while setting it all against the backdrop of a grand narrative that rests on a powerful sci-fi premise, is a show that lots of people would watch. In fact it sounds oddly familiar to one of the most popular shows of the last five years. FlashForward, in its best episodes, does this. If it could figure out how to do this regularly, to sustain the quality of its best episodes, then it would be one of the most promising new shows of this season.

Photo from: http://flashforwardtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/abcofficial02.jpg

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