What Did You See?

Unlike film, TV is a landscape for characters over concept. It’s more about what happens to the people who inhabit a mundane, everyday setting—hospital, police station, bar—than it is about cataclysms and life-changing events. Just imagine what your favorite show would be like if, week in and week out, something huge had to happen, whether if felt organic or not. It’s the rare show that can successfully meld character and concept in a way that is both entertaining and thought provoking (Lost and 24 immediately spring to mind, though both have had moments where events have felt forced, particularly in the latter). This season, that show is ABC’s FlashForward (Thursdays, 8pm), a headtrippy drama that, like Lost, dares to draw viewers in with more questions than it is currently prepared to answer.

The show’s premise is simple: On a seemingly normal morning, people across the globe black out for two minutes, seventeen seconds, during which time they have visions of what is going to happen to them on a specific date, April 29, 2010. FBI agent Mark Benford (Shakespeare in Love’s Joseph Fiennes) sees himself relapsing into alcoholism while working on the blackout case, dubbed Mosaic. His wife Olivia (Lost’s Sonya Walger) has a vision of herself with another man, a man she’s never met but who ends up being the father of one of her patients. Mark’s partner Demetri (John Cho from the Harold & Kumar movies) sees nothing at all and later receives a mysterious tip telling him that he will be murdered in March.

This worldwide event brings up a number of existential questions. Can what you saw be changed or are you destined to live it out no matter how you try to intervene? How do you go about your normal life now that you have information that could make you rethink everything? And how much stock should you put in something that may be nothing more than a glorified dream? Of course, FlashForward isn’t coming right out with answers to these questions; they’ve got an entire season to fill, after all.

We're slowly starting to delve into what caused the blackout and why it happened in the first place. Among the tidbits that have been revealed so far are that a man in a Detroit baseball stadium was immune to the blackout; a Nazi named D. Gibbons is a “bad man” (Benford’s daughter’s words; Gibbons was in her vision) and will soon be released from a German prison; a similar blackout occurred in Somalia in 1991; and Olivia’s future lover is apparently involved in the whole thing, along with a mystery man introduced last week played by Dominic Monaghan, also from Lost.

What we’ve seen so far is that the visions are making people act in ways they wouldn’t ordinarily act, such as Olivia and Mark keeping secrets from each other about what exactly they saw. And if this gripping show has a flaw, this is it. We don’t get to see who these people really are because they no longer seem to know themselves, so enmeshed are they in what will happen rather than what is happening. Still, this is a wait-and-see type of show, where patience with storytelling and character development will hopefully be rewarded with a whiz-bang payoff. From its cast to its time structure, FlashForward obviously owes a huge debt to Lost. I can only hope that it proves to be a worthy successor to that classic, soon-to-retire island drama.