Jan 9, 2009 09:00 AM
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Is ABC's new drama Flash Forward going to turn out to be less like Lost and more like NBC's Heroes? Its creator's explanation of how they plan to keep the show fresh makes us wonder.
Flash Forward, which is being worked on for a fall 2009 debut, is based around Robert J. Sawyer's 1999 novel Flashforward and centers around a mysterious event that makes everyone around the world simultaneously black out for two minutes - and see their lives in exactly the same point of time five months in the future. But show creator Brannon Braga knows that television shows ideally last longer than five months, and has planned for that eventuality:
[W]e want to reset the show at the end of each year, where we'll do another flash forward at the end of the first season, and then potentially another flash forward at the end of the second season, each one kind of resetting the core characters' visions of the future and introducing new characters... The core concept is very much the same as Robert Sawyer's novel [but] to do a TV show, you have to sustain potentially—and God willing—100 episodes or more; you've got to change the concept a little bit. His novel had people having visions of the future 20 years from now. We change that to five months from now and kind of narrowed down the scope a little bit and made it a little bit more of an intimate epic.
The idea of "resetting" the show with new glimpses of the future at the end of each season makes us more than a little nervous, because it reminds us of the continual future visions that made Heroes so repetitive and dull. While we can understand the desire to restate the show's gimmick every season, a continual resetting of "the future" sounds less like the over-arching plan of Lost, and more like the sound of people who're making it up as they go along.
Brannon Braga Says Flash Forward Will Reset, A La 24 [Scifi Wire]
Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.
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