In ABC’s FlashForward, which debuts at 8 p.m. Thursday (Ch. 5, 6), the complete planet earth knows where they will be in six months’ time — on April 29, 2010, to be precise.
The plot of the latest and one of the most anticipated new fall show is that every person on the planet is blacked out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and has had a vision — a flash-forward — to the same time six months ahead.
The visions mean different things to each person — one character about to get married sees nothing, while another on the verge of suicide sees himself alive. But for them all, the question is: Are the visions unavoidably true?
FlashForward stars Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) as FBI agent Mark Benford, whose vision of the future had him looking at a bulletin board filled with clues about the unexplained incident and which makes him the right man to investigate the phenomenon.
Joining him on the team are two other agents played by John Cho (as Demetri Noh) the Harold and Kumar star and Christine Woods (as Janis Hawk), with Courtney B. Vance as their boss, Stan Wedeck.
Gabrielle Union is Noh’s fiancée and a criminal defense attorney. Also on the series are two former Lost actors — Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger, who plays Benford’s surgeon wife, Olivia, who has a vision of herself with another man.
With a large ensemble cast — 11 series regulars and numerous guest stars planned — the series opens the door (make that doors) to numerous story possibilities, both forward and back. It also opens the door to comparisons to ABC’s Lost, and the network is hoping that fans of the Emmy-winning hit series will get hooked on FlashForward as well.
“The primary reason why we’re on ABC is I’m an enormous, enormous fan of Lost,” says executive producer David Goyer. “I just thought it was such a genre-breaking, bold show, and it proved to me ... that you can do a show with a large ensemble cast ... tell a big, kind of cinematic story.”
While Monaghan sees similarities in the two shows — large ensemble casts, very ambitious story lines — he sees distinct differences at the same time.
“I don’t think necessarily we’re dealing with something as deeply rooted in a mythology that needs to be solved. I think this is a show that is, not necessarily to use the word “simplistic,” but is probably not as sophisticated in that deeply rich mythology as Lost is.”
FlashFoward is based on the Robert Sawyer novel of the same name that was in the works before Lost, and producers are hoping that viewers will find it easier to follow.
“As a viewer, I really like to feel that the storytellers know where they’re going,” says Goyer. “We constantly talk about the obligation we have towards our viewers to really figure it out and know where we’re going.”
Goyer says the producers made a decision early on not to tell the actors a lot about where their characters are going because they didn’t want it to affect their performances.
“I think that’s kind of fun and exciting,” says the producer.
One thing we know is that April 29, 2010, is not the end of the show — at least if it’s a big-enough hit.
Producers say they’ve loosely plotted out five seasons, and won’t say what the significance of the spring date is, only that it’s “one of the mysteries of the show.”
April 29 happens to be a Thursday night, so Fiennes says it’s no mystery as to what he’ll be doing — “tuning in.”
Via: Projo.com
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