FlashForward: How long is too long?

One of the weird developments of this TV season is the number of shows, usually very young shows, that came on in the fall, then went on an extended hiatus and are only returning now that spring's approaching.

"FlashForward" is back tonight after being away for three and a half months, and both "V" and "Glee" will have been gone for similar or longer gaps by the time they return in upcoming weeks ("V" on March 30, "Glee" on April 13). And that's not even counting other shows like "Fringe" that have taken shorter but still noticeable mid-season breaks.

Now, the reasons behind these gaps - and what's happened during them - aren't all the same. "Glee" went away in part because Ryan Murphy had a prior commitment to direct a movie. Both "FlashForward" and "V" have been retooled and had new showrunners installed since we last saw them. "Fringe" went away because Fox needed, for some reason, to find a timeslot for "Past Life."

But whatever the reason, all these scenarios also seem to be the broadcast networks responding to the problem that few people watch reruns anymore, and even fewer watch them for serialized dramas. In the good ol' days when the networks had to stretch 22 episodes of a show over the 39 weeks of the official TV season, they could feel confident that the reruns would perform adequately enough to live with, and that's just not the case anymore. Ideally, every show would work the way "Lost" and "24" have for years, and just air all their episodes straight through. The problem is that the way the business is set up (and, like Titanic approaching an iceberg, it's too big and unwieldy to easily maneuver around this problem), most shows are incapable of starting production on a season before late summer, and therefore the only shows that can run straight through for 22 weeks are the ones that start in mid-season.

But given how high-profile (if not always highly-rated) these shows are, and how long most of the gaps have been, I'm going to be really curious to see how many viewers remember or care to come back now. "Glee" shouldn't have a problem, as its fans are rabid and loved what the show was doing when it left, and as it'll be airing after "American Idol." But "FlashForward" and "V" were both bleeding viewers when they went away, in part because those viewers liked the ideas behind the shows better than what the shows were doing with those ideas. I'll probably give "V" another shot, because I've liked new showrunner Scott Rosenbaum's work on "Chuck" and "The Shield," but with "FlashForward," there doesn't seem to be any there there, and the constant showrunner changes suggest that nobody behind-the-scenes knows what to do with it, either.

But out of curiosity, what are those of you who stuck with "FlashForward" through November going to do tonight? Do you still care? Are you viewing the two-hour episode tonight as a welcome event, or the show's last chance to convince you to stay? Click here to read the full post

FlashForward, "Black Swan": Black like me

Quick spoilers for last night's "FlashForward" coming up just as soon as I add frozen yogurt in the future...

Given the number of hours of TV I have to watch every week, there comes a point in the lifespan of any new show where I have to decide whether I'm going to stick with it, or if I'm going to pull a George Costanza and declare, "That's it for me!"

With "FlashForward," I'm not exactly at the latter point, but at the very least I think I'm going to take a break from blogging it for a while, only returning if it gets better.

My complaints are the same that they've been: I don't feel connected to any of the characters, which means I therefore don't care about their existential dilemmas about their flash-forwards. Also, when I find myself siding with the flash-forward skeptics, even though I'm clearly not supposed to, I can tell this is not a show designed for my enjoyment. No need to keep rehashing all that in greater detail. (Though specific to this episode, the priest came off as a complete boob, where I think they could have done something interesting with how organized religion is responding to the first seemingly celestial event since Biblical times.)

So I'll give it another few weeks in the DVR rotation, hope for some kind of breakthrough, but I suspect I'm gonna be done soon.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

FlashForward, "137 Sekunden": Nazis. I hate these guys.

Spoilers for last night's "FlashForward" coming up just as soon as I spill out some bong water...

"137 Sekunden" was an improvement over last week's episode and the second half of the pilot, but I still worry that there are some fundamental problems that "FlashForward" simply can't overcome.

I'm glad that we got more of a sense - with the FBI funeral and the largely empty flight (with the nervous airline exec) - of how much the blackout itself messed up the world. But the show has neither the screen-time nor the budget to adequately depict the chaos created by the blackout, which still feels like the show views it as a minor nuisance compared to everyone's reactions to their flash-forwards. And that just makes that obsession seem silly. Perhaps if there was more of a contrast - if we saw people diving so deeply into their visions to escape the terrible reality created by the blackout - it might work better. I got the sense that's what David Goyer and Marc Guggenheim were going for with Courtney Vance's eulogy, but it's one of those things that the show's format just doesn't seem equipped to handle, which makes the whole global blackout something where the creators bit off more than they're going to be able to chew.

Beyond that, I'm starting to bang my head against the wall with the circular logic so many characters, particularly our man Mark, are employing. He arranges for the Nazi to be freed because the Nazi said (and the bong-smoker confirmed) that he was freed in his vision, and his picture is on the wall in Mark's vision because Mark puts it on the wall here. And the Nazi assumes he's helpful because in the future he wasn't in prison, but in the future he wasn't in prison only because he claimed to be helpful, not that he was actually helpful. I get that this is the nature of paradox, but it made Mark seem like a sucker well before he found out for sure that he had been played.

Also, in these situations where characters in the present use flash-forward knowledge to make decisions, shouldn't anyone be questioning why no one in their flash-forward behaves as if they're already familiar with what's happening? Shouldn't the Customs guy have recognized the Nazi? Shouldn't Mark know that the men with guns are coming for him? And, since they don't, doesn't this suggest that the future isn't going to play out the way the flash-forwards say? And, therefore, isn't it even dumber to make decisions based solely on the theory that this is how the future is supposed to play out?

That I'm spending this much time dwelling on the quantum mechanics is suggestive of the larger problem with "FlashForward." I don't want to keep bringing up "Lost" every week - though it's hard not to when they keep bringing in "Lost" faces, this week with Kim Dickens (aka Sawyer's baby mama) as Aaron's ex-wife - but that show just did an entire season about time-travel, about whether the future can be changed, temporal loops, and a lot of the other things "FlashForward" is dealing with. And it was much more engaging because the characters were richer, and because the show only occasionally stopped for people to discuss the way it all works, whereas here it seems that's all that anyone does. Everyone on "FlashForward" is spending their time talking about what happened in the past, or what's going to happen in the future, while making precious little happen in the present.

In fairness, "Lost" already had four seasons to build up its characters before getting into the time-travel shenanigans, but even at a comparable point in its first season, most of the regular cast was better sketched-in than anyone on "FlashForward" is so far. This script made an effort to give Demetri a personality and make us care about his impending demise, and to give us more backstory on Aaron, but it still feels like broad generalities, as opposed to anything specific to these men. One's the harried engaged guy (who now knows he's gonna die before his wedding if he doesn't change the future), the other is the alcoholic struggling to stay sober, and I've seen all these beats before.

Unless some of these characters start feeling like actual people soon, as opposed to two-dimensional archetypes running along a Mobius strip, I'm not going to care about whether their futures come true or not, and I'm not going to be watching this show anymore.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

FlashForward, "White to Play": Apocalypse wacky

Trying to get through as much Thursday night TV as I can, on Thursday night, so really quick thoughts on the second episode of "FlashForward" coming up just as soon as I order a happy meal...

It's early yet, but so far it feels like "FlashForward" has bitten off much more than it can chew. They need to depict the physical and emotional chaos that would be caused by the blackout itself, as well as the psychological trauma of the world getting a look at its future (or lack thereof), and it needs to move the plot forward, and it needs to make us interested in the characters and why they're so excited or upset by what they saw...

...and two episodes in, it doesn't feel like it's doing any of those things particularly well. The characters are ciphers, there are occasional allusions at best to just how dysfunctional society would be after a mass blackout, too much of the dialogue still feels like bald exposition, Joseph Fiennes still seems like a lightweight leading man (and has a distracting bow-legged walk), etc.

This episode is where Marc Guggenheim took over Brannon Braga's writing and producing responsibilities, and I had hoped that he would start giving the show and its characters a humanity that's usually lacking in Braga-written shows like "Threshold" and the "Star Trek" spin-offs. Instead, the major difference was that we occasionally got injections of pretty broad comic relief (an expansion of the boss's toilet incident, the racially-insensitive cupcake lady), complete with the nails-on-a-chalkboard Please Laugh Now music ABC loves to insert into the lighter moments of its dramas (including the Guggenheim co-created "Eli Stone"). I'm not saying comedy is a bad idea - "Lost" gets away with light moments all the time, and there were times when even Ron Moore admitted "Battlestar Galactica" was too grim - but the tonal shifts were jarring, and it felt like (lame) comic relief for comic relief's sake.

I'm in for a bit, in the hope that they can figure this out and make all the pieces fit together, but the show is not off to a promising start so far.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

FlashForward, "No More Good Days": Seth MacFarlane is here why?

I wrote about the pilot of "FlashForward" in today's column - and I was specifically concerned that the pilot's second half (boring, talky) is more representative of what the series will be then the first half (car chases, special effects, kangaroos). I'm curious what you all thought. Was the first part, plus the cliffhanger, enough to keep you around for a while? Do you like any of the characters? And, again, how badly does the distraction level of having Seth MacFarlane play one of the FBI agents outweigh any value his acting skills might bring? Click here to read the full post

'FlashForward' & 'Dollhouse' season two review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review the pilot for "FlashForward," which is a show that has a cool premise and mediocre execution, and the season two premiere of "Dollhouse," which is a show that started off with a dumb premise but has started to be executed so well that it doesn't matter.

I'll have a separate, brief "FlashForward" post tonight, and a "Dollhouse" episode post tomorrow night. Click here to read the full post