Join us on the forums for discussion on the first episode of FlashForward!

“FlashForward,” having been teased during “Lost,” rightfully has its share of mysteries and a unique mythology growing.

And of course, that means spoilers.

Well, the showrunner-approved ones anyway. Journalists were threatened with having their press passes revoked, the silent treatment invoked and other menacing consequences if we were to reveal some of the pilot’s sixth-act surprises during a screening of “FlashForward” Wednesday night in Burbank. So we’re not going to do that.

Luckily, the event also supplied alcohol, which loosened showrunners David S. Goyer and Marc Guggenheim’s lips about other spoilers that we may share with you, the hungry readers.

Check out ABC’s “FlashForward” pictures.

Before we jump into the fray, a little background: “FlashForward” is based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel about a mysterious global phenomenon — everyone keels over, blacking out at exactly the same time for about two minutes. During this time, they all have visions of their future. How did this happen? What does this mean? Will the future come true?

“FlashForward” — Yes, all one word (the opposite of a flashback), but with the capital “F” in the middle.

What’s different from the book: 1) The so-called flashforwards are only for six months hence, not 20 years. 2) The main characters are not quantum physicists, so the TV-viewing audience will find them more relatable. 3) The overarching reason behind the flashfowards are different from the novel. As Guggenheim sagely observes, “We’re not schmucks.”

April 29, 2010 – This is the date that everyone flashforwards to. No, this isn’t the season finale. Goyer explains, “I think it’s natural for the audience to assume that we’re just going to vamp until episodes 20 and 21, and then a bunch of s***’s going to happen. We’ve already finished [shooting] the first seven episodes, and it will become crystal clear by the end of those seven episodes that that’s not what we’re doing. We’re never going to lie to the audience. We’re going to play by the rules.”

2 minutes and 17 seconds – This is the amount of time that everyone is “out” and visiting April 29 in their visions. Goyer promises that there will be an answer for why it’s that specific length of time.

An end is in sight – Having begun the development process before the writers’ strike, plenty of work has been done on the story, so a finale, complete with answers to everything, is known. What’s unknown is just how long ABC will want to run this thing.

Goyer: “We did a bible and planned out the whole first season. We know what the second season is about. [We can end it in three seasons]. We can extend it to six to seven seasons. There are potentially 6.8 billion stories to tell.”

How much we’ll actually be told – Goyer: “At the end of the first season … all the glimpses of the future that you’ve seen of our series regulars, that we’ve teased, we will know whether those particular futures have come to pass or not.”

There’s no real “Lost” connection – Other than Sonya Walger (Desmond’s Penny from “Lost”) getting cast, nada. Goyer: “It was written as a spec and originally was even anticipated to be an HBO show. So it wasn’t written at all for ABC or to be a ‘Lost’ replacement. And I think the comparisons are accurate in that we also have a very large cast and are telling a very big, cinematic, ambitious story, but I think once you see the pilot … that’s where the similarities end.”

Dominic Monaghan – Yeah, we couldn’t find out if our favorite castaway/hobbit was involved either, but we tried. [ForwardFlash Update: Yes, Dominic Monaghan has since confirmed his involvement - he will be playing a character named Simon.]

Seth MacFarlane – You’ve already seen the “Family Guy” creator in the first-look video clip. He apparently liked reading the pilot script so much, he called the “FF” team up, asked to be in the pilot and got cast as part of the FBI team investigating The Blackout. It’s likely he’ll be back as a recurring character.

Alex Kingston – The former “E.R.” star pulled a MacFarlane and can be seen in the pilot as well. Judging by what we saw in the pilot, she should be back.

Globetrotting – The Blackout was a worldwide phenomenon, so don’t expect the show to stay put in the U.S. The first 13 episodes will take place in six countries. One of the episodes will take place in Dubai and have the requisite subtitles.

DVD content – The intricate stories of the main 10 characters have been meticulously plotted out, beat by beat, on a mega-bulletin board made of six regular-sized ones — three wide, two high. Guggenheim says they’ve been taking snapshots of the board periodically — not only as insurance in case something happens to the boards and all is lost, but also to place on the DVD a visual summary of the many changes that have taken place while developing the story.

Mosaic website – We already know about The Mosaic Collective website from the 5-second promos of “FlashForward” during “Lost.” This will be a plot device, an actual website in which everyone in the world will be able to input what their flashforward was and cross-reference it to others. It will become the ultimate in social networking and become part of the vocabulary in the show: “I Mosaic-ed you.” As viewers, we’ll also be able to input our own vision, and there will be some mysterious programming in there to give us an actual result.

Liars – Some characters on the show will lie about their visions for various reasons — embarrassment, horror, denial, deceit, picking up women or what have you.

Rock star’s vision – In an aspiring musician’s vision, he discovers that he’s made it in six months’ time because he sees himself on stage being cheered by adoring fans. And just as he’s about to play his signature song, the one that makes him famous, the 2:17 expires, leaving him wondering what the song he has yet to write will be. Since everyone else’s visions take place during the same period of time, even the people in the audience can’t say what the song is.

Celebrities unlikely – There probably won’t be a meta element of having real-life celebrities playing themselves on the show and professing to have a vision. Goyer: “We haven’t decided where to break the fourth wall or not. My gut instinct is not to do that.”

Animal antics – An animal is seen in the pilot that Goyer says we’ll see again. Also, we will get the answer about whether or not animals also experienced the flashforward.

“FlashForward” will debut on Thursday, Sept. 24 on ABC.

“Network television is in the throes of a major evolution, or devolution, or whatever you want to call it. But it’s a crisis, really. And the crisis rises from the fact that people have choices in how they consume their product,” said  Guggenheim in an interview with Newsarama.


[…]


“With serialized shows, there are a lot of people who are waiting for the DVD box set to come out,” Guggenheim said. “Imagine if comic book companies didn’t pay attention to how many trades they were publishing, but rather only paid attention to month-to-month sales,” Guggenheim said. “In fact, I’ll go you one better. Not even month-to-month sales. They’re only paying attention to how Amazing Spider-Man sold on the Wednesday it came out as opposed to the following Thursday, Friday or Saturday, right? So that’s the problem. You have a lot of people who are either ‘waiting for the trade’ or picking up their comic book on Thursday, Friday or Saturday.”


[…]


“But there’s another factor here, which is perception,” Guggenheim pointed out. “Nielsen is the company that has the monopoly, and I use that in the most pejorative sense, has a monopoly on reporting ratings. Nielsen comes out with preliminary ratings the very next morning. They’re called overnights for that reason. That’s the first data point that you get. And that is purely live viewing on the first night – no DVRs, no iTunes, no internet. Then over the course of the new two to three weeks, additional data comes in, and it includes internet and it includes DVRs. But here’s the problem. Those overnights have set the tone. Those overnights have created the perception.”

Hmmmm.  I suppose Marc must conclude TV by the Numbers is part of the problem, not part of the solution.


There may be something to it in the sense that we perpetuate the reality (rather than the myth) that advertising is bought and sold based on viewing and while we don’t see the C+3 (commercial ratings, as opposed to program ratings,  live + plus 3 days worth of DVR viewing) the L+SD preliminary overnight numbers have been an excellent proxy in most cases of the Live+7 (week’s worth of DVR program ratings).


I could learn a ton from Mr. Guggenheim, and there’s probably very little I can teach him. But there’s this: DVR ratings are included in the preliminary overnight numbers – and should be much more indicative of the Live+7 number for Flash Forward than they were with Eli Stone. Generally speaking 8pm, when Flash Forward will air, and 9pm shows have a much higher percentage of the week’s DVR viewing occur on the same night than shows that run at 10pm like Eli Stone did.


Almost all Nielsen numbers that are regularly cited include at least the same night DVR viewing.  The preliminary overnight numbers, as well as the final numbers that come out later in the day and are used in the weekly reporting  all include DVR viewing up to 3am after the show aired.  The only time we even ever bother to look at the purely live numbers at all is when calculating total DVR viewing.


Let’s take a look at Lost’s numbers for season five.  They include a rerun or two, and reruns are DVRd much less, but it still makes for a good indicator.   Lost averaged 7.941M live viewers, 9.525M live+SD viewers and 11.279M live+7 viewers.  That means on average, including a rerun or two that drag the average down, Lost averaged 3.338M DVR viewers per airing.  BUT,  1.584M of those watched on DVR the same night the show aired.
Factoring out the rerun or two, typically half of Lost’s weekly DVR viewing occurred the same night the show aired and would have been included both in the preliminary overnight numbers, and the final weekly numbers.


Those percentages looked much, much different for Eli Stone.  These numbers only include airings between 9/22/08 and 5/20/2009, so the final episodes of Eli Stone that aired in the summer are not included here.   Eli  Stone averaged 5.883M live viewers, 6.177M live+SD viewers, and 7.088M live+7 viewers.   That’s 1.205M weekly DVR viewers on average with only 294,000 of them or 24.4 percent watching the same night.  Things change all the time, but it’s reasonable to conclude that the % of DVR viewing for Flash Forward that is counted the night the show airs should track much more closely with Lost than with Eli Stone.


The numbers that really matter the most for Lost last season are its adults 18-49 ratings.  Of all the ABC shows, Lost experienced a bigger boost on a percentage basis due to DVR viewing than any of them.  Some of that is because it aired very few in-slot repeats, vs. say, Grey’s Anatomy, which aired more in-slot reruns during the season and are counted in the season totals I’m looking at.  And even with the repeats, Grey’s had the better overall 18-49 numbers for the season with Live, L+SD and L+7.


Lost averaged a 3.3 adults 18-49 rating with live viewers, when same day DVR viewing was factored in that shot up to a 4.2 rating, and when a full week’s worth of DVR viewing was counted in, it went up to a 5.2 rating.  That’s a huge increase over live viewing – 55 percent, but compared to the live+SD numbers the increase was 22 percent.


Some shows with lower ratings like Dollhouse might do better on iTunes, Hulu, etc than others.  And DVD sales do matter.  We don’t, for example, know how well Dollhouse sold yet during its first week (we’ll see those numbers Monday night or Tuesday) but we do have enough data already to figure it probably didn’t sell anywhere near as well as True Blood, which sold over 500,000 copies in its first week.


Lost also gets a ton of online viewing, and though its DVDs are released late in the year in early December, has huge DVD sales, even on an annual level .   Last year it sold over $30 million worth of DVDs in just the last few weeks of 2008.


One thing I’d like Mr. Guggenheim to consider is that it’s not the ratings themselves, regardless of when they’re released, or that they’re released by a company with a monopoly on ratings  that create the perceptions.  A show’s ratings don’t occur in a vacuum. What creates the perception is relative performance when compared to other shows!


We know how Lost did in the past.  We know how Eli Stone did when it went head-to-head with CSI: NY.   More importantly now for Marc, we’ll know how Flash Forward compares to Survivor, and Bones and Parks & Recreation (and ok, The Vampire Diaries).  We’ll know how it compares to Grey’s Anatomy and how it’s doing relative to the rest of ABC’s schedule. We’ll know that pretty much after the first episode, and while we won’t know online viewing, or the full DVR viewing or DVD potential yet, we’ll have a pretty good view of how the show is doing.  And we won’t need any of that other stuff to form a very valid perception.


We don’t need any new data  to know that Flash Forward needs to do better than Ugly Betty.   It won’t do that if it’s only finding half of Lost’s season five viewing audience.  Ugly Betty had a seasonal average of a 2.25 adults 18-49 rating for  live+SD viewing (the 2.25 are 18-49 ratings points out to hundredths, not millions of viewers).  If it doesn’t do better than that,  ABC isn’t going to be thrilled.


Again, I think Flash Foward will come out of the gate strong. But I haven’t seen the pilot yet, so I can’t offer any opinions on the show. ABC is promoting the hell out of it though, so hopefully it premieres with better than a 3.0 rating with adults 18-49.  Especially with serialized shows it’s necessary to come out of the gate strong these days and then hang on to as many viewers as possible.


Sure, that’s just a perception, but the old adage of perception is reality didn’t get to be a cliché for nothing.  If Flash Forward was airing Fridays, I’d claim all bets are off. Obviously, my perception was not reality when it came to Dollhouse!  But Flash Forward is a well-promoted show airing on Thursdays,  the most important night of the week advertising-wise and not on Fridays, where magic can still happen even when the ratings aren’t magical.

It’s the question that’s central to ABC’s new drama series Flash Forward, which launches this fall and features an ensemble cast grappling with visions of their future–six months forward in time–when the entire world blacks out.

On hand at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour in Pasadena were Flash Forward cast members Sonya Walger, Dominic Monaghan, Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Courtney B. Vance and executive producers David S. Goyer, Jessica Borsiczky Goyer, and Marc Guggenheim.

Goyer promised that the numerous questions raised in Flash Forward’s pilot will get answered. “By the end of Season One, most of the questions asked in the pilot will be answered,” said Gowyer. However, the cause of the blackout will be an overarching plot that will unfold over the entirety of the series.

What else did they have to say? Let’s discuss.

Jessika Borsickzky Goyer said that discovered the Robert Sawyer book “Flash Forward” about nine years ago and brought it to David Goyer, whom she later married. One of the more compelling questions that the book raised was: “What if you could know your destiny?”

Some liberties were taken with Robert Sawyer’s book, most notably changing the flash forwards to six months rather than 20 years and shifting the action from CERN to Los Angeles. Goyer and co-writer/executive producer Brannon Braga sold the project as a spec. (We later learned from ABC’s Steve McPherson that the project was actually originally set up at HBO.) The producers created a series bible which they took to McPherson when they pitched FlashForward… so they have a very clear indication of where the series is going.

Asked about similarities to ABC’s own Lost, which wraps its run next May, Goyer says he’s friends with showrunner Damon Lindelof but the genesis of FlashForward took place before Lost.

“We would be thrilled with half the rabid fanbase of [Lost]. We should be so lucky,” said Goyer of Flash Forward.

Still there are some intended overlaps. Goyer says that Lost “traffics in shades of grey,” which he loves. So look for some mightily conflicted characters in Flash Forward.

“I don’t know that the lessons of Lost are really applicable to our show,” said Goyer, who said that they try to imagine, as rapid TV enthusiasts themselves, what they would like to see unfold on a series.

“By the end of the first season, we’ll get to April 29th, 2010 and beyond,” said Marc Guggenheim referring to the visions that the characters experience, which show them their future selves on that very date. That date corresponds to the airing of the 21st episode of Flash Forward (out of a probable 24), though it’s worth noting that ABC hasn’t strictly speaking picked up the series yet for a full 22 episodes.

Meanwhile, Lost’s Dominic Monaghan signed on to Flash Forward without seeing single script page for his character, said Goyer, went on to say that in doing so Dominic made a huge leap of faith.

Monaghan contended that there are lots of similarities between Flash Forward and Lost but that there are “distinct differences” between the two: “Flash Forward is not as deeply rooted in a mythology that needs to be solved,” said Monaghan.

One of the funniest moments of the panel came when Monaghan ribbed fellow Brits Sonya Walger and Joseph Fiennes for “stealing roles that should go to American actors.” Jokingly, of course.

Seth MacFarlane, who appears in the pilot episode, will be “popping in and out” of FlashForward, said Goyer, who said they’ve since filmed additional scenes with him.

Jack Davenport is playing a “version of” the novel’s Lloyd Simcoe, said Goyer. Novelist Robert Sawyer understands the necessity to change things for series and Sawyer himself is writing an episode of FlashForward for the first season.

“If the show doesn’t work, look for us to be back here next year with our show about wacky particle physicists,” joked Guggenheim.

Alex Kingston, who appears in a single scene in the pilot will be back on FlashForward. Gabrielle Union shows up in Episode Three. The producers revealed that they have a huge jump on production and have already written scripts through Episode 111.

Asked to reveal certain information about the pilot’s mysteries, Goyer and Guggenheim were tight-lipped:

• “It would be a disservice to our audience to say what happens after April 29th,” said Goyer about what happens next.
• “Significance of the date is one of the mysteries of the show,” said Guggenheim. “But April 29th is a Thursday when we will be airing.”
• “The kangaroo will be back. More than once… The kangaroo is a ‘thing.’” said Goyer about the use of a kangaroo in the pilot. (Hmmm….)
• “When we catch up to the future, you’ll understand” why some people were looking at the calendar during their flashforward, said Guggenheim.

Lost’s Sonya Walger said that Olivia’s flashforward has a ripple effect on everything around her as it has a profound influence on how she sees her life. (As for whether we can see more of Penny Widmore,
Walger said she has “absolutely no idea” about whether or not she’s done with Lost.)

“That’s why I left Law & Order: To be in Kickboxer 2!” joked Courtney B. Vance. Guggenheim hit back: “You never thought your character would do something like that to a kangaroo.”

Still, it’s not surprising that Vance is in the dark about what happens to his character. Goyer made the decision very early on not to tell actors too much about what happens to their characters in the future. Alfred Hitchcock used to do that with his actors, said Goyer.

Joseph Fiennes said that he was attracted to the project because of the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy, along with strength of the writers and complexity of the characters.

“One of the primary reasons people come to dramas is conflict,” said Goyer. “This show hopes to traffic in the gamut of human experience.”

A third of characters are afraid of their futures, a third have futures that are aspirational, and the final third are agnostic about it, said Goyer. That mix of reaction is a compelling and interesting mix.

“One of the things the show is about is the resilience of humanity,” added Guggenheim.

Goyer said that the flash forwards bring the whole world together, with people coming together over a shared experience, much like they did with the events of 9/11.

So what’s the central question embedded within Flash Forward? Goyer has a simple answer for that: “If you saw your future, what would you do about it? And can you change it?” asked Goyer.

Flash Forward airs this fall on ABC.

What exactly is ABC’s new show FlashForward about? Worldwide clairvoyance? Disasters? FBI agents? Kangaroos? Co-star Dominic Monaghan best described the show with two simple words.

I seem to agree with the man, the whole thing seems like a total “head fuck.”

The new show will follow the path laid out by Robert J. Sawyer in his original book, but what’s changed in the television version? We asked a few members of the cast to give us some insight into what’s ahead for the story, but no one would (or could) tell us much.

It seems FlashForward really is aiming to be the next easter-egg-heavy show with hidden tidbits everywhere, including easter eggs hidden in one character’s flash.

Dominic Monaghan is appearing on this new would-be Lost replacement, as a man named Simon. But that’s about all he’s got for us, aside from saying it’ll screw with your mind.

“I just kinda know what you guys know. A world event takes place where everybody passes out for about two and a half minutes and in that two and a half minutes people have visions of their potential future. So every one becomes a prophet of their life. And it’s the story of what happens to the world when you know what’s going to happen next. Some people are gonna have great lives; some people are going to commit suicide and (yet) they know they’re alive in the future; some people are going to have a baby with some girl and in the future they don’t have a baby. It’s just a huge head fuck. Head fuck!”

Joseph Fiennes and John Cho, who play two FBI agents, stress that in producer David S. Goyer’s world, the rabbit hole can always go deeper. Cho, whose character doesn’t actually have any vision of the future, says while that doesn’t bode well for his character, nothing is ever written in stone.

“Certainly my character’s very scared that he’s going to die, because he doesn’t have a vision, but … I don’t know, I honestly don’t know whether he will die or not.”

“In Goyer’s world,” said Fiennes, “you have to remember that nothing is as it seems.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t bank on him dying — because if it’s implied, as you say, I wouldn’t infer.”

Producer Goyer also mentioned there is plenty to throw people off track, but many clues to keep them entertained. FlashForward has already incorporated a thousand (ok, like seven) easter eggs into the first 17 minutes of the pilot to keep people engaged.

Goyer says the writing team has careful mapped out where they want these rabbit holes to lead, which meant incorporating such things in the pilot as the company Red Panda and … a kangaroo we see jumping across the street as Los Angeles lies in ruin.

The kangaroo, says Goyer, will definitely be back.

And Cho’s words keep ringing in my head, as the perfect tagline for every dramatically secretive TV serial today: “If it’s implied … I wouldn’t infer.”

FlashFoward begins September 24 on ABC.

Upcoming ABC series FlashForward is about people who see the future. But there’s no futurism in it. Robert Sawyer, author of the novel that inspired the series, said the show’s producers felt they could sell science, but not the future.

Speaking to us at WorldCon science fiction convention in Montreal, Sawyer explained why the show (featuring John Cho, pictured here in a publicity shot for FlashForward) changes his novel in one significant way. The characters get a glimpse only six months into the future, rather than the two decades they get in the novel. Sawyer says executive producers David Goyer and Brannon Braga chose to do that for a few reasons:

One rationale is pure economics: you don’t have to make the future world. But it’s also about audience. For example, here’s the difference between Battlestar Galactica and Lost. Lost gets 10 million viewers and Battlestar Galactica rarely tops 1 million, even if Battlestar Galactica is arguably a better show. And that’s because as soon as audience sees robots and aliens, it dries up. They tune into other channels. Not showing the future on FastForward allows the audience to build.

Sawyer is a creative consultant and what he calls an “unofficial science consultant” on the ABC series. “I’ve been very impressed by how well-informed David [Goyer] is about science, and how important it is to him,” Sawyer said. I asked whether the show would revolve around an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, the way the novel does, and he was mum on that point. But he did offer a hint: “They needed a science consultant for the show, so that tells you something about what’s going to happen.”

Mainly, though, Sawyer is happy with the writing on the show. He enthused:

I’ve seen most of the pilot and it’s fabulous – it has the look of a motion picture. I don’t expect the episode I write to be on the Hugo Awards ballot; I expect the pilot [written by Goyer and Braga] to be on the ballot.

Until now.

ABC’s new drama pilot Flash Forward, written by David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Blade) and Brannon Braga (Enterprise, Threshold) and loosely based on Robert J. Sawyer’s 1999 novel of the same name, might just be the one do the trick. With Lost set to end in May 2010, the network seems hellbent on finding a suitable replacement for the series and Goyer and Braga’s project seems the best suited so far to capture the imaginations of Lost’s devoted band of obsessive followers.

It was with much curiosity that I sat down last week to read the pilot script for Flash Forward, entitled “No More Good Days.” (If you’re at all spoiler-phobic, I suggest you avoid reading what follows as I’ll be fleshing out the logline that’s been floating about the media and discussing specific plot points from Goyer and Braga’s pilot script.)

What is Flash Forward about? In a nutshell, it’s the chaos that ensues after everyone on the planet blacks out for two minutes and seventeen seconds. But that’s not entirely true. First, about 40 million or so poor souls don’t survive the global event; airplanes fall from the sky, cars collide, people fall down stairs, drown, etc. as they lose consciousness during whatever they’re doing at that moment. Second, the effect isn’t so much a blackout but a Lost-appropriate flash forward in time as each of the survivors experiences a snippet from their own future during that time loss. And not just any moment, but a very specific moment five months from then: 8 pm on April 20th, 2010.

Why do each of them witness that specific moment? That’s one of the script’s central mysteries, along with what caused the worldwide blackout, whether it was a natural event like an earthquake or whether it was a man-made, terrorist-style attack, and whether the future can be altered. (Other possibilities for the Event not discussed in the script: extraterrestrial or a 4400-style warning from the future. And, personally, I would have made that future date, oh, sometime during the end of May sweeps.)

The survivors are, in many cases, deeply disturbed by the visions of their own futures and the FBI, among other agencies, begins to look for patterns emerging in the overlapping visions of everyday people, visions that include a new rollout of Apple’s Lion OS XI operating system, Dow Jones highs, and other facets of the future that could change the course of life around them. But that comes later; mass pandemonium is first step immediately after the Event as people attempt to make sense of what has occurred and make their way to their loved ones.

So let’s meet our cast of characters. Los Angeles-based FBI agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), a recovering alcoholic, and his partner Dominic Witten (John Cho) are in pursuit of a group of suspected terrorists when the Event occurs. Mark has a vision of himself, badly cut up, beaten, and unshaven at the FBI field office. He stands in front of a white board containing elements of a case codenamed MOSAIC: a photograph of a badly burned doll, the name D. Gibbons, etc. when he hears two people approaching outside. He takes a swig from his hip flask (obviously having fallen off the wagon), draws his gun, and takes the safety off. Whoever is out there, they are gunning for him. Dominic, meanwhile, experiences no vision whatsoever and begins to fear that it means he’ll be dead, a suspicion made all the more real when he receives a phone call from a woman in South Africa who claims to have seen a vision of a newspaper article about Dominic’s murder.

Their boss Stan Wedeck (Law & Order: Criminal Intent’s Courtney B. Vance) quickly tries to take control of this bewildering turn of events. Computer-savvy agent Janice Hawk (Welcome to the Captain’s Christine Woods) reluctantly admits that she had a vision of herself with her baby daughter. The only problem is that she’s not pregnant and she can’t conceive as she recently battled cervical cancer. (Curious that.) The FBI quickly look to solve the riddle of what happened and try to find overlapping visions of the future that can corroborate others’ stories (hence the Mosaic in Mark’s vision), leading Janice to discovers a quite shocking revelation about the blackout, one that could provide some answers… or merely more questions. (Sorry, folks, I won’t reveal exactly what she finds!)

Mark’s wife Olivia (Lost’s Sonya Walger) is an emergency room doctor at UCLA Medical Center; she’s involved in an operation during the Event and nearly loses the patient. Olivia and Mark have been through some rough times during his drinking and their marriage is barely holding on by a thread. So what then of her vision of her own future, one that she shares with a stranger in the bed she now sleeps in with Mark? Curious. Olivia has little time to ponder her fate when a child, Dylan, is brought in; Olivia performs emergency surgery on him but before she does, he recognizes her and calls her by her name. Hell, he even refers to the rooster cookie jar in her home that contains Nilla wafers. Meanwhile, Dylan’s father Lloyd Simcoe (Swingtown’s Jack Davenport) attempts to reach his son from Northern California. In a twist of coincidence (or is it?), he just happens to be the mysterious stranger in Olivia’s vision with whom she is romantically involved five months in the future.

Other characters in Flash Forward’s sprawling cast include Mark and Olivia’s daughter Charlie, who says that she had “a bad dream” during the Event and presages major disaster ahead for the survivors when she says that there are “no more good days”; Charlie’s teenage babysitter Nicole who views the Event as a punishment from God; Olivia’s fellow doctor Bryce Varley, who was about to commit suicide when the Event occurred; Mark’s AA sponsor Aaron, who has a vision of his daughter Shawna–killed overseas in the military–alive and well; and New Scotland Yard FBI liaison Inspector Fiona Banks who has a shared vision with FBI agent Gough about something called the Rutherford Case.

Whew.

While Goyer and Braga’s script stumbles in a few parts and the dialogue could use a little tweaking in some places (the scene between Dominic and Kathryn was a little on the nose, for example), the overall result is pretty damn strong, offering up a potential series that–like Lost before it–tackles the notions of fate versus free will, preordained destiny versus random chaos, and a life-altering experience that will shake several characters’ perceptions, outlooks, and core identities as they adapt to new circumstances. In order words: Big Life Issues, all nicely wrapped up in a genre series that will fulfill the needs of fans of action, sci-fi, drama, romance, etc. and attract men and women of all ages.

Overall, Flash Forward is an extremely formidable offering for series contention. And while many networks have strayed from overly complex serialized dramas with large casts of characters of late, Flash Forward could be the one to buck this trend. ABC knows that it has to find a replacement for Lost sooner rather than later and, if handled properly, this could be a suitable contender to the throne.

I would be extremely surprised, given the level of talent that ABC Studios has already attracted to this project, if Flash Forward doesn’t earn itself a place on ABC’s 2009-10 schedule. The mere fact that Jack Davenport has been cast in such a small role in the pilot script (he has about 30 seconds worth of screen time in this undated draft) leads me to believe that the studio and network have major plans for this project.

Given the strength of the pilot script and the potential for franchise possibilities (not to mention the opportunity to offer Lost fans a new fount for complex mysteries), I’m already looking forward to see just what Goyer and Braga have up their sleeves for the series… and just what new tragedies will befall Mark and the others as they seek answers. One need not have a flash forward of their own to see that ABC would be wise to order Flash Forward to series.

Stay tuned.