The FlashForward Post Mortem: What Went Wrong?
Earn the Audience’s Trust – I think I’ve said this in one venue or another before, but Lost worked because in the early days they gave the audience episodes that mostly stood alone, working in the subplots gradually. By the time they got around to the Numbers, we had enough reason to believe that there was some kind of plan in place. So many of the shows that tried to be the next Lost failed quickly because they jumped into the mythology right away. Lost didn’t tell us about the man in the Hatch who saved the world every 108 minutes right away – they won the audience’s trust. I know that in my case, I didn’t seize on the small details of FlashForward, because they didn’t prove that there would be any sort of payoff to that kind of effort. Obviously you don’t want to give away the store right away, but you have to give us a reason to pay attention. Just look at all the time they spent in early episodes on the crows, or the whole thing with the pardoned Nazi and the “137 Sekunden”. That all just went away, with no payoff. Even if they’d mentioned the crows on occasion, just to assure us that we should pay attention to that. Look, we’ve been burned by Heroes – not only was there not a plan in place, but after four years, even the writers weren’t paying attention anymore. Make it worth our while is all I’m saying. Heck, if they’d planted some clues that Janis was a double agent, we would have had something to look back at and be impressed that they set that up ahead of time. Instead, it was just a “What the Hell?” moment.
Pacing, for God’s Sake, Pacing! – In fairness, this is something that Lost struggled with in the early days, too. I think it was a mistake to have the season build toward April 29, because they didn’t have enough story to fill the intervening time. This isn’t something I really thought about until I started writing the recaps, but when I had to write about each scene, I was running into the problem that too many scenes didn’t give me anything to write about. Mark and Olivia have the thousandth conversation about whether their marriage is in trouble. Aaron talks yet again about how his daughter is still alive. Demetri is worried about dying. They harped on certain themes and set-ups over and over again, without bringing something new. By the end of the series, I was beginning far too many paragraphs with “(Character) talks about (motif). Again.”
True, you could have said that about Lost at various points. In another universe, there’s probably an alternate EJ who wondered when the hell Jack and Locke would stop talking about faith. Of course, that turned out to be crucial to the overall arc of the series. We don’t really know what would have been important to the complete FlashForward story, but there’s still a way to make those repetitive thematic conversations interesting.
Frankly, it was a kick to have the second Blackout happen minutes after everybody caught up with their future, but that just left the finale too stuffed and the middle episodes just lean on plot. It might have been interesting to have at least a couple of episodes dealing with how people reacted to no longer having that view of the future to work toward. Alternatively, maybe they didn’t need 22 episodes. If they were sold on the timing of the second Blackout, they could have trimmed the number. Have a season that’s pushing toward something rather than one that treads water. The trip to Somalia took up two episodes and accomplished nothing for the narrative, other than getting Demetri’s hands on Dyson Frost’s videotape. The entire episode devoted to Bryce and Keiko didn’t achieve anything – even with more screen time, Keiko was never anything more than Bryce’s image of her. The model Lost used since Season 4 would have worked here – sixteen weeks, sixteen episodes. The best episodes had an urgency about them, so why not impose that urgency on the season itself?
Maybe Don’t Take a Four-Month Break Mid-Season – This should be elementary, really. An extended break after the 10th episode burned up all their momentum and left details fuzzy for even avid viewers. We’re programmed to expect that kind of break between seasons, but it’s very frustrating in the middle of the season. And then FlashForward lost two showrunners during the break, which threw things off even more. A change in creative teams is smoother when there’s immediate input. There might be a rocky episode or two, but there’s instant feedback from the audience. In this case, the new bosses took over when the show wasn’t airing, which meant they had to produce several episodes without any reaction from the viewers. That can’t be easy.
And yes, Glee did almost the exact same thing without any ill effects. However, you can’t deny that Glee had significantly more buzz, and promoted their return with an all-out media blitz. More importantly, their last episode before the break wrapped up several storylines. Will’s wife left him, and the Glee Club won Sectionals. Do you remember what happened before the FlashForward break? No, you do not. Also, and this is a small thing, but Glee opens with one of the characters catching up the viewers. FlashForward uses a more traditional montage of pertinent clips from previous episodes. But after four months, we don’t remember what was significant about these clips.
It’s the Schedule, Stupid – You know, if you’re positioning a show as a successor to Lost and actively courting the same audience, it seems like the right time to air it is right after Lost. Instead, they continued airing FlashForward on Thursdays at 8, where it was the odd man out in ABC’s night of hospital melodrama. This put it opposite ratings winners like Survivor and Bones, as well as NBC’s Community and Parks and Recreation, which were definitely the hipper choices of the night. If you want to get buzz, don’t put a show opposite Survivor and Parks and Rec – those are what the TV bloggers are going to be talking about on Friday morning.
Frustratingly, they aired a catch-up episode immediately after a Lost episode. That’s the sort of thing you want to air right before the actual show, and certainly not on a different night and a different time. That’s just bad scheduling. I understand that ABC probably wanted to give the more expensive V the power lead-in, but that show actually kind of sucks. (Admit it – you’re only watching for Elizabeth Mitchell.) Despite my pissing and moaning, I loved FlashForward and I would be so happy if I could be anticipating Season Two right now.
Make Sure We Know Who Everybody Is: Remember when they were looking for the Mole in the Mosaic Task Force, and it turned out to be Marcy? Could you believe it? Oh, also, who the hell is Marcy? I vaguely remembered her having a couple of lines in an early episode, which is not great when you suddenly make her important. At least give her a personality and a couple of appearances under her belt. Aside from Marcy, there were four suspects who would be completely unfamiliar to the viewers. There were a couple of guys who had probably never appeared on the show before, one who appeared only once in the pilot and who viewers might only have remembered if they knew he was Seth MacFarlane and felt the urge to punch him in his big stupid face. (That was my reaction.) The other guy never did anything on the show, but I recognized him as Officer Dave Brass from Oz. You don’t want most of your suspects to be unnamed characters. It prevents us from emotionally engaging when there’s actually a substantial possibility that the traitor is somebody we’ve never seen before.
Don’t Hose the Audience – As I said, I feel like the last several minutes of the episode were a response to the cancellation. But not in the good way – not in the “give the audience some closure” way. Pushing Daisies created a two-minute epilogue for the series finale after their cancellation was announced, giving all of the characters a happy ending, and that’s kind of the gold standard. Some shows try to wrap up their series when cancellation comes (Arrested Development is a good example). Some hedge their bets by giving you an ending but also bringing tantalizing hints of what might have been next season (John from Cincinnati has a fantastic piece in the finale where John gives the audience cryptic hints about the purely theoretical next season.). FlashForward gave the audience the finger by cramming in more context-free visions of the future, leaving fates of many major characters unknown (some by design, some by sloppy storytelling), and setting up a direction that they would not have actually used in a new season. See, the season ends with the FBI building exploding as Mark runs for the window just after a Blackout. Now, we get contradictory information as to when the new Flashes were set, but it’s at least four years out. There’s a shot of somebody who’s supposed to be an older version of Mark’s daughter Charlie (though she looks too old for the time frame) exclaiming “They found him!” We’re clearly meant to believe that she’s talking about Mark, giving us hope that Mark survives the blast. But if there had been a second season, they wouldn’t have separated Mark from the rest of the cast for the entire year and beyond. I don’t think that would have been the plan at all. It feels like they put together a different ending than the one they would have used for a season finale. A frustrated cliffhanger is one thing, but this came off as a “screw you” ending, and that’s just a shame. Obviously they couldn’t answer everything, but they could have delivered a satisfying finale. But they did something worse than leaving unanswered questions – they asked a lot of questions that couldn’t be answered because they were never intended to be asked.
Just a few tweaks to the finale, and they could at least have had a dynamite Complete Series DVD collection. There are a lot of one-season wonders that make for a fantastic boxed set, and it’s because they’re satisfying. Freaks and Geeks, Brisco County Jr., John from Cincinnati, The Job… those are sets that I’m going to watch again and again. I’m going to recommend them to people and give them as gifts. I’m not going to give anybody a FlashForward box set, because they seemingly went out of their way to make sure that you would only be aggravated at the end. It’s five minutes away from DVD glory, and that’s probably the most frustrating thing about all of this.
I know this is really negative, but I loved the show (despite its flaws), and it sucks that there isn’t going to be another season. It really asked some interesting questions about destiny and human nature, and some of the characters were really, really effective. At its best, it was excellent. At its worst, mildly irritating. Overall, that’s pretty darn good. And Stanford Wedyk, we’ll miss you most of all…
