Now that Lost is heading towards its final season this January, ABC thinks it can carry on the series’ unique blend of adventure and metaphysical mystery with the new Flash Forward, a term used for the Lost’s mind bending peeks into the future of some of the castaways. Flash Forward, loosely based on a science-fiction novel of the same name, makes the mistake of not trusting its audience. Let me explain:
The pilot episode begins with it’s central protagonist, Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes) an FBI agent, wakes up in his crashed vehicle to find that Los Angeles and the world, has been hit by a catastrophe caused when everyone on earth lost consciousness for over two minutes. Those who survived find that they remember what they were doing six months in the future. They mystery is what caused this and how will seeing an often disturbing glimpse of one’s future affect one’s present actions–the old destiny versus free-will trope.
An intriguing premise,with a far larger scale than Lost. But as the hour unfolded, I found it was giving me far too much information too quickly. Knowing the program had been previewed on Lost last year and that it must involve the same sort of complex storylines and enigmas with many characters, I was primed to watch for the little details that might be important later. Sure enough, the words “Red Panda” appear a least twice in different scenes. And close-ups of three five-point stars on a man’s arm are sure to mean something. And lest we miss these clues, during the breaks, the announcer makes sure we are paying attention, telling us that these elements and the kangaroo bouncing down the street is important, so pay attention, folks!
Of course, Lost began it’s pilot episode by focusing on it’s chief protagonist, Jack Shepherd, pulling out from his eye to the jungle he’d just crash landed into. He leaps up to help the survivors and we gradually meet the cast. When Flash Forward’s Benford begins helping surrounding survivors of the mayhem around him, it seem more than derivative, it’s imitative. At one point, in the episode, there’s even a billboard for Oceanic Airlines! OK, we get it, you wanna be the next Lost! Heck, it even has Dominic Monaghan, who played Lost’s Charlie coming in as a character soon.
But how different from Lost, which took its sweet time letting the first season play out and kept throwing weird stuff at us with no explanation until our patience was rewarded with a little information. We weren’t even sure there was a time travel element to the series until the fourth season. In Flash Forward, we start with it but are expected to be just as intrigued.
That’s why I think the show doesn’t trust its audience. The producers saw that Lost, er, lost a significant portion of its audience who got tired of waiting for answers and trying to keep up with the details, so they have announcers telling the attention deficient to go to the show’s website for more info (and to see more network promotions) rather than allowing the innate strangeness of the concept draw us in. Flash Forward gives us mysteries, but little mystery. It can’t trust its characters or plots to hook us or let us discover the clues for ourselves, one of the most enjoyable things about Lost. Perhaps it will find a way to hook us into its own complex plotting, but if you make something too easy, you’re rewarding laziness. It may be that this kind of densely plotted, highly allusive narrative is simply not going to attract more than a certain number of viewers, especially if there’s no endpoint in mind, as when Lost’s producers discovered they needed to give their series focus and drive. They found that it’s one thing to start a big story, you also have to have a final destination to hold your audience. Flash Forward didn’t even start off in a fresh new way and I wonder who it will attract.
I felt much the same way watching this first ep. The narrative seemed to suffer from A.D.D., introducing us too all the principle players and plotlines so fast I didn’t have time to really get invested in any of the characters. I tried explaining that what made LOST work initially was its focus on Jack for the first half of the two-hour pilot. We witness just about everything unfolds from his POV, and he earns the audience’s trust (a reason the ABC suits wisely cited to convince JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof not to kill the character off in the first hour, as was originally planned).
FLASH FORWARD makes almost no effort to earn that kind of trust. I’m intrigued by the premise, but I really could not care less about any of the chief characters at the moment. The story’s exposition felt a little too contrived as well–just how many people found themselves looking at a calendar in their glimpse of the future?
I do want to go and read the book, but I fear that the show might fail to reach expectations and go off the air before we can get any real answers.
Comment by taj — September 28, 2009 @ 5:17 pm |
Taj, Just to make sure you get it, here’s my posted reply to your comments: Taj Thanks for the comments. I’ve heard about the change in Jack’s original fate before, but what’s the source? DVD extras? I’d love to read about it since it tells us so much about the evolving narrative in it’s initial stages in which, as a friend told me, There was no actual story arc or mythology, just the idea an ABC exec had sold to Abrams who had run with it before handing it off to “Darlton” who retrofitted what we have seen ever since as the overarching scenario. It also reminds us that many great movies and television stories aren’t the work of a singular genius allowed to do his own thing, but arise out of the tension between artistic aspirations of creator/producers and commercial interests, in ABC’s case, a feel for what would attract and hold an audience.
All this makes me wonder if Lost is a singular thing–a happy collision of the right premise and people–and you can’t emulate it like it was another cop or procedural formula.
Comment by Alex — September 29, 2009 @ 1:23 am |
Taj
Thanks for the comments. I’ve heard about the change in Jack’s original fate before, but what’s the source? DVD extras? I’d love to read about it since it tells us so much about the evolving narrative in it’s initial stages in which, as a friend told me, There was no actual story arc or mythology, just the idea an ABC exec had sold to Abrams who had run with it before handing it off to “Darlton” who retrofitted what we have seen ever since as the overarching scenario. It also reminds us that many great movies and television stories aren’t the work of a singular genius allowed to do his own thing, but arise out of the tension between artistic aspirations of creator/producers and commercial interests, in ABC’s case, a feel for what would attract and hold an audience.
All this makes me wonder if Lost is a singular thing–a happy collision of the right premise and people–and you can’t emulate it like it was another cop or procedural formula.
Comment by Alex — September 29, 2009 @ 1:23 am |
Hey, Alex. The source for Jack’s original fate comes from a couple places: The 1st season DVD commentary on the pilot, including (I think…I’m writing this away from home, and away from the DVDs) some of the supplemental material, and from IMDB. The original idea was for Jack to be killed by the monster when he, Kate and Charlie hike to the cockpit and find the pilot alive. Supposedly, in the original script, Kate and Charlie find Jack’s bloodied corpse in the tree, rather than the pilot’s. Kate, then, would have become the “leader” of the castaways. Thank God for studio suits.
IMDB’s trivia section on the show confirms Jack’s original fate, and mentions that Michael Keaton had originally been cast in the part, but backed out when they decided to make the character a regular. Personally, I think they’ve done great with Matthew Fox. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411008/trivia
I’m not sure Lost is a singular thing, at least as far as serialized mystery shows go. Heroes had a good first season, and Jericho had a decent thing going for it at first too. But both, however, eventually went off the rails. For whatever reason, Lost has maintained a general consistency (so long as we continue to ignore certain portions of season 3).
A lot of this I think has to do with Team Darlton’s creativity at the helm. They bring an intentional thoughtfulness to their writing that started with creating characters interesting enough to hold interest even when the answers were long in coming. They have somehow managed to maintain that balance between character, suspense and revelation (admittedly at some points better than others), and they make a difficult job look easier than it is.
Comment by taj — September 29, 2009 @ 1:53 am |
Yes, all the reasons you’ve stated underline Lost’s uniqueness–the other show’s didn’t hold an adequate audience and the third season was, Cuse said, due to their spinning out episodes to run in place because they didn’t know how long they would have to finish the overall story. Once their end point was set, the normally engaging narrative resumed–I was about ready to stop watching but the strong characters you mentioned kept me watching; I couldn’t give up wanting to know what would happen anyway and I’m glad I was there when the magic returned. Lost seems singular also in the density of its references, its allusiveness to stories and concepts that reward the viewer’s attention as well as the myriad details and clues imbedded in the words, sounds and images. It’s this density that Flash Forward was attempting without first intriguing us.
Comment by Alex — September 29, 2009 @ 10:50 am |