Flash Forward (Braga's new show)

[The Habs Fan]

Flash forward to 2009: ABC might finally have launched a strong companion to "Lost" with "Flash Forward."

After heated bidding, the spec script by filmmaker David S. Goyer and "Star Trek" veteran Brannon Braga is close to landing at ABC with a pilot order and series penalty behind it.

Based on Robert J. Sawyer's sci-fi novel, "Flash Forward" is considered very compatible with "Lost." It chronicles the chaos that ensues after everyone in the world blacks out for 2 minutes, 17 seconds and has a mysterious vision of the future that changes lives forever.

Goyer will direct the pilot. He also will exec produce with Braga and Jessika Borsiczky Goyer (NBC's "Revelations") along with Vince Gerardis and Ralph M. Vicinanza ("Jumper"), who own the rights to the book. ABC Studios is in negotiations to produce.

"Flash Forward" originally was developed at HBO, which retains a piece of the backend. The pay cable network's brass are said to have been high on the project but found it a better fit for a broadcast network. And with HBO's blessing, Goyer and Braga took it to the marketplace, where it spurred a bidding war between ABC and Fox.

Its pending sale to ABC created a conflict for Braga, who is under a deal with 20th TV to serve as a co-executive producer on "24," the studio's drama for Fox. ABC Studios and 20th TV engaged in conversations about possibly co-producing "Flash Forward," but when the talks stalled this week, Braga opted to pull from day-to-day involvement on the project, which helped the deal move forward. He will continue to serve as an exec producer on "Flash Forward" while working full time on "24."

Goyer and Braga met on the CBS sci-fi series "Threshold," which both executive produced.

Goyer most recently co-wrote the story for the megahit "The Dark Knight" and penned and directed the upcoming thriller "The Unborn." Braga worked on several "Star Trek" series, including "Enterprise," which he co-created, and also penned two "Star Trek" movies.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr...sion/news/e3i47f5cb6394a9cc0f53497a9f9dde8287


I like the concept, and despite the bad rap he gets around here, I liked the majority of Braga's writing on Star Trek and am happy to see him on another sci-fi series.

 

[Dream]

We have to go BACK!

 

[The Habs Fan]

We have to go BACK!

That's the first thing I thought of too.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I hope it's good and I hope it's successful.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

That premise actually sounds intriguing. I'll check it out. Even a half-assed ripoff of Lost might be worth watching. After all, Threshold wasn't a total disaster and they did the casting pretty well. Get a cast like that and we might have something here.

 

[Guy Gardener]

This sounds like it's going to have the same problem as the nine. continually moving forward as everyone focusses on the past. Lost only works because it is moving so damn slowly. The story on the island is only into it's 4thish month?

My unasailable guess is that several hundred women will discover that they were impregnated during the black out and that they'll be... Well, that's very Threshhold

 

[DrFyzziks]

The novel it is based upon (Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer) is pretty good. Strangely enough, it involves an experiment with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN:

http://www.amazon.com/Flashforward-Robert-J-Sawyer/dp/0812580346

and the Wikipedia article about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashforward_(novel)

 

[Christopher]

This sounds like it's going to have the same problem as the nine. continually moving forward as everyone focusses on the past. Lost only works because it is moving so damn slowly. The story on the island is only into it's 4thish month?

Actually, no, they're focusing on the future. Presumably the series would follow how people's visions of their future affect their lives -- what do they do to avert those future events, what do they do if they know they're dead in the future, etc. Might be more like Heroes in that regard, a story about characters working to avoid or alter the future they know is coming. In the book, the visions are of a future 21 years ahead, in 2030. I'd imagine the show might change that to, ohh, five or seven years.

 

[Mistral]

I hope you're wrong, Christopher. I found the original idea (the book) great but 5-7 years? I can see it now-some guy has a vision of the Raiders winning the Superbowl. Oh, the horror of it all! -Not a lot of tension or drama in a story like that, y'know?

 

[Christopher]

I hope you're wrong, Christopher. I found the original idea (the book) great but 5-7 years? I can see it now-some guy has a vision of the Raiders winning the Superbowl. Oh, the horror of it all! -Not a lot of tension or drama in a story like that, y'know?

I don't see how that follows. Heroes was able to build suspense with the characters striving to change a future that was merely weeks away in story time. And I'm not proposing it would be exactly the same situation as Heroes; presumably the different characters would have their own troubling destinies that they'd try to avert. I haven't read the book, just the Wikipedia summary, but I can speculate that maybe one character, say, sees himself divorced from his current wife and married to her best friend 5 years in the future and has to face how that foreknowledge affects their marriage, while one character sees nothing at all and therefore knows she's going to die within five years, while another character sees himself stricken with a crippling disease and contemplates suicide to avoid it, and so on. My thinking is that the show probably wouldn't have the book's freedom to cover the whole 21-year span but would rework the premise so that it could fit within the usual lifespan of a successful TV series, which is 5-7 years.

Come to think of it, I'm reminded of the Showtime series Odyssey 5, in which a space shuttle crew witnessed the mysterious destruction of the Earth and was rescued by an alien that sent them back in time five years to try to avert it. So all the main characters had foreknowledge of their future to contend with on a personal level as well as a global level: one character knew her young son would die of cancer within a few years, one tried to discourage his son from pursuing a life path he knew would go badly, one just decided to indulge himself and live to the fullest in the time he had left, and so on. Except it's different because those characters had actually lived five years beyond everyone else (one character was a twentysomething prodigy who had to deal with being a high-school student again), while in this case, everyone in the world just gets a vision of themselves at a particular date in the future (except those who are dead by then). But it shows how you can build a series around foreknowledge of the future and its effects on people's lives.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Might be interesting if the "visions" were not of the future at all, but some sort of mind-control aimed at manipulating people by making them think certain things would happen.

And why wouldn't lots of people assume that? Brainwashing or implanting ideas in people sounds more plausible than seeing the future. If it happened to me, my first instinct would not be that I saw my own future, but that somebody is messing with me!

 

[FreezeC77]

I've read the book and thought it was good, I could see it being a movie, but I'm not sure how it works as a series.

 

[stj]

The bbs Braga hate misleads people into ignoring the announcement that this is not going to be Braga's baby, except for the cowriting credit on the script. Personally, I find the quality of Goyer's work mixed. Producers from Jumper don't sound promising at all.

Even though it would be more promising with Braga than without, it should be worth checking out. The time frame for the flash forward will almost certainly be short, to avoid (costly) science fictiony future scenes.

But I think serializing some big story is a bad idea. The novel is one of Sawyer's weaker (i.e., recent) offerings with drivel about immortality and clownish quantum physics. Sawyer;s fiction has been getting seriously loopy with taking religious/spiritual idea seriously. Even more important, the set up is ideal for treating the flashforward as the most important event of a character's life in stories with real resolutions. They might not necessarily be single episode stories but open ended storylines should be avoided like the plague.

 

[Christopher]

The bbs Braga hate misleads people into ignoring the announcement that this is not going to be Braga's baby, except for the cowriting credit on the script.

Actually he will be an executive producer on the show, but will focus most of his efforts on 24, where he is currently.

But yeah, I did find it odd that they announce a David Goyer/Brannon Braga show and the thread calls it "Braga's new show" instead of "Goyer's new show." I would've thought David Goyer was a bigger name in the industry. Outside of Trek, Braga's hardly done anything: the story for Mission: Impossible 2 (with Ron Moore) and executive-producing Threshold and now 24 -- that's about it.

Personally, I find the quality of Goyer's work of mixed quality.

Yeah, it was kind of surprising to see in his filmography that he's responsible both for Batman Begins and the David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie. (Though come to think of it, there was a lot about Batman Begins that I didn't like.)

Even though it would be more promising with Braga than without, it should be worth checking out. The time frame for the flash forward will almost certainly be short, to avoid (costly) science fictiony future scenes.

Even if they went with the book's 21-year timeframe, I don't think it would be that costly or that science-fictiony. The world in 2030 probably won't look profoundly different than it does today. I mean, we're talking about everyday people's visions of their future, not astronauts or something.

The novel is one of Sawyer's weaker (i.e., recent) offerings with drivel about immortality and clownish quantum physics. Sawyer;s fiction has been getting seriously loopy with taking religious/spiritual idea seriously.

Yeah, the Wiki article's description of the book's take on the quantum "observer effect" was not heartening. I thought Sawyer knew his science, so I'm surprised he'd buy into the mystical misinterpretation of the observer effect as meaning that the universe doesn't exist if humans aren't aware of it. "Observation" is just an experiment-oriented term for interaction of a quantum entity with a larger system; i.e. any interaction causes the same effect, but scientists speak of it in terms of one particular type of interaction, namely observation, because science limits itself to describing what can actually be determined in experiments, and experiments have observers.

 

[Borgminister]

Gooooooo high concept!

 

[stj]

Personally, I find I should really edit my posts. Or is it just the anithistamines kicking in?

Borgminister---More and more the choice in television is between high concept or soap. Give me high concept, please.

 

[Trent Roman]

I've read the book and thought it was good, I could see it being a movie, but I'm not sure how it works as a series.

Likewise. As a miniseries it would translate very well to television, but as a weekly series, they're going to have to retool the concept. Maybe making the ability to project oneself in the future easier than in the book (where it was a difficult to reproduce set of coincidences that caused the event), and restricted to a given individual or set of individuals rather than the entire species going forward each time.

Yeah, the Wiki article's description of the book's take on the quantum "observer effect" was not heartening. I thought Sawyer knew his science, so I'm surprised he'd buy into the mystical misinterpretation of the observer effect as meaning that the universe doesn't exist if humans aren't aware of it. "Observation" is just an experiment-oriented term for interaction of a quantum entity with a larger system; i.e. any interaction causes the same effect, but scientists speak of it in terms of one particular type of interaction, namely observation, because science limits itself to describing what can actually be determined in experiments, and experiments have observers.

It's been a while since I've read the book, but I don't remember that happening. There were, however, a lot of theories and counter-theories been thrown about while the scientists attempted to figure out what had happened, if it could happen again, and whether or not the future was mutable, so perhaps it was just one of a number of competing theories. Certainly during the few minutes where everybody's consciousness was away in the future, people fell down stairs, cars crashed and planes fell out of the sky, with millions of casualties and billions in damages, so it's not as if the novel suggests that the world got 'paused' while there were no observers.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[Christopher]

From the Wikipedia summary:

Oddly, no recording devices anywhere in the world functioned in the present during the event. Security camera tapes show noise and even recording devices in television studios show nothing until the event is over. This is interpreted as proof of the observer effect in quantum theory. With the awareness of the entire human race absent, "reality" went into a state of indeterminacy. When the awareness returned, reality collapsed into its most likely configuration, which was one in which moving objects had careened out of control in the direction they were already headed.

Maybe the summary is inaccurate?

 

[Samurai8472]

Looks like Brent Spinner will have new series

maybe as a jobless scientist who with his flash of the future, gets ideas to make things that shouldn't be in the present yet.

 

[Trent Roman]

From the Wikipedia summary:

Oddly, no recording devices anywhere in the world functioned in the present during the event. Security camera tapes show noise and even recording devices in television studios show nothing until the event is over. This is interpreted as proof of the observer effect in quantum theory. With the awareness of the entire human race absent, "reality" went into a state of indeterminacy. When the awareness returned, reality collapsed into its most likely configuration, which was one in which moving objects had careened out of control in the direction they were already headed.

Maybe the summary is inaccurate?

Oh, yes, I remember now the bit about all the security tapes being blank. My mistake.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman