In the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "August: Osage County," currently being performed in L.A., one of the characters cracks no one would get out of bed if he knew what the future held.
In ABC's "FlashForward," which debuts Thursday at 8 p.m., the whole planet knows where they are going to be six months ahead of time: on April 29, 2010, to be precise.
The premise of one of the most anticipated new fall series is that everyone in the world has blacked out for two-minute and 17-seconds and has had a vision - a flash forward - to the same time six months ahead.
The visions mean different things to each person - one character about to get married sees nothing while another on the verge of suicide sees himself alive. But for them all, the question is: Are the visions inevitably true?
"We've basically broken our series regulars down into three categories," said executive producer David Goyer, whose writing credits include "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight."
"A third of them fear the future, and they are trying to do everything they can to fight it. A third of them, their futures are aspirational, and they are trying to do everything they can to make it happen. And a third of them are kind of agnostic because they just don't understand what it means, and they are trying to figure it out."
"FlashForward" stars Joseph Fiennes ("Shakespeare in Love") as an FBI agent Mark Benford, whose vision of the future had him looking at a
bulletin board filled with clues about the unexplained disturbance; that makes him the right man to investigate the phenomenon.Joining him on the team are two other agents played by John Cho (Demetri Noh) and Christine Woods (Janis Hawk) with Courtney B. Vance as their boss, Stan Wedeck.
Gabrielle Union is Noh's fiancee and a criminal defense attorney. Also on the series are two former "Lost" actors - Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger, who plays Benford's surgeon wife, Olivia, who has a vision of herself with another man.
With a large ensemble cast - 11 series regulars and numerous guest stars planned - the series opens the door (make that doors) to numerous story possibilities, both forward and back. It also opens the door to comparisons to "Lost"; the network is hoping that fans of the hit ABC's Emmy-winning series will get hooked on "FlashForward" as well.
"The primary reason why we're on ABC is I'm an enormous, enormous fan of `Lost,"' Goyer said. "I just thought it was such a genre-breaking, bold show, and it proved to me ... that you can do a show with a large ensemble cast ... tell a big, kind of cinematic story. `Lost' traffics a lot in shades of gray, different shades of morality, which is something I find really interesting."
While Monaghan sees similarities in the two shows - large ensemble casts, very ambitious storylines - he sees distinct differences at the same time.
"I don't think necessarily we're dealing with something as deeply rooted in a mythology that needs to be solved. I think this is a show that is, not necessarily to use the word "simplistic," but is probably not as sophisticated in that deeply rich mythology as `Lost' is."
"FlashFoward" is based on the Robert Sawyer novel of the same name that was in the works before "Lost" and producers are hoping that viewers will find it easier follow.
"As a viewer, I really like to feel that the storytellers know where they're going," Goyer said. "We constantly talk about the obligation we have towards our viewers to really figure it out and know where we're going."
For Fiennes, he's happy for the "opportunity to get off a horse, out of a flouncy shirt" and play "a guy that wears a gun on his hip and some cuffs on the back of his belt," referring to all the period films he's done in his career. The British actor is also excited by the complexities of the script.
"I love the idea that (the characters) contradict themselves," Fiennes said. "There's this impending doom. They seem to judge each other before these dates arrive. There's no absolute - it's not set in stone."
The London-born Walger adds that it's "utterly compelling to play somebody who thinks of herself one way ... and then to have that undone by a vision of yourself being the unfaithful one in the family home."
Goyer says the producers made a decision early on not to tell the actors a lot about where their characters are going because they didn't want it to affect their performances.
"Hitchcock used to do that with a lot of the actors he'd work with, you know," he said. "In `Shadow of a Doubt' ... he'd tells Joseph Cotten, `Just go look out the window.' And Cotten had no idea what he was looking at, but you would look at him in the movie, and it's amazing. That was sort of the pact we made."
One thing we know is that April 29, 2010, is not the end of the show - at least if it's a big enough of a hit.
Producers say they've loosely plotted out five seasons, and won't say what the significance of the spring date is, only that it's "one of the mysteries of the show."
April 29th happens to be a Thursday night; so Fiennes says it's no mystery as to what he'll be doing - "tuning in."
Source : Pasadena Star News
