Lizzi and I recently began watching a new television series on ABC called FlashForward.  It was described to us as a mix of 24 and Lost, which sounded just fine (conceptually, at least).  Speaking of the latter, I gave up on Lost about two seasons ago – I got tired of it once I figured out that the writers had absolutely no idea what direction they wanted to take the show in, likely because they didn’t envision it lasting more than two seasons.  I’m at the point now where all I need to know is how it ended.  I’ll greet the news that it was all just a crazy acid trip of Hurley’s with a nonchalant “ah, interesting” and then never think about it again.  This would clearly fall short of justifying the endless hours we spent mesmerized by the plight of the survivors of Oceanic 815, but such is life.

Anyhow, back to FlashForward.  The story is an interesting one and certainly contains some solid potential.  The basic premise centers on an inexplicable event – a mysterious two minutes, seventeen seconds when everyone on the planet loses consciousness. While suspended in their dreamlike states, most people experienced a flashforward, during which time they each got a glimpse of their lives on a date about six months into the future (I say most people because those who saw nothing got a glimpse into their own impending mortality).

The primary characters in the show are members of an FBI team who have taken the lead in solving the mystery of the mass blackout, a puzzle piqued by the spotting of a lone, solitary character moving about a baseball stadium while his fellow sports fans lie slumped in their seats (caught on security camera, of course).  That means someone must be behind this nefarious deed!  Why the mastermind would choose to enjoy his time among the snoozers in a baseball stadium remains to be seen, but an interesting development nonetheless.

While I hesitate to embrace a plot that promises to weave in lots of headscratching moments of time-shifting (thus flying way too close to that sun called Lost), I like the unique gist of the story (which is based on a novel of the same name by Canadian science fiction writer Robert Sawyer).  However, there are a couple of things that bother me intensely about this show.  First, the acting is atrocious.  For some reason, five of the ten main characters are British actors, with only two of them actually playing a character of British origin.  This means we get to watch actors spend more time thinking about perfecting their American accents than nailing their lines, which is a painful exercise.  Most brutal on this account is the protagonist himself, special agent Mark Benford, who’s played by the very British Joseph Fiennes.  Apparently, Fiennes is a rather accomplished stage actor but his turn as an American FBI agent is truly terrible.  His portrayal of Agent Benford might be one of the worst acting performances I’ve ever seen on the small screen.  And that’s saying something, particularly when we consider the existence of shows like Reba and Walker Texas Ranger.  Beyond the brutal performances of Brits trying to speak American (hehe), John Cho, who plays special agent Demetri Noh, is equally horrendous, even in the absence of the need to fake an accent.  At the end of the day, I don’t care whether any of the characters in the show lives or dies, an ambivalence that I’m sure the show’s creators aren’t seeking (you may recall that I feel the exact same way about the characters in Grey’s Anatomy, save for the fact that I actively root against Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang).

My second gripe relates to the directing, which I suppose is magnified by my distaste for the acting.  The director loves to repeat things so much that I get the feeling he thinks I’m slightly handicapped.  It’s like he’s deathly afraid we’re going to miss some key revelation in the story, so he bludgeons us over the head with it sixteen times just to be sure we caught it.  And he loves cliches.  There are numerous over-the-top cheesy scenes in the series, including the one below, which involves one of those totally lame yet ubiquitous moments.  It involves two guys on the same team that earlier had a falling out; they later find themselves in a shootout with the bad guys; one of the good guys saves the other guy’s butt, who greets his savior with a nod of the head while bullets zoom by; and, of course, it’s set to totally incongruous music and is played in slow motion.  There should be a keystroke for P-U-K-E.  If there were, I’d be pushing it now.