Shows we hope to love:  FlashForward gets reduced to Hollywood's lowest common denominator
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

 
I dread the premiere of this show (relax, no spoilers here: you can learn this much just by watching the ABC trailers). Yet I was prepared to love it, based on my reaction to the book. The show hasn't even debuted yet, and already people are wondering: can this show be saved from its developers' mistakes? Disclosure: I am an aficionada of sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer's work and have just recently reread the novel on which this new TV series is presumably based (except that it isn't, really). Given how much I liked the book, I was looking forward to the show's premiere, until I actually learned something about the show. Talk about disappointing.

It's not new for Hollywood to botch something from the get-go, but I keep hoping at least a few people in the TV and film business will learn from Hollywood's mistakes. That hope isn't usually rewarded, but I comment here just in case there's still time to influence the show's developers. To that end, I left a lengthy comment on one of the industry sites earlier today, then decided I should at least post that much on my own blog; therefore, I'm going to repeat here most of what I've already posted there. When you're the author, you get to do this. But back to Sawyer and FlashForward.

I hesitate to say that I'm a Sawyer fan because fan is short for 'fanatic,' and I'm not a fanatic about anything (except, possibly, the correct use of the English language, which is an occupational hazard for all good writers and editors anyway). But I've enjoyed and been challenged by Sawyer's novel and his books Calculating God and Factoring Humanity. The Neanderthal series, not so much: I've never liked alternative histories and am much more interested in speculations about the present and future. Earlier this summer, I read Sawyer's latest, WWW.Wake, and loved that. So when I heard about the spin-off show, I reread (and again enjoyed) FlashForward.

Let me stop here and admit that I'm a science geek as well as a journalist. Not only am I a long-time hard sci-fi reader, but I also have a strong interest in astronomy and cosmology, therefore in particle physics, and have attended classes and lectures at both Fermilab and the Adler Planetarium for more than 20 years. In the process, I've had teachers that include physicists Leon Lederman (a Nobel Prize winner) and the late David Schramm, and astrophysicist Rocky Kolb, and lecturers that include David Levy (co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which broke up and fell into Jupiter 15 years ago), former Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, and Dan Hooper, who is one of the current dark matter gurus at Fermilab.

Moreover, I'm one of those people who thinks we really ought to be out there living and working in space, building colonies on the moon and in high earth orbit, because we can't afford to leave humans all in one place in case nature throws another asteroid at us and wipes out all or most of life here. All of which is a long way of saying I'm really into the science of this, not just the fictional part. The dirty little secret is that science is way cool, and so is science fiction when it's done well and based on hard science. So I'm afraid of Hollywood botching yet another attempt at a sci-fi program on prime-time network TV.

FlashForward could turn out to be unexpectedly great, but the early indications worry me. The fact that Robert J. Sawyer is a consultant means almost nothing, because show developers and networks often ignore their nominal consultants. I do NOT want this show to turn into another idiotic clone of Lost that strains credulity. The real physics behind Sawyer's book is already enough to strain credulity for anyone who is unfamiliar with the seeming absurdities of quantum physics. Rather, I want any show based on this book to get a much wider audience/fan base than the book did and have people really thinking about the fascinating questions involved.

The dead giveaway here for me is the fact that once again, TV writers have decided to lift the merest wisp of what is a great plot from a wonderful book and take it completely in another, more trivial direction, thereby spoiling things for everyone. That's the first big mistake. I keep remembering the cinematic abortion known as I, Robot for comparison. Yes, I'm saying that film was a huge failure despite Will Smith and the big box office it got. What scares me even more is that I heard that the writer who made such a mess of I, Robot now has the rights to develop Asimov's Foundation trilogy (heaven help us!!!). Now that's scary. The guy who rewrote I, Robot for film did so in ways that would piss off Isaac Asimov, were he still alive, and betrayed the entire underpinning of the robot stories; he (the scriptwriter) should have been smacked silly for completely mangling and sabotaging the original storyline.

Surely David Goyer and Brannon Braga, who co-wrote the pilot for FlashForward the TV show, have been around long enough to know better by now. One would think so, but apparently not. Oh, and heaven forbid that a protagonist should actually be a Canadian, let alone a physicist ... Really, Hollywood: get over your xenophobia and ethnocentrism already.

Second big mistake: even worse, the setting now is not CERN or anywhere in Europe, but – no, not again! – Los Angeles. Really. I am SO tired of L.A./Hollywood pretending it's the center of the universe. The only alternative TV series locations that Hollywood ever seems to consider are New York or Washington, DC, and yet the rest of the planet is still out there. Bringing the action back to L.A. is just more boring navel gazing by Hollywood, whereas putting FBI characters in charge (as if the CERN physicists wouldn't have been way ahead of them on investigating this phenomenon anyway) reduces FlashForward to just another cop show without it actually being about that – and not a good cop show, either. Besides which, changing the plot's focus like that just makes it smell like another Fringe rip-off (right down to having a black agent as the head of the local FBI task force; I like Courtney B. Vance, but come on now – get a clue). How freaking unoriginal.

Third big mistake: there are two central figures, not one, in Robert J. Sawyer's excellent book – Canadian physicist Lloyd Simcoe and his co-lead investigator on the Higgs particle project, Greek physicist Theo Procopides. Much of the story's drama and development comes from the fact that these two are opposites in a few significant ways. Simcoe is a resigned fatalist who thinks the future is immutable, whereas Theo disagrees and is trying to change what he assumes could be his future. This difference in belief, as well as their age difference, drives much of what the two men do. And Theo's a great character; why get rid of him and substitute multiple boring ones, as in yet more cops? What's the point? Is the character too challenging for the writers? Please: if the writers on Numb3rs can make mathematicians interesting every week, it can be done.

In addition, removing CERN and the physicists from the center of the plot kills an opportunity to let reality help you out with the drama. And there is drama at CERN: the Large Hadron Collider still isn't running right and isn't anywhere near full strength. By now, it's almost a year behind schedule. However, there have already been a few (frivolous) lawsuits by people trying to prevent it from running at full power, by people who are afraid (wrongly) that running the LHC will create a black hole and we'll all get sucked in and die (not likely). Why not use that notoriety and capitalize on it to drive curious people to this story line? Oh wait, maybe nobody in Hollywood watches the news (you think?).

Besides, it IS fascinating to consider what physics experiments at that power level might produce, even though they're only approaching energies of a fragment of the Big Bang. Sawyer knew it to be so and wrote a very compelling, entertaining, and scientifically credible novel. Why mess with that? Only Hollywood would be dumb enough to try: it just can't seem to keep itself from tampering with and dumbing down brilliant ideas, especially if those ideas didn't originate within the TV and film establishment. What crap.

Fourth big mistake: the flash-forward is only 6 months ahead instead of more than two decades. REALLY BIG mistake. Six months is nowhere near as compelling as 21 or 22 years in the future: you can already imagine on your own that you wouldn't look much different in six months, for example, and can probably narrow down most of the likeliest scenarios re: where or how you would be employed, where you'd be living, who you might be with, etc., barring accident or acts of God. Nowhere near as much to worry about or anticipate. But two decades from now?? Way different story: your own predictive ability is virtually eliminated, so of course the flash-forward vision is of much greater interest and speculation.

All I can say is: I hope they paid Sawyer really well for the rights to his novel and that he laughs all the way to the bank – because I suspect the end result here won't make him (or us) very happy. Too bad: Sawyer's book has a fascinating premise.

Then again, those guys could still surprise me. I guess we'll tune in September 24th and see.

UPDATE two months later: Yup, as I predicted, they really messed with Sawyer's story, so badly that the series was canceled after the first season. That didn't have to happen, but those morons at ABC always think they know better than the original authors do about why a story is interesting. And so they screwed up again. I really do hope that Sawyer was well compensated for this nitwit rip-off and laughed all the way to the bank. That would be the only thing that went right.