The Yin Blog

A quick thought on ABC's "FlashForward"

Spoilers up to 11/5/09!

I've been watching ABC's serial sci-fi drama "FlashForward" almost in real-time, meaning that it just sits on my TiVo for an hour or so.  (To put it in context, I haven't gotten around to the "V" re-make yet, despite having high hopes for it.)

In "FlashForward," everyone on the planet -- except for one creepy person spotted in a baseball stadium surveillance camera -- blacks out at exactly the same time, for 2 minutes, 17 seconds.  Thousands are people are killed in plane crashes, auto accidents, hospital operations, and the like.  Most, but not all, of the survivors had a glimpse of where they would be in six months.  Some had happy visions, others not so happy.  The ones who had no glimpse at all begin to fear that they're going to be dead.

It's a pretty intriguing set-up, and the producers have been doling out small answers regularly, for which I'm grateful.  The one big complaint I have is that the producers have revealed too much, yet not enough, with regard to two characters -- Lloyd Simcoe and Simon Costa -- who are revealed to have caused the global blackout.

Now, the difference between American mysteries (as opposed to British, Agatha Christie type mysteries, where there's no action at all) and thrillers might lie primarily in the fact that thrillers generate suspense by showing you things from the point of view of the protagonist and the antagonist, whereas mysteries show you only the point of view of the detective.  I think Alfred Hitchcock once explained how he built suspense -- if two men are in a room playing chess and a bomb blows up, that's shocking but not suspenseful.  On the other hand, if you see someone plant the bomb before the chess players walk into the room, that's terribly suspenseful!  With a mystery, on the other hand, it works if the detective unravels the clues pointing toward the planted bomb, and then the detective must race the clock to get to the room before the bomb blows up.

Back to "FlashForward": it's nice for us to know that Simcoe and Costa are responsible, but it's frustrating that we aren't told everything they obviously know.  Why do they think they're responsible?  What project were they working on together, and how might it have caused the global blackout?  They might not know, but they obviously have suspicions.  By not sharing those with us (the viewers) -- only showing us the same conversation over and over ("We're responsible for killing 20 million people!"), the producers are artificially dragging things out.

It's too late to unring the bell, but really, I think it would have been better to have shown us nothing about Simcoe's and Costa's conversations, and simply give us only the same information as the FBI agents have.

NBC, Desperation, and Jay Leno

TV Guide has an interesting column titled "Is Jay Leno Killing NBC?," that basically wonders whether NBC's decision to give the weeknight 10-11 pm time slot to Jay Leno has doomed the network.

To recap -- a few years ago, NBC announced that Conan O'Brien, host of "The Late Show with Conan O'Brien," would take over as host of "The Tonight Show" in 2009.  Jay Leno, who had been host of "The Tonight Show" since the early 1990s, was apparently going to be put out to the pasture, except that Leno wasn't ready to retire.  Since Leno routinely beat his competition (David Letterman) in the late night ratings, he was a hot commodity for other networks, and there were serious talks about bringing him over to ABC.  To keep Leno, NBC offered him a 5-night-a-week prime time show that he could develop as he saw fit, which meant he was basically taking his version of "The Tonight Show" to prime time: same skits, same monologue, same soft celebrity interviews.

You couldn't expect him to match the ratings of scripted shows, but then NBC's been essentially a disaster in that department, and -- this is the key thing -- an hour of Leno would be A LOT cheaper to produce than an hour of a scripted show.  So NBC expected big cost-savings as a result of airing Leno, even if he didn't boost ratings.

One problem is that the NBC affiliates (that is, the local markets) aren't happy at all, because Leno is delivering smaller audiences to the late night local news . . . .

But what the TV Guide article crystallized for me is basically how *bad* NBC's other shows have become.  When I was in my formative years in the 1980s, it seemed like NBC was THE network, with "The Cosby Show," "Cheers," "The A-Team," "Family Ties," "Miami Vice," and "L.A. Law."  NBC dominated in the 1990s as well with that Thursday night block of "Seinfeld," "Friends," "Mad About You," and "ER" -- whatever it aired in the middle of that group did well, even when the shows sucked (ahem, "Caroline in the City," "The Single Guy").

But now?  Bleech.  My boys are starting to like football, so I actually had "Sunday Night Football" on last night.  Apart from that . . . it's pretty barren as far as the Peacock network goes on my TiVo.  CBS has the best reality TV shows ("Survivor" and "The Amazing Race"), Fox has the best thriller/dramas ("24," "Fringe") as well as "So You Think You Can Dance," and ABC has some interesting serial shows ("Lost," "FlashForward") and the predictable but amusing "Castle."  It just goes to underline how desperate NBC has become that airing Leno five nights a week in prime time may make sense from a financial standpoint.

Revenge of TV lovers!

This is a pretty hilarious story by a TV writer for "The Simpsons," getting a well-measured dose of revenge against one of those annoying "I don't watch TV" pseudo-intellectuals!