Braga Talks About “Flash Forward”

On Slice of SciFi #190, we brought you news that Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, “Flash Foward” was being made into a potential television series for ABC.

The series is being billed as a companion piece to “Lost” for the alphabet network.

One of the producers for the pilot and potential series is long-time “Star Trek” producer and writer, Brannon Braga.  During a recent interview with SciFi Wire, Braga shared a bit what fans can expect to see from the series.

In “Flash Forward” an experiment causes the entire world to flash into the future for two minutes, with everyone getting a glimpse of what’s to come.  Braga says that the premise can be made into a long-term one, along the lines of Fox’s “24” with each season representing a new flash forward.

“Yeah, the structure’s not dissimilar from ’24’ [on which Braga is a co-executive producer], and we want to reset the show at the end of each year, where we’ll do another flash forward at the end of the first season, and then potentially another flash forward at the end of the second season, each one kind of resetting the core characters’ visions of the future and introducing new characters,” Braga said.

“One of the cool things about the show is you have 5 billion potential storylines.” Braga continued.  “And we plan to tell the stories of people all over the world. Obviously they’ll be focused on mainly people here in L.A., but we’re going to go all over the place.”

“The core concept is very much the same as Robert Sawyer’s novel,” Braga says. “That was the impetus for it and the idea of the entire world blacking out at the same time for a discrete amount of time, and everybody on Earth having mysterious visions of the future. Same idea. Obviously, to do a TV show, you have to sustain potentially—and God willing—100 episodes or more; you’ve got to change the concept a little bit. His novel had people having visions of the future 20 years from now. We change that to five months from now and kind of narrowed down the scope a little bit and made it a little bit more of an intimate epic. But essentially the concept is the same.”

Production on the pilot is currently underway.