Tag: TV

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One of the events I made sure to hit at Comic-Con was the Flash Forward panel. Flash Forward is a new series launching on ABC this fall — you’ve probably seen ads for it — about what happens when everyone in the entire world blacks out for two minutes and has a vision of what they will be doing at a specific time in the future. This incident has two major consequences:

  • Millions of people die, worldwide, in the space of moments. Cars and airplanes crash, people standing on staircases or ladders fall to their deaths, swimmers drown, etc.
  • The survivors know exactly what they’ll be doing for a two-minute slice of time in the future…but they don’t necessarily know why.

Flash Forward

It’s based on the novel Flashforward by Robert J Sawyer, which I reviewed last December. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. The focus seems to be different, though: the book follows the scientists whose experiment accidentally triggered the event, in which everyone sees visions of 21 years in the future. The TV show is following, to start with anyway, an FBI agent investigating the event.

So where the book is mostly philosophical science fiction, the show looks like a mix of action, mystery and drama.

Both have, as their major theme, a single question: If you knew what your future was going to be, what would you do? Would you try to change it? Would you try to make it happen? If you saw a future you wanted, would you slack off, confident that things would work out in the end, or would you put in extra effort knowing you’d succeed?

To start with, they brought out the producers of the show, had some discussion, then ran the first two acts of the pilot episode.

Read on for a write-up and photos from the panel. Continue reading →

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A quick look at TV shows we’ve been watching this season.

Lost – Good season, learned a lot more than I expected about DHARMA, major cliffhanger. Renewed for a final season…in 2010. (Hard to believe that’s less than a year away)

Pushing Daisies – managed to maintain the tone & quality, but canceled halfway through the year. Supposed to get the last 3 episodes starting at the end of the month. A 12-issue comic book miniseries has already been announced.

Bones – I only saw a few episodes, but liked them, and Katie’s been watching it regularly. Fun off-format season finale w/ a nasty cliffhanger. Returning, according to the voiceover during the credits.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – turned out to be a surprisingly solid, complex show. No word on renewal yet, but I’d like to see more. Update 6: canceled.

Dollhouse: Started off weak, but got really interesting as the season progressed. It’s not a comfortable show by any means. No word on renewal, but if I had to choose between this and T:SCC, I’d take SCC. Update 2: Unofficial sources say it’s renewed, but I wouldn’t count my actives until they’re all back for their treatments.

Heroes: I gave up 2 episodes into the “Fugitives” arc, but Katie kept watching. Deeply problematic show but its high points were very good. Renewed, and I hope it’ll improve next year.

Better Off Ted – fun, painful, quirky all rolled into one. Sort of like a less-nerdy Dilbert or Office Space. I’d like to see more, but it doesn’t seem likely. Update 3: Holy crap, it’s been renewed! That’s a bigger surprise than Dollhouse!

Castle – favorite of this year’s mid-season replacements. Would definitely like to see more, but would be okay if this turned out to be all. Unlike, say, Drive. Update 1: Cool! It’s been renewed!

Battlestar Galactica – finished off with a very good final season. Caprica, on the other hand, was tedious. May take another look at it when the series launches.

Update 4: Forgot to mention The Unusuals, which we checked out, but neither of us found interesting enough to stick with. The ads built it up to be…well…unusual, and it wasn’t. Castle and Bones both routinely dealt with more unusual cases. For anyone who did like it, prospects look dim. Update 7: canceled.

Update 5: EW has a running tally of all the network shows.

Update 8 (May 18): The decisions are in for all of them now. I’m sad to see Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles canceled (especially in the same week that Terminator: Salvation opens), and I’m still annoyed at losing Pushing Daisies halfway through the season, but the other shows we watch have had a remarkably good survival rate this year.

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Roomba Path (photo by SignalTheorist)

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Pushing Daisies is being resurrected as 12-issue comic book miniseries! Bryan Fuller tells E! Online:

We got a 12-issue order for a comic book for DC Comics. I think the comic book is great, because it has all the characters in it, and it starts a new story. It’s basically Chuck, Ned, Emerson and Olive versus 1,000 corpses, so it becomes a zombie movie, but the zombies are articulate and smart and can do things that no other zombies can do. The Pie-Maker versus 1,000 corpses. … It’s the movie idea that I wasn’t sure we’d get to do. [The plot] is not really so much the back nine [episodes] as it would’ve been on the television show, it’s a whole new story that wraps everything up in a different context.

Update 2024: Sadly, this never happened.

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There’s a relief!

TV Shows on DVD reports that the second season of Pushing Daisies — the complete second season, including the final three episodes that ABC hasn’t bothered to show yet — will be coming to DVD and Blu-Ray on July 21. Just in time for Comic-Con.

The article is dated April 1, but they swear it’s not an April Fools’ joke, and indeed Amazon is accepting pre-orders with a July 21 release date.

I’m still somewhat bitter at ABC for canceling the show, though not as much as I could be. It really did have “Too good to last” written all over it, and I’m still astonished we even got a second season (never mind that it managed to live up to the first one). Mostly I’m bitter that ABC held onto those last three episodes. They could have shown them at three in the morning. In a DVR world, fans would have managed to find them. Or they could have put them on their website, or sold them through iTunes.

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