As FlashForward disappears from the TV landscape until March 2010, many fans are concerned about what this means for the future of the show.
Long breaks for serialized TV shows are never ideal as momentum is often lost and casual viewers forget where the show left off.
But perhaps the powers that be will use this opportunity to iron out some of the problems that have dogged the show since the Pilot? With a big promotional push during the down-time (as ABC are more than capable of doing), perhaps the break could be the best thing to happen to FF since Keiko arrived (briefly) on the scene?
EW spoke to exec. producer David Goyer to shed some light on why the show is taking such a long hiatus and what the future holds for FF.
EW: So… FlashForward isn’t coming back until March.
DAVID GOYER: Why?
Yes! Why?
The answer is simple. We originally planned to come back in January, but about three weeks ago we sat down with ABC scheduling and looked at what our programming schedule would be like. And I think on serialized show like 24, Lost, and Prison Break the most important thing is to air consecutive episodes without repeats or preemptions. To be brutally honest, our programming schedule in January was going to be awful. We were going to be off for four or five weeks [through December and into January], then back on for two weeks, then off for two weeks because of the Olympics, then back on four weeks, off for two weeks again, back on three, off for two again… Our first 10 episodes had one preemption; our last 13-episode arc was going to have four. I just think when we saw that, the studio and the network and all the producers looked at each other and said, “This is crazy.” We’d rather bite the bullet, come back in March, and air all 13 episodes consecutively without preemptions.
The overnight ratings for the show have steadily declined since the premiere. [FlashForward has dropped from a little over 12 million viewers to a little over 7 million viewers over the course of 10 episodes. The numbers don't reflect DVR usage, which is substantial for FlashForward.] If the ratings hadn’t been dropping do you think ABC would have made this move?
I don’t honestly know. I just know that when we first heard about this possibility three or four weeks ago, we were all looking ahead to the series of preemptions ahead of us and were feeling very concerned. One of our staff writers is from Prison Break, and he made a comment that every time their show had been preempted, it would get knocked down [in the ratings] and they’d have to build back up, and after being preempted, they’d get knocked down again and have to build up yet again—they felt like they were continually treading water. … I know for me, as an audience member, I feel incredibly annoyed when I’m watching a serialized show and have to deal with preemptions. … Our production schedule hasn’t changed at all. We’re shooting episode 14 now; we’re prepping episodes 15 and 16. We’ll have all our episodes written and most of them shot by the time we come back in March.
We recently reported that you had to shut down production to work on some scripts…
Which I was actually a bit bemused by, commenting on it as if it was a big deal.
It wasn’t?
No! We only shut down for one week. And I’ll tell you why: we were given the reins to speed up the storytelling, and we had broken episodes 15 and 16 and done some very major moves in those episodes. When the network and the studio saw the scripts for those everyone looked at each other and said “Let’s move those up to 13 and 14.” So we swapped those out and moved episodes 15 and 16 into the 13 and 14 position. In the process, we needed to take a week to re-prep.
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