The FlashForward premiere is just over a day away and there’s a lot of ’stuff’ out there, but here’s the best of the latest from the world of FF.
New FlashForward promo from FIVE - short but very effective.
..and from Italy.
Spanish viralesque FlashForward promos from Cuatro.
I have to say, I’ve never known a TV series to launch with as much international hype as FlashForward. I think people really are tapping into the ‘global event’ premise, which not enough TV shows do well enough.
FlashForward is set to follow in the footsteps of Fringe and Dollhouse by reducing the amount of commercials during episodes:
With eight comedies and dramas premiering this fall — seven of them in the next few weeks — Walt Disney Co.’s ABC is making the unusual move of reducing the number of commercials in the premiere episodes of its new shows.
Although that may seem an odd decision in a tough economy when networks are scrambling for every advertising dollar they can get, they are also fighting to hold on to every viewer. ABC hopes that fewer ads will prevent people from switching the channel to a rival network.
The network is eliminating the first commercial break — which typically occurs about eight minutes into an episode for comedies — from new prime-time series, including “Cougar Town,” “Modern Family” and “The Middle.”
“You hope the longer you keep them at the start of the show, the more likely they are to stick to it,” said Jeff Bader, ABC Entertainment’s executive vice president and scheduling chief.
That also means more content as well. The story lines of comedies will be about three minutes longer, and those for the dramas may be as much as five minutes longer than they are normally. The opening of the dramas could run as long as 15 minutes before their first commercial. “FlashForward,” ABC’s big bet for the fall, may have an opening as long as 18 minutes.
At one point, ABC even toyed with the idea of premiering the episode without any commercials. But the network thought finding a single advertiser to foot the “brought to you by” sponsorship bill would be too challenging in the current economy.
Reducing the number of commercials in hopes of maintaining an audience is not unheard of in television. Fox last season reduced the commercial load in its dramas “Fringe” and “Dollhouse,” but has since dropped the practice.
Sonya Walger may have a new sci-fi monster to play with but that hasn’t stopped her from paying homage to the ‘irreplaceable’ LOST, which comes to an end in 2010:
“I think Lost is like losing a friend or a relative or someone,” she said. “You can’t replace it with another one.”
“Lost holds a very special place in people’s hearts and I wouldn’t presume to say that FlashForward will replace Lost. I think it provides a lot of the same adrenaline and fascination and entertainment. It will help ease the pain of losing Lost! I think it will appeal to the very same audience.”
Symmetry Magazine talk to FlashForward author, Robert J. Sawyer about the inspirations behind the novel:
Why the LHC?
Sawyer’s novel was conceived in 1997, well before CERN became a household name. But the author prides himself on keeping up with the world of science, and twelve years ago the LHC was already big news in the scientific community.
“My original notion was that I wanted to briefly punt the consciousness of everyone on Earth into the future,” he said, “and even before 1997, the various science magazines I read were all noting that CERN was planning to build the Large Hadron Collider, so it immediately sprang to mind as a possible plot point for the novel. I needed a reason why such consciousness displacement didn’t happen all the time, and why indeed it hadn’t happened yet, and the notion that the LHC would unleash, in a controlled way, energy levels not ever previously produced on Earth, was irresistible.”Sawyer has kept up with the LHC’s progress, and admits to a special interest in the use of the new accelerator to search for dark matter. Stephen Hawking’s famous bet against CERN finding the Higgs also caught his attention, for that fact that a non-discovery might make the world of particle physics that much more mysterious.
“I understand where he’s coming from: if CERN finds the Higgs, the Standard Model is confirmed, and all is neat and tidy,” he explained. “I actually wanted to be a paleontologist; I was and am fascinated by dinosaurs. But, in many ways, the discovery by Luis Alvarez and his colleagues that an asteroid impact probably caused their extinction took a lot of the wonder out of that field; questions can be more interesting than answers, and Dr. Hawking is clearly hoping that what the LHC finds—or doesn’t!—will give us exciting new mysteries to wrap our heads around, rather than simply confirm things we already think we know.”
