I generally don’t watch a lot of television dramas. That is, I don’t sit down and actively follow many such programs. There have been exceptions to this, as a child I was addicted to / terrified by Twin Peaks, a show I revisited as an adult on DVD and enjoyed more than ever. I was also a big fan of The Sopranos, and am currently eagerly awaiting the finale season of Lost.
For the most part, however, I don’t spend a lot of time trawling through DVD boxsets or downloading the latest episodes of whatever from the States. Generally this is due to the fact that I am more interested in doing other things. Also, whilst I am a big fan of films, and I love comedy television, I get a bit distracted when it comes to TV dramas, especially long running serial ones.
The last show I tried getting into was Heroes. I really enjoyed it to begin with, but by the end of the second season I had lost all interest in it. It was a dual case of my gradually losing the will to follow such a sprawling show and a general decline of the shows quality. It should be noted however that my continued love of Lost, with its inherent sprawling-ness, points to Heroes gradual decline as the main reason for my abandoning. Lost, though, I am still a big fan of. For me it has been paced perfectly over its life-time in both revealing and answering enough week after week, season after season. Most other such dramas, however, just don’t do it for me.
Tonight I decided to get back in on the ground floor with a new drama show, FlashForward. I had heard glowing recommendations from friends and it came with an intriguing premise. To sum up the program’s setup; on one afternoon, worldwide, the entire population of the globe have a 2-minute blackout in which they have visions of their lives 6 months into the future. We then follow the fortunes of a number of these characters as they attempt to make sense of what they saw (including a cornucopia of dilemmas from alcoholism, to infidelity, to death) and attempt to find out who or what caused the blackout to happen. So far so good.
The idea, and its unveiling are intriguing. Sadly however the show seems plagued by what I fear is now an endemic characteristic of modern television (and much of modern cinema), namely that of a rapid-fire pacing of the plot, involving clumsy, ham-fisted info-dumping dialogue that aims to ram as much storyline into an hour, spelled out as clearly as possible to keep people from wondering for just one second what is going on. The idea of subtlety, building-of-tension, or any kind of ambiguity seems to be a foreign concept.
This is not to say that the show is not enjoyable. The concept behind it is strong enough to keep me interested for now, and its pretty well acted and generally well put together. The first episode in particular ended with a humdinger of a cliff hanger. But even then I can’t help but think to myself that in the olden days of yore, a cliff-hanger like that would have come in episode 4 or 5, or (God forbid) at the end of the first season. Alas, it seems TV executives and the public at large just don’t wanna wait anymore. Everything must be spelled out and hinted to within 5 minutes or we will simply switch away and the show will be cancelled before the first episode ends.
This need to move things forward eventually caught up with Twin Peaks. David Lynch was forced eventually to reveal Laura Palmers killer much earlier than he had planned (Indeed he had planned to never reveal her killer). It saddens me to think that TV executives just won’t trust audiences to stick with something which doesn’t reveal its hand straight away.
The result of this breath-neck pacing is not just a lack of tension, but also results in the unfortunate clunky dialogue that necessitates such box-ticking story telling. (See Heroes eventual fate). I fear this will also happen with FlashForward.
I’ll stick with it for now though, its plus points are just about out-weighing the negatives. But for how long? Ironically, it will be this attention-deficit-style that will possibly bore me and drive me away.