Via the wonder of the internet, I’ve caught up with both episodes of Flashforward so far. I can say that I’m enjoying it, and I hope it avoids the fate of another similarly time-twisting series ABC tried during Lost’s absence, the show Daybreak . Like the prior effort, it has a contemporary setting using the tropes of the cop-show genre to tell a sfnal story, which is now a sub-genre unto itself. After two episodes, I get the sense that Graeme McMillan, over at io9, doesn’t like it nearly as much as I do. From the first review it seems that he was lost with the opening scene, pun sorta intended.
However, while some of the complaints I won’t argue with— the ones that happen to be matters of taste (lens flares arrgh!)— there are others I don’t think are merited. While I agree that this is trying to capture the magic of Lost— the same lightning in a different bottle— expecting it to treat its own background with the same sophistication in the first few episodes as Lost did in its penultimate season, is asking a bit much. How complicated was the plot of Lost in its first two hours? Plane crash, Island, ensemble, and two weird plot points.
The other point is I think many of his complaints come from looking at a show with a sfnal premise as if it is targeted at a sfnal audience. Genre offers us more than a handy slot to categorize stuff, it also gives an author an arsenal of convenient shorthand, a body of assumed knowledge and a set of assumptions on how the audience will interpret what’s put in front of them. This can be a blessing, and a curse. While using these shortcuts can tighten your story, and give you a narrative both richer and denser, it’s transferring the effort to the audience. The more you rely on the genre itself to support your work, the smaller the group of people is who are equipped to appreciate it. (This isn’t only true for SF, if you look at a typical Regency romance you’ll see endless assumptions about the reader’s knowledge of the historical period and the social norms of the upper class, much of which drive the plot while being completely opaque to the noob.) The less you rely on genre conventions to communicate, and the more explicit you are about your story, the more fans of the genre you end up alienating. After all, is so damn obvious what you’re doing, just get on with it, do you think we’re stupid?
It’s a fine line.
