The highly anticipated TV show FlashForward hasn’t even premiered yet and already it’s forming a huge cult following.  The main storyline behind the show is that for 2 minutes 17 seconds, everyone in the world blacks out.  What’s even more bizarre is that during the blackout, everyone has a vision of their own life 6 months in the future.  If you’ve seen the one-minute preview clips, one character sees herself pregnant although she is currently single, another doesn’t see anything which leads him to think he dies, while another sees himself putting the puzzle of the blackout mystery together.

FlashForward has created a pre-series buzz rivaling even that of Lost.  Interestingly there is a website called The Mosaic Collective, a viral marketing tool, which claims its directive is to compile everyone’s flashforward.  The Collective’s goal is to document, categorize, and look for similarities within the database.  The site is interactive, allowing any viewer to upload a sort of hypothetical flashforward tweet to the site.  It is very interesting, especially the flow chart view which shows connections between keywords.

What draws people into the show is the uncertainty of events between the blackout and the supposed reality in the flashforward vision.  Do we have the power to change the future given the current situation we are in?  It is the optimism that we can make a difference, that we really do have the power to change the future.  Thus, the challenge that is presented is what steps we are supposed to take in order to maintain/change your future.  Most of us, me included, like organized steps from A to B to C which lead to outcome D.  If life were drawn out on a blueprint for us to follow, it would be boring.  I would go one step further and say most people would lose interest because no matter what you might do, you’ll still end up at the same pre-determined place.  The fact that we don’t know what’s out there, what will happen in the next one, ten, a thousand minutes in our life is what makes life life.  Uniquely, the show forces the viewer to self-reflect on where their life is versus where they want to be.

Nothing in the world is predetermined.  Like Schrödinger’s cat experiment, we can wonder and hypothesize all we want if the cat is dead or alive and debate quantum superposition and collapsing realities.  The only way we find out what happens is if we actually open the box.  Like the experiment, the only way for the show’s characters to know what happens is to deal with the uncertainty while simultaneously making choices that will bring them closer to their desired reality.  I can’t wait for the show to start and to see the direction it goes in!

FlashForward premieres on September 24^th at 8/7 pm on ABC.