Gone In A Flash

I think I'm gonna bail on FlashForward. NBC here I come. After watching the first two episodes, there's not much to hold me. So far the characters aren't compelling and the writing isn't sharp.

Worse, the central premise has problems. Everyone blacks out and sees the future. Okay. Now either this means they can prevent it from happening, in which case who cares about what they saw, or they can't. Yet it seems absurd they can't. There are millions of people who'd probably like to avoid what's going to happen, and there's nothing they can do about it? Why not?

Stories about this sort of inevitability are so common they're practically cliches. Sometimes it's a character going into the past to prevent something and, ironically, causing it. Sometimes it's a character having a vision or being told a prophecy and in trying to prevent it, makes it come about. (Oedipus springs to mind.) This concept can still work, but it better be fresh.

The flash forward as a dramatic device usually has the audience knowing what's going to happen, not the characters. The fun is seeing how the unaware characters get to this place. Somehow, when all the characters know what's going to happen, much of the fun is gone. (Kurt Vonnegut's last attempt at a novel, Timequake, had people reliving a period, so they had no free will the second time around. He couldn't make it work. Feels somewhat the same for this show.)

There is one part of the story that I like--the search for who or what caused the blackout. That I find interesting, if slow moving. But it's not enough.