The first time I remember seeing something like this was with (appropriately enough) Murder She Wrote, with a paperback mystery novel credited to Jessica Fletcher. In that case, though, the show had been on for years and was a television staple. DC Comics got into it in 1997 with The Life Story of the Flash, credited to Iris (West) Allen, which had previously been referenced in the comic books.

More recently, Lost had an in-universe book published in the real world: Bad Twin was billed as the final novel by one of the passengers on Oceanic 815 who didn’t make it through the first episode. I actually read that one. It was interesting enough, though it had little to do with the show beyond the presence of the Widmores.

…for obvious reasons.

Adaptation

It’s been interesting to look at both where the TV series diverges from the book — the setting, the time scale, recordings, and in most cases the cast — and where it tracks — the concept, the impact of the worldwide blackout on people now, the way different people approach their foreknowledge, a main character investigating his own murder, and the way the viewpoint organization just pulls together to take point on investigating the incident.

And every once in a while, a specific conversation is adapted. Demetri’s “You’re going to be murdered” phone call from Hong Kong and Theo’s phone call from South Africa are very similar. And there’s a discussion on the likelihood of an event hitting exactly on the hour that was practically lifted for episode two.

I doubt the TV show will tackle the question of whether the universe exists without observers (sort of “If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound?” taken to the extreme) or the long-term implications of life extension. And somehow I doubt the Large Hadron Collider and search for the Higgs boson are involved (though I noticed the TV show’s Lloyd Simcoe works at Stanford, which does have their own particle accelerator).

It’ll be interesting to see where they go with this.

Prediction

Entirely separate from the TV show, it’s also been interesting to look at the book’s predictions for the present day. Most of it takes place in 2009, but it was published 10 years ago. I list a few items — like getting the Pope’s name right, but missing the explosion of cell phones — in my review of the book from when I read it last year.

Then there’s the suggestion made that one could prove the future can be changed by demolishing some major landmark that many people saw in their visions, but “I don’t suppose the National Park Service is going to let us do that.” In my head, I imagined a deadpan voice saying, “You can’t blow up a national monument.” Hmm, I doubt the cause of the blackouts in the TV show will be robots from space.

Last night, while watching “The Order 23 Job” on our MacBook, we got to the final commercial break — and TNT popped up an error saying that the content required Windows to play. The episode played fine. Previous commercials played fine. But this one? The DRM wasn’t compatible with the player on the Mac.

Yeah. The DRM for the commercial wasn’t compatible.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if TNT approached it the way Hulu does when a commercial fails to play, which is to blank the screen for the duration of the ad (typically 30 seconds) and admonish you for not watching the commercials. Unfortunately, the episode didn’t pick up again.

As near as I can tell, the player was set up to continue the episode when the ad finished, and didn’t account for the possibility that the ad might not play. To make matters worse, the scene selection thumbnails don’t work right in Safari, so we couldn’t jump straight to the final act.

Because neither of us wanted to spend a lot of time troubleshooting, we just went into another room and brought up the Windows box to finish the episode. I suspect the scene selection would have worked in Firefox on the Mac, but haven’t tested it yet. I did go back later to see where I could report the problem to TNT, but the wording in their FAQ suggests to me that they’ll just ignore any reports of Mac problems.

I don’t mind watching reasonable ads to get a free service, but if the ad breaks, it shouldn’t take the actual service down with it. You don’t kick people out of a movie theater because the previews didn’t play, and you don’t send them home part way through an event because one of the sponsors’ banners fell down.

Most shows would take two hours to do all that, or pick and choose to cram it into one. (They even found time for a car chase.)

One of the things that really impressed me was that, just using one episode’s worth of characters, they showed the beginnings of so many totally different ways of looking at humanity’s glimpse of the future, whether through hope, fear, or simply confusion. From what they said at Comic-Con, one of the ideas is to be able to expand this to theoretically anyone in the world.

The extended preview of upcoming episodes (a flash forward to Flashforward!) seemed to be making a great effort to say that yes, they’ll be answering questions, and no, you won’t have to wait 3 years to find out what the heck is going on (unlike that other show with Sonya Walger, Dominic Monaghan, and Oceanic Airlines).

There were a couple of moments that I thought were forced, though the only one that really stands out was the immediate juxtaposition of the “we’re being punished” and “this is a gift” reactions.

Adaptation

They did a good job of taking the source material, Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Flashforward (I’m getting really confused as to whether the TV series has a space in the title or not, but the book definitely doesn’t), and making something that’s recognizably the same idea, but telling a new story with it. It has the benefit of all the thought he put into it:

• What are all the consequences of everyone blacking out for two minutes?
• If everyone experiences his or her own future at the same instant, what about people who are asleep at that time?
• How do you determine whether people are seeing different possible futures or the same future?
• How do you determine whether the future can be changed? (It’s a common enough storytelling trope, but how would you scientifically prove it?)

And so on. But they can tell a larger story, with more characters…and still surprise people who read the book. I don’t know whether they plan on using a similar explanation for what caused the event, or whether the TV version will come down on the side of “The future is not set” or “You can’t fight fate” (though I expect it will be the former, for storytelling reasons). And there was a moment a few minutes before the end that just came out of nowhere and left me thinking, “Wait, what???”

The book is definitely worth reading, especially if you like science fiction of the “what would happen if…?” variety, and it looks like it probably won’t spoil much.

IIRC Neil Gaiman said he stole the joke from Douglas Adams, who had someone refer to “Dentarthurdent” in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, but I always think of a Charlie’s Angels episode in which someone greeted “Bosleyjohnbosley.”

The thing is, I barely remember Charlie’s Angels, so the way I remember it is actually as “Bosleytombosley” … and in my memory, she’s saying it to Tom Bosley!

I made some remark about how the Tesla was intended to make people rethink the electric car.

Katie’s response: “Every time a Prius gets pulled over for speeding, people rethink the electric car.”

• Millions of people die, worldwide, in the space of moments. Cars and airplanes crash, people standing on staircases or ladders fall to their deaths, swimmers drown, etc.
• The survivors know exactly what they’ll be doing for a two-minute slice of time in the future…but they don’t necessarily know why.

It’s based on the novel Flashforward by Robert J Sawyer, which I reviewed at Speed Force last December. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. The focus seems to be different, though: the book follows the scientists whose experiment accidentally triggered the event, in which everyone sees visions of 21 years in the future. The TV show is following, to start with anyway, an FBI agent investigating the event.

So where the book is mostly philosophical science fiction, the show looks like a mix of action, mystery and drama.

Both have, as their major theme, a single question: If you knew what your future was going to be, what would you do? Would you try to change it? Would you try to make it happen? If you saw a future you wanted, would you slack off, confident that things would work out in the end, or would you put in extra effort knowing you’d succeed?

To start with, they brought out the producers of the show, had some discussion, then ran the first two acts of the pilot episode.

Read on for a write-up and photos from the panel.

The Show

I’ll try to keep this as minimally spoilery as possible.

It starts out with Joseph Fiennes’ character crawling out of a multi-car pileup, trying to make his way through the chaos, then jumps back to “four hours earlier.” It introduces a number of characters: Fiennes’ FBI agent. His wife, a surgeon (Sonya Walger). One of her colleagues. Their daughter, the daughter’s babysitter, and the babysitter’s boyfriend. Fiennes’ AA sponsor, and finally his FBI partner (John Cho) and boss (Courtney B. Vance).

It follows each character through the morning – tailing a terrorism suspect, prepping for surgery, climbing up onto a utility pole, and in one case going out to the pier to shoot himself. Then the flashforward hits, you see Fiennes’ vision (a big bulletin board with case notes, drinking, some sort of shoot-out in the office), and then he’s back at the multi-car pileup.

From there the chaos just sort of expands — you see their immediate location, with Fiennes and Cho trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and it pulls out to bigger and bigger pictures. The show checks in with the other characters…like the surgeons who all blacked out during surgery. There’s a stunning shot of downtown Los Angeles. Let’s just say…imagine what the freeway would look like if every driver on the road blacked out at the same moment.

Discussion

The cast came out next – Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Courtney B. Vance, and Christine Woods, and the panel turned into a discussion followed by a question and answer session.

Key points:

The first season is working up to the day of the visions: April 29, 2010. At that time we’ll see the context of what’s really going on, how people ended up in very different places from the beginning of the show, and whether the future can be changed. (That last is a huge question in the book.) They are hoping to air the first part of that story on the actual date! (Babylon 5 had a couple of good examples of how a vision of the future can be perfectly accurate, but misleading. The best is Londo’s vision of how he’ll die, in what appears to be mortal combat with G’Kar.)

They do have plans for where to go after they catch up to the visions, so future seasons won’t just be flailing around for ideas. Someone mentioned the 21-year timespan of the book, and Courtney B. Vance kept joking about how he planned to be on this show for 21 years.

There is a “game changing” moment around episode 7 or so. My guess: either that’s the point where they find out what caused the blackout, or they find out conclusively whether the future is or is not mutable.

One of the main characters did not have a vision, implying that he’ll be dead by the end of the season unless they can change the future.

Even though they’re writing a completely different story around the novel’s central concept, Robert J. Sawyer has been involved in the show and will be writing an episode.

They kept giving Joseph Fiennes grief over the fact that he wasn’t wearing baggy shirts and riding a horse.

Virtual Presence

At the end of the panel, they ran a short video montage introduced by Sonya Walger, sitting on a director’s chair in a living room wearing a bathrobe. Walger explained that she had two choices this weekend: get married, or go to Comic-Con. She made some remarks about the spandex quotient (though all the while people dressed as Spider-Man and other super-heroes were wandering around in the background) and not having to answer questions about Penny on Lost, and told us to enjoy the clip. Then she stopped talking to the camera, stepped off the chair, dropped the bathrobe to reveal a Wonder Woman costume, and shouted, “All right! Where’s my *bleep* tiara!”

The clips hinted at what other characters had seen in the future, including one who didn’t see anything, and finished with Fiennes threatening Jack Davenport, who appeared to know something about what actually happened, who then said something about his partner…at which point Dominic Monaghan (long rumored, but not up to this point confirmed) stepped into view. What he said was lost in the general squee, but that was the end of the clip–

–And then Dominic Monaghan walked into the room. To more squeeing. Unfortunately they were running a bit over, and he was only there for about a minute before they had to end the panel. Long enough for him to sit down and say, “I play Simon.” and that was about it.

• DVDs: Angel Seasons 1-5 (individual season boxed sets)
• CDs: Tori Amos “A Piano” boxed set (massive 5-disc archive of hits, rarities, alternate mixes, etc.)
• T-Shirt: Star Trek (XL) from the new J.J. Abrams movie. Handed out at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007, still has the original 12-25-08 release date on the back. It’s never been worn.

Here’s the link to all the auctions. Most of them run through Sunday, May 24.

Does the Star Trek universe have reality shows?