Too much of everything

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

First few episodes were very good - then it degenerated into sentimental rubbish - it should have focused on the science instead of polluting the program with a very sentimental middle class centric view of the world peddling a very dubious morality. Disappointing!

I personally, was disappointed that there was not a second (or even third) season to this excellent series. I have always loved texts, be it books, movies, TV series with intriguing and mind bending concepts.. this certainly fits the bill. The entire world blacking out for two minutes and seventeen seconds, seeing their respective futures, and taking actions to ensure / change their future is an intriguing topic, and one that I thought was executed quite well.The acting was done quite well, but this was all about the concept and the execution. Such a clever idea deserved a sequel, as i felt there were many unanswered questions which didn't do it justice. It made you question aspects of your own life, and delve into decisions / indecisions you have made in the past. I feel any text that can make me examine myself in that light deserves to be commended. If you are someone that is after something light-hearted, something you can sit back and enjoy without paying a great deal of attention, then this isn't for you. If, like me, you enjoy something a little more mentally stimulating, something that makes you think, and something that intrigues you overall, then this is an excellent place to start.

Due to an unexplained phenomenon, the entire world's population blacks out for approximately 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and almost everybody sees a glimpse of life 6 months into the future. An elite FBI task force is formed to investigate.This is high concept sci-fi that devolves into chaos as more gets revealed. It lasted one season for 23 episodes in total. It became chaotic after the winter break. I would have liked to see if the show could recover some of its original tension in a second season. The other problem may be the large cast. It tends to dilute the emotional tension of each individual character's storyline.

...but am not surprised that it turned out to be a flash in the pan. Production values were good, most of the casting/acting was tolerable, and the script/dialog wasn't nearly as bad as various mavens on this site have suggested, but ultimately David S. "Threshhold" Goyer's latest creation still couldn't surmount its flaws. The core concept is intriguing: a brief planetary blackout of consciousness during which most everyone experiences that time span in the future--and why some don't is, of course, a key feature of the main theme of the event, the dichotomy between free will and predestination.The major weakness, I think, was Goyer's decision to kowtow to the demands of LCD audiences of serial drama and veer too far from the source material, a 1999 novel by Robert J. Sawyer, a well-respected Canadian genre author. Too many (often extraneous) characters are introduced into the mix--the plot is shifted to focus on an FBI investigation into the origin of the phenomenon and its possible recurrence, with the mystery compounded by an overly elaborate conspiracy that is never satisfactorily resolved (or even explained)--and the result is a diffusion of interest in those characters. The primary leads suffer from being morally suspect in ways that lessen sympathy for their dilemmas, and most of their precognitions are dealt with in a facile manner that has no root in genuine character development. A sacrificial suicide toward the beginning of the story establishes that the future everyone has seen is malleable, but a number of characters make no real effort to alter what they perceive as probable negative outcomes. Cases in point would be the girl who saw herself drowning, the alcoholic FBI agent who saw himself falling off the wagon, his loyal wife who saw herself all cozy with another man, and the partner who saw nothing at all."Flashforward" smells of desperately wanting to become another "Lost," in essence, with multiple threads of mystery that could be exploited over an extended period of time. I suspect this was not all mapped out from Day One, however, but was cobbled together once the series was greenlighted for a full season. With better characters and smarter scripting, it might have worked. Alas...I didn't regret the time spent with it, but won't be returning to it, and don't bemoan its cancellation. Season Two would have just been more of the same.