30 Day TV Challenge - Day 11: "Because I was LOADED, okay?!!!!" -or- "It's never lupus."

11. A show that disappointed you.

I had a little bit of a struggle deciding exactly what this prompt was asking for. Did they mean a show that started out well, then went slowly-but-surely off the rails (like The X-Files, undone by an increasingly ponderous mythology with no clear purpose or definition)? Or did it mean a show I had high expectations for, and then watched in horror as it met none of them (like Voyager, which I'm apparently still not done jabbing a fork into)? I couldn't make up my mind. So: I'll answer them both.

First, the latter -- and I'm pretty sure a year ago I had a vision I'd be writing this very essay...

Flashfoward
This image looks like how watching it felt.

My disappointment in Flashforward is no secret. In fact, I wrote about it before, at great length, and made my bottomless disdain for what was presented very clear. I called it the "most frustrating show in the history of television," and the said the show might end up forcing me to "kill everyone on the planet in a screaming rage." But I was still hooked, and vowed to hang in there, hoping it might get better.

I lasted three more episodes.

The failure of Flashforward was a tricky one, it turns out, and I think most of my expectations can't really be blamed on the program itself. (This is another case, as with Battlestar Galactica, where research would have served me well -- if I'd known beforehand that Brannon Motherfucking Braga was one of the show's creators, we would not be having this discussion right now.) If Flashforward had aired on NBC, or CBS, or even, Gods help us, SyFy, I wouldn't have given it much thought at all. But Flashforward aired on ABC, behind an army of promotion, most of it aimed squarely at my personal demographic -- that is, people who loved Lost. The first promos aired during the fifth season finale of Lost, and ABC positioned it as the heir to Lost's mysterious supernatural throne.

Which was overblown beyond imagination, of course. Flashforward was an unbelievable train wreck, a program whose few original bright spots were quickly blotted out by its flaws: bad writing, worse acting, and an unshakable feeling that no one involved in the production thought we were smart enough to understand what was happening.

But, most fatally for a serial mystery show...it just wasn't interesting. If you can, for a moment, reflect on the show's central mystery -- every single person on the planet blacks out for two minutes and sees a vision of themselves, six months into the future, without any idea why -- and then realize that these people managed to make it boring. Inescapably, indescribably boring. When you have one of the best concepts ever seen on a science fiction television series and you can't make it any more compelling than a random rerun of CSI: Miami, I find myself profoundly disappointed.

Then again, I was also profoundly disappointed by...

House
Putrid discharge, indeed.

Oh, this hurts. This hurts bad. Because I loved this show. Couldn't get enough of it. It was appointment viewing, every single week. Some of its best episodes -- "Cursed," "Three Stories," "The Mistake," "House's Head" and "Wilson's Heart" -- still rank among my favorite works in all of television.

But House collapsed. Oh, Gods, it collapsed like a cheap wooden bridge in a hurricane.

The premise of House is what we in the business* like to call "high concept." This means it can be explained in a single sentence: "A curmudgeonly genius solves medical mysteries." And for the first season, that's pretty much all it was: a patient comes in, is sick, they treat him/her, he/she doesn't get better, they treat him/her more, he/she gets a little better then a whole lot worse, House sees a weird coffee stain that leads him to the answer, patient is cured (except for the rare instance when they'd die anyway). Simple, clean and fun. Season two upped the ante by making the doctors' lives a greater focus: suddenly, the B-plot of every episode was devoted to some personal struggle in House's life or the life of his team. And the show was suddenly better.

But something happened, somewhere. I'm not sure I can actually point to any specific jump-the-shark moment --  except maybe when House's team "left," but they never actually went anywhere and weren't even removed from the main titles even when they were gone for half a dozen episodes at a time, which kind of made it hard to buy their departures -- but it just fell down and never got back up. The personal stories were less interesting. The constant spelunking into House's psyche became painfully repetitive and never went anywhere at all. And the medical mysteries -- which were the whole concept of the show, remember -- went from compelling-if-formulaic to formulaic to dull-and-formulaic to just being an afterthought. The poor sick people felt like invaders from another show altogether.

But most of all -- House never lost. Ever. The world would fall on him and ask him to change some abhorrent part of his behavior, and he would, only to reveal at the end of the episode that he hadn't changed at all. He'd kick his vicodin habit, everyone would be happy, and then it would turn out he'd never quit after all and we were right the hell back to where we'd started. The personal side of House, which improved the show in its early stages, was now its biggest weakness. It was treading water, and poorly. I went from watching the show live every week, to watching it on DVR a few days later, to just letting weeks' worth of House pile up and forgetting about it. And then it was gone.

*Full disclosure: I am not actually in the business.

What Did You See? Was It Me, Holding My Face in My Hands and Screaming?

We're only four episodes in, but FlashForward might just be the most infuriating show in the history of television. And not infuriating in a good way, the way Lost is infuriating. In the "I swear to god, I am going to punch every last one of you in the kidneys" way.

I should explain.

Imagine if David Copperfield spent an hour-long special making quarters appear behind a ten-year-old's ear. Imagine if Radiohead and U2 shared the stage for a free concert, but played poorly rehearsed Lady Gaga covers all night. Imagine showing up for a Patton Oswalt comedy performance only to see him read knock-knock jokes for an hour. Imagine someone giving you a free Star Trek DVD and finding out it's "Spock's Brain." Imagine somebody wins that Toys R' Us spending spree they used to give out as prizes on Nickelodeon game shows, but only buys a pack of baseball cards.

That's FlashForward.

I guess I need to keep explaining.

For those of you who haven't seen it (or its heavy advertising campaign), FlashForward has a dynamite premise: everyone, everywhere in the world, simultaneously blacks out for exactly two minutes and seventeen seconds. During that time, everyone sees a vision -- they see themselves, six months into the future. Why did everyone see these visions? Who or what caused them? What could have affected everyone on the planet at the same time? What's the significance of the date of the flash-forwards -- everyone sees themselves at the same moment in time, so why that particular moment? And is the future set? Can knowledge of what's to come allow you to change it? One FBI agent sees himself investigating the blackouts, and uses those few disjointed images as the launching pad to an investigation to try to find answers to the biggest mystery in the history of humanity.

Sounds awesome, doesn't it? Told you: dynamite premise. But the execution -- oh gods, the execution.

The writers -- and, also, the editors -- of this show seem convinced that we, the audience, are idiots. Now, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, for sure, but you should get a load of these guys. The FBI agent, the one I mentioned before? His wife -- who actually also plays Penny on Lost, and that's not the last time I'm going draw parallels between these shows before we're done -- sees herself in the future with another man. A man she hasn't met at the time of the flashforward, no less. Drama! And then, while treating a young boy injured during the blackouts -- she's a doctor -- she meets the boy's now-single father...and it's him! Suspense! Not a bad dramatic hook, not at all.

Now, I trust that you can remember that information. But FlashForward does not. Because every time it's brought up -- and it's brought up a lot, as characters spend pages and pages of dialogue doing nothing but standing around reiterating what's already happened -- we are once again subjected to her flashforward. Flash -- the man in front of the fire! Flash -- doctor lady gazing down on him from the stairs! Every. Time.

The FBI agent? He's a recovering alcoholic. But in his vision, he was drinking. We know that it weighs heavy on his mind. But just in case, we're going to look at it ten times every episode. His partner? He didn't see anything during the blackout. Does that he mean he might die? He thinks so. And it scares him. And so he'll tell us. Over. And over. And over. The FBI agent's AA sponsor? He saw himself with his daughter...who's been dead for several years. Hope you like watching that meeting, too, 'cause they're gonna rerun it so many times I'm afraid they'll eat through the tape.

And the dialogue -- Je-sus. The little kids are the worst, speaking in fucktarded ready-for-trailers snippets that don't make the slightest bit of damn sense -- when asked about her vision, the agent's daughter says, "I dreamed there were no more good days." Yeah. Sure you did. A character has a moment where he realizes that he could act and potentially alter the future -- the audience realizes it. The other character in the scene realizes it. But just in case, he talks about it for a paragraph, ending with, "You get to decide whether or not my future happens!"

Each episode opens with a compelling image, and ends with a banging cliffhanger...but the forty minutes in between are the very worst kind of overwritten hackery, buoyed by the occasional moment of brilliance. Personally, I like to lay the blame for this on the network: they're afraid of losing an audience trained on Grey's Anatomy with what is, admittedly, something of an off-the-wall premise. So the fantastical time-loop stuff has to be explained ad nauseam, for fear someone might get confused and flip over to Dancing with Disgraced Former Republicans.*

But you know what? Lost is, hands down, the strangest show I've seen on network television since, well probably ever. And they don't feel the need to spend half of every episode retreading already retread exposition. And you know what else? Lost had the common courtesy to actually make us care about its characters before hitting us with the high drama -- FlashForward doesn't do that, so we get dramatic moments that fall flat, like a father we know nothing about telling his son we know nothing about that the mother we've never seen is dead. We know nothing about the FBI agent's partner other than that he's a surly asshole, so it's hard to get wrapped up in his eventual death and the existential quandary he's having about it. And the reason I keep referring to people by vague nouns instead of their names is because the show hasn't actually made me remember them.

"So," you say, "why don't you just, ya know, quit watching it?"

Because. Because I love the premise. And there are those occasionally flashes of brilliance, which make me think the show might be going somewhere interesting. I get the feeling that this is a problem of execution, not concept, and that if the network gets out of the way and the creators pull their heads from their asses, FlashForward could be something great.

Or, I could end up killing everyone on the planet in a screaming rage.

*Yes, I know Tom Delay isn't on Dancing with the Stars anymore. But I never got a chance to make a joke about it when he was, so just deal with it, 'kay?