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ABC hopes you saw what it wanted you to see during ‘Lost’ (updated)

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

What did you see during the ‘Lost’ commercial breaks tonight?

Five Easter eggs? Yes. But not from ‘Lost’ executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. These were tiny images inside a black screen followed by the words -- ‘What did you see?’ -- which lead us -- ABC hopes -- on another interactive adventure.

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The clips are the beginning of a promotional campaign for an ABC drama pilot, ‘Flash Forward,’ that has not been officially picked up as a series for fall, but it can be assumed that it’s highly likely it will be part of the fall ABC lineup that will be announced on May 19 in New York.

The ads, first reported in ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ last week, and their companion website, TheMosaicCollective.com, didn’t reveal much about the show. The first was of pallbearers carrying a coffin. The others were a bride and groom kissing, a surfer, a fetal sonogram and a group of kids leaving school.

The question each spot poses is a central theme of the series and one that ABC’s marketers are running with as they attempt to position this series as its replacement for ‘Lost’ once the show goes off the air next season.

In an interview last month, Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs, ABC’s executive vice president of drama development, described the drama, which is based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel of the same name, as follows:

‘You’re following a bunch of individuals in the first two minutes. Our FBI agent, played by Joseph Fiennes, appears to be in an FBI chase. You think he has a car crash. He has a flash of all sorts of things and he wakes up on the freeway and subsequently discovers that everybody else in the world has had a blackout that lasted the same amount of time. This resulted in a lot of devastation across the world. Everybody talks about their flash and they realize they were all dreaming of the same day -- which is a day in the future. You can identify with the different people and have that sense of global import -- we’re all in it together -- like ‘Lost.’’

In addition to Fiennes, Sonya Walger (‘Lost’ and ‘Tell Me You Love Me’), Christine Woods, Courtney B. Vance and John Cho are part of the cast.

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According to Zap2It.com, those investigating the event will have only ‘a huge mosaic of people’s flash forwards’ to go on, which is where the name of the website comes from. So far, the only message on the website, after users answer a question, is ‘The Mosaic Collective is dedicated to connecting the world one experience at a time.’

-- Maria Elena Fernandez

UPDATE: For those who missed the ABC spots, this post has been updated with links to each of them.

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