ABC picks up its first drama for fall, ‘Flash Forward’

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No surprises here, since we’ve been seeing ‘Flash Forward’ promo spots on ABC for two weeks.

Late Friday, ABC officially ordered 13 episodes of ‘Flash Forward,’ the series the network hopes can win the hearts of ‘Lost’ fans, with its epic, mysterious bent.

Based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel of the same name, the series stars Joseph Fiennes, Sonya Walger, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Brian O’Byrne, Courtney B. Vance, Christine Woods, Zachary Knighton, and Peyton List. It was created by David Goyer (‘The Dark Night’) and Brannon Braga (‘Mission Impossible: II’ and ‘24’).

ABC’s executive vice president of drama development, Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs, described the series this way to The Times in March:

‘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.’ ‘

-- Maria Elena Fernandez