Flash Forwards Extended Hiatus A Good Thing, Says Author

Don’t panic, Flash Forward fans. The fact that ABC put the show on extended and there'll be no new episodes until March is a good thing. Well, at least that’s how Robert J Sawyer, author of the original book on which the show is based is playing it.

His reasoning? The restart in March means that all the remaining episodes of season one will shown in one long run week after week, without those annoying two-to-three week breaks that usually plague the broadcast schedule of US shows. This, he hopes, will mean that people will be able to follow the complex story more easily.

Writing on his blog he says:

“A lot of people are spinning this online as a bad thing, or a sign of lack of faith in the show on the part of ABC. I suspect the announcing of the scheduling change could have been handled better, but, in fact, it's a very good thing overall… The new schedule, with the final 14 hours running without preemptions*, really lets us get our momentum going in a way that the old schedule just wouldn't have.”

(* Preemptions are those weeks in which a show doesn’t air.)

He also notes that, “because of some calendar dates we want to reference in-story, and the availability of one of the actors we want to use, the episode I'm writing has been moved from the seventeenth episode to the nineteenth.”

SFX Magazine is the world's number one sci-fi, fantasy, and horror magazine published by Future PLC. Established in 1995, SFX Magazine prides itself on writing for its fans, welcoming geeks, collectors, and aficionados into its readership for over 25 years. Covering films, TV shows, books, comics, games, merch, and more, SFX Magazine is published every month. If you love it, chances are we do too and you'll find it in SFX.