10 TV Shows That Make You Question Your Own Reality
7. FlashForward
Speaking of flash forwards, ABC’s FlashForward was an incredibly short-lived series debuting in 2009 which attempted to pick up the mantle at the back-end of Lost’s run as the go-to Pandora’s Box mystery show. The series stars the excellent Joseph Fiennes in a society where a mysterious event causes everyone to lose consciousness for 137 seconds and flash forward to see images of their own lives six months into the future.
In similar style to Lost and perhaps because of the success of that show’s particular style, FlashForward was set up to follow its blueprint of layering mystery upon mystery week after week in order to build up a mind-blowing array of questions that viewers could theorise over after each episode. The show itself asks a lot of questions on the basis of destiny and the illusion of choice - within each character’s flash forward, they see a fixed future that their actions surely lead them towards regardless of what they do. Elements of a predestined fate versus the ability to change your future are interesting introspective subjects which have been the source of philosophical debates since the Ancient Greeks, and make for a fascinating modern TV show.
The show garnered a lot of initial buzz and was lauded for its usage of the mind-bending concept originated in the series’ source material (a novel of the same name by Robert J Sawyer), but it ultimately didn’t quite live up to the hype and was cancelled prematurely after just one season. With just 22 episodes, Flashforward is a show that is quickly bingeable, but you may be faced with wondering all day after watching whether it was entirely your choice to do so or whether your reality had been preordained to lead you to it.