12 Most Underrated TV Shows Ever
10. FlashForward
Built up around a single high concept, FlashForward managed a single season in the 2009/2010 season on ABC, the same network as the outgoing hit Lost. That clearly wasn't a coincidence (they even shared a cast member in Dominic Monaghan), but FlashForward would both benefit and suffer from the comparison.
Based on Robert Sawyer's novel of the same name, FlashForward detailed the aftereffects of a mysterious planet wide event which caused almost the entire population to black out for 137 seconds - during which time they saw the future. Their own future, to be specific: a vision of their life six months from that moment, a flashforward.
As a crack team of US federal experts tried to uncover the origins of the Blackout conspiracy while dealing with the ramifications of having glimpsed tiny portions of their own future, the show dealt with the interpersonal relationships involved as deftly as Lost had. The key difference was that FlashForward didn't combine mystery after mystery, weirdness after weirdness: even allowing for some branching out of the mythology in subsequent seasons, it was still possible to see a potential outcome that explained everything, something not everybody could say about its older sibling on ABC.
Sadly, Lost's divisive final season was being broadcast by the same network at the same time, and audiences frustrated with one clearly weren't prepared to take another chance again so soon. Finally, viewing figures had declined sufficiently that ABC determined that the show wasn't worth the investment any longer. Fans of FlashForward disagreed, of course: but in 2010 there would be no saving the show, in any form or on any platform. Had it been made only a few years later, that might not have been the case.