• FlashForward, 8-9 p.m. Thursday, WPLG-ABC 10

If you could see the future, would you try to change it? If you're an ABC executive and the future is 14 million viewers evaporating in a puff of Nielsen smoke when Lost wraps ups its final episode later this season, the first answer is: You betcha! And the second is: FlashForward, the network's sci-fi series that debuts Thursday.

Opening with a cataclysm, then following characters as they cope with the fallout while trying to figure out what happened and why, FlashForward shares not only Lost's dramatic formula but even its crack-in-time plot devices.

In this case, the catastrophe that gets the show rolling is not a desert-island plane crash but a worldwide blackout: Seven billion people lose consciousness at the same moment, then wake up two minutes and 17 seconds later after a series of flickering hallucinations.

As they compare and decipher their visions, they realize they've all had a glimpse seven months into their individual futures. Now they ask themselves the same question Ebenezer Scrooge put to the Ghost of Christmas Future in A Christmas Carol: Did they see shadows of things that will be? Or things that might be? And what can -- or should -- they do about it?

The first half-hour of FlashForward plays like an inept action flick, an over-edited, high-speed cavalcade of cars running off freeway overpasses, planes ramming into buildings and other consequences of technology untended by human masters.

It's only when the action (and the torrential cross-cutting) slows that you start getting to know some of the capable cast, including Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) and John Cho (the Harold & Kumar movies) as FBI agents tracking a terrorist cell who believe their case may be connected to the blackout. Sonya Walger (Lost) plays Fiennes' wife, privately troubled about their marriage, and Zachary Knighton (Life on a Stick), a suicidal doctor.

And it's only when the characters begin revealing what they saw while unconscious that FlashForward turns interesting as it examines the interconnectivity of the human experience. For some characters, the future foreseen is bright: romance, babies, reunification with missing loved ones. For others it's bleak: alcoholism, infidelity, nameless dread. ``I dreamt there are no more good days,'' a little girl confides to her father.

Can the future be changed? And if so, does pulling at one person's loose threads unravel another's fate? ``You're worried your future's going to come true,'' one friend warns another. ``I'm worried mine won't.''

Where this is all headed is anybody's guess, but by the end of FlashForward's first episode, you're likely to be interested enough to return.