New show alert: Flashforward

Posted by sara September 24th, 2009 at 03:38pm In All Things TV FlashForward General Hotness How I Met Your Mother Lost

Guess who’s going to be on TV tonight? Yeah, John Krasinski and Joel McHale, tall, hot and funny, whatever. The really important addition to Thursday nights is my beloved John Cho, who joins Joseph Fiennes, Sonya Walger, and Dominic Monaghan in ABC’s FlashForward, which starts tonight at 8.

John, whom some of you will insist on calling Harold from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle/Escape From Guantanamo Bay (or you could call him Mr. Sulu, that would be fine), is not making his first foray into TV. He had a recurring role on the short-lived and tragically underwatched but really quite enjoyable Kitchen Confidential in 2005, and he guest-starred on How I Met Your Mother in 2007.

In fact, I have been rewatching HIMYM on DVD for the past two weeks or so, and damn, but that is just a funny show. The older stuff (can you believe this is season 5? Me neither!) really holds up, and as someone whose stomach turns a little when couples baby-talk to each other, it amazes me that I’m still cool with the whole Lily-Marshall cooing-at-each-other thing. I think my goodwill toward them dates to the pilot, when they got engaged, had sex on the kitchen floor, and then, when Lily noticed a Pop Tart under the fridge, Marshall said, “Dibs.”

Anyway, there have been two weird coincidences in my rewatching. The first is the show’s deep love of Patrick Swayze. First, there was Barney’s co-opting of the Dirty Dancing story for his losing-my-virginity tale in season 2, then, the literal (offscreen) Swayze sighting in an episode I watched last night, the one in which John Cho seduces Marshall with Kobe lobster and Swayze into becoming an evil corporate lawyer. I find it some sort of strange cosmic error that I’m watching these now, a week after Swayze died.

The second coincidence is the Cho episode showing up the night before the FlashForward premiere. I will be honest, as much as I deeply loved Joseph Fiennes back in 1998, I have not given him much thought lately. And I have such lingering resentment against Lost for the two season I wasted on that show that I definitely wouldn’t give it a watch for Walger or Monaghan. But Cho? I love Cho. He makes everything better.

And this one time, he called me! That was great. His kid picked up the phone during the interview and started mashing buttons, which was adorable. So, FlashForward! Might be great, might not. I will give it a try.