Flash Forward’s Experimental Space Imagines Better Futures, for All of Us
An interactive interview with Rose Eveleth about the beauties and dangers of experimenting on the line between fiction and nonfiction
Flash Forward’s approach to the future is one of imagination, considered research, and a deep understanding of the dotted line between fiction and nonfiction. Its host, Rose Eveleth, with a degree in ecology, behavior, and evolution, and another in journalism, has an intricate comprehension of the ethics and the reasoning behind the design of the podcast. Futurism is experimental by its nature, because the future is unpredictable. It makes sense for a show about the future to meld fiction and fact, to take risks in experimentation with the shape and style, all so that Flash Forward can accomplish what it has set out to do: encourage hope and effort into imagining, and building, better futures.
The show we know now as Flash Forward started life as a 20-minutes-or-less pilot season at Gizmodo (a subsidiary of Gawker) titled Meanwhile in the Future, for which she was paid the ridiculously low amount of $250 per episode. It was always a concrete concept of blending “audio drama and journalism… using fiction to talk about the future.” In the implosion of Gawker, Eveleth got to keep the RSS feed (but not the name), which meant that she could continue to experiment in the audio space and find new topics to research and develop.
Even in the nascent stages of Flash Forward’s debut, experimentation was the name of the game. Experimentation with fiction alongside journalistic nonfiction — interviews, facts, historical context — has a long history across mediums, even (perhaps especially) in places like documentary film-making. But in 2015, for a podcasting industry deeply entrenched in the history and format of public radio journalism, it was too big a risk for those who might pick up the show and fund it: it caused issues with selling the show.
“They were like, ‘Well, it’s not journalism, but it’s not an audio fiction show.’ This has been a challenge for Flash Forward for its entire existence. Like, it doesn’t get nominated for awards in journalism, because they’re like, ‘Whoa, there’s fiction in here.’ But it’s not enough fiction to get nominated for fiction awards,” and here, I sigh, because the reluctance of taking risks appears everywhere. Eveleth laughs, not without a twinge of irony. “[It] ends up in this weird in-between space, which is sort of the whole point of the show: that there’s value in doing this, in mixing these things.”
It also meant that Eveleth had to do all of that herself: research, interviewing, scripting, recording, producing, marketing, selling — the plight of the single, independent podcast creator of too many hats. Thanks to associate producer Julia Llinas Goodman, the production aspect of that burden has now been alleviated.
But because Eveleth produced Flash Forward wholly independently for so many years, it meant that she had more room and ability to try the new things, tweak the show, and try the weird things. In fact, the whole history of Flash Forward is about trying new things.
“The show is already kind of like out there in that way, which I think makes it a little bit easier for me to experiment, because the listeners know that the whole point of the show is to try new things and see where we can go. Every little vignette is slightly different and I’ve done weird things with them,” Eveleth describes the freedom she has, even when Flash Forward has to live in a constrained box publicly in terms of funding and sponsor support.
“I’m very privileged to be able to say this, but if I’m not feeling like I’m getting to try new things, or learn new things, then I don’t want to do something anymore. I don’t really want to just come to work every day and make the same show and know that it’s gonna work,” and Eveleth starts to laugh. “It’s just who I am. I can’t turn it off.”
So why does it work?
“The reason why I think fiction works in these conversations about the future is that it allows you to actually envision something. One of the challenges that people have about the future as a reporter is that it doesn’t exist yet…”
It sounds obvious, but Eveleth is driving at a problem of imagination and consideration. Journalists, in order to portray the future, will talk about what could happen in the future in theoretical, abstract, and often nonspecific ways.
Instead, Eveleth underscores that, “what fiction allows you to do is put characters into those situations and make people kind of think about, Well, what would I do if that was me? How would this impact my family? If I were in that position, would I do the same thing as the character that I’ve just heard, or would I do something different?”
This probably also seems obvious, but often gets mistaken or forgotten when people talk about fiction as being “unimpactful” or “not as important” in consumption or creation as producing scientific or technological work. This is what fiction is built to do, to guide their audience into new, different situations and think about what it would be like for them to be the characters portrayed, for them to deal with that situation. Star Trek offered criticisms about the Vietnam War escalations and Cold War tensions, in order to grapple with moral and cultural dilemmas and perhaps deliver some hope to a strained audience. We’re witnessing an urgency in fiction writing and producing in platforming discussions about inequality, authoritarianism, racism, and climate change.
Eveleth sets up an example, one that immediately prompts an emotional reaction inside of me: “It’s very easy to avoid thinking about the future when it’s presented in really analytical and abstract ways. Like, climate change, right? The world will warm by this number, which is true, but does that feel like anything? And what does that mean for me, or for people I like, or for my family?”
On my daily Twitter doomscroll (I know, I know), there’s always something about climate change, because this is not just the future: this is the present. Enormous red, orange, yellow maps of warming numbers alongside scientific jargon that I can’t really parse without a Google search. Sharp photos of the current drought in California, of reservoirs already 50% lower than they should be in the early summer. It’s terrifying, but feels like groundless, abstract fear because I rarely know how to handle it, or what it means for the future.
That’s when a little travel is necessary.
“[Fiction] transports you. It transports you into a new world and forces you to confront these ideas and these topics and these issues and these situations, and it gets you thinking about like, do I want to live in that world? Is that the future that I want or not?”
However, Eveleth treads the line between fiction and nonfiction with caution — in all the episodes, the fiction segments are clearly demarcated both by their placement and by their design — and warns others to do so as well. She cites the common pitfall of using fiction to talk about real situations, often setting into fiction a real story to avoid talking about difficult situations with real people. The trouble with “compressing real people into characters” is that creators are likely fictionalizing them without fully comprehending what that means.
“If you can just invent a character that’s a stand in for a person like this, you don’t have to grapple with the realities of those people: how complicated they are, how they might not actually have the opinions you think they have, how they might tell you something that you didn’t expect or like something that you thought they were going to hate,” Eveleth sounds clearly frustrated, and my noises of agreement are more like groans.
“Sometimes, I feel that the people who are blending fiction and journalism [are doing it] because they couldn’t find the story they wanted to find, so they just made one up.”
And of course, this ties back into why so many journalists were skeptical of the work that she was doing, because it can be done very poorly.
“There are people who do that in a way that is beautiful and nuanced. But I think there’s a real danger there in fictionalizing people who you don’t know, and turning their stories into your story. I even see this sometimes in climate change fiction, with these fictional stories of like, people in India, blah, blah, blah. Why don’t you just go talk to some people who live in India who have this experience and can actually tell you about this?”
This is why the people Eveleth invites onto the show aren’t just science and technology professionals: they include activists and organizers, educators, professionals in areas outside of STEM, and fantasy and science-fiction authors like Lois McMaster Bujold.
“For me, one of the big tenants of the show is this rejection of the idea that a very small cohort of tech people get to determine the future. There’s this idea that, like, if you are a dude who wears black turtleneck and stands on a TED talk stage, then you’re a futurist and everyone else is just waiting with bated breath to see what they come up with, so that we can live in that future. It’s really important to me to reject that idea, not only because those people tend to come up with pretty shitty futures, but also because it’s just not true.”
This tenant is all across Flash Forward’s interview design, improving with every season. Eveleth interviews disabled people on episodes about gene editing (“Snip Snip Snip”), trans folks on topics about gender (“BODIES: Switcheroo”), Indigenous folks about the Land Back movement (“Give the Land Back?”). On Twitter, Eveleth asks her audiences about things like how they prefer to be addressed if they have academic titles, and talks about the importance of always thinking about who you’re talking to. It’s a transparent process, and by its nature, it’s a political one.
“It’s a political statement, to say that the future is for everyone, that more people should have access to the production of the future. Everybody should have a say in this and the future will be better if everybody has a say.”
The experimentation of Flash Forward begins at its blending of fiction and nonfiction, but it doesn’t end there. Eveleth’s need to try weird things extends also to changes in design, like the entirety of season five. Usually, Flash Forward seasons consist of singular topics per episode released on a regular biweekly schedule. Season five, however, decided to step into a different framing altogether: themed mini-seasons with recurring characters and events.
“I was finding it hard to promote the show, because people either assumed that it already did really well and didn’t need promotion, or assumed [from the lengthy catalog] ‘Oh, there’s too much of this,’” a common plight for long-running independent podcasts with a dedicated fan base, and just enough press. However, they’re still independent, and when you’re in the weird limbo that Flash Forward occupies, it means you have to fight for every download.
“And the ad sales people I was working with at the time had not sold any ads for the show.”
Zero. Zero ads.
“I thought, maybe if I do them in mini-seasons, I can both drum up more attention, because then it’s like, “Ooh, this little mini-season’s gonna drop”, and I can do little press releases around each mini-season. Potentially, I can also sell a mini-season to a sponsor, where it’s like “This set of episodes is sponsored by this, you know, whatever company.”
Those were the business-oriented reasons for Eveleth to try a change in direction. But there was one more.
“It’s also a fun challenge, right? Because getting to write across five episodes where you have a recurring cast and you have recurring things happening instead of just having these short vignette things, was a fun challenge for me to do.” It was new and different, and still fit into how Eveleth organized the general structure of each episode.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The advertisements didn’t work at all; downloads went down for that season of the show. Eveleth suspects the schedule confused her audience, since there was a long break between mini-seasons instead of being on a cadence of every other week. The sponsors also didn’t bite at all, for any of the mini-seasons. And it was intensely disheartening.
“In many ways it was a business failure, because it didn’t do any of the things that I had hoped. I actually thought about ending the show at the end of that year. Because it was just like not, it just didn’t go — it was kind of — it was very depressing because I actually thought that the futures and the episodes were really some of the best ones that we had done.”
In my opinion, she’s not wrong. Many of the episodes from season five are some of the best of the whole catalog, especially because of the linked fiction pieces, creating a synchronicity between episodes that would be impossible to pull off in the original design. It was surprising to me to hear that it was that much of a failure in terms of the business side.
Sometimes, the experiment doesn’t work. Sometimes, it does. In 2017, Eveleth released the first episode of something called “Back to the Future”, where she revisited the artificial wombs future explored in the very first episode of the show. Then, on February 2nd, 2020, “Back to the Future” returned to discuss three futures from prior episodes that have had some kind of update or that, in some cases, have occurred (Yes, there was a pandemic episode in 2018, “The Very Big Sick”).
Since then, she’s produced two more of those and has teased another in the break for 2021, citing in one intro that “[p]eople really seemed to like the last one of these”. It seems, on the outside, to be working as a good way to fill breaks in between seasons and to keep people updated not just on the reality they live in, but on the probability of the futures that Eveleth has presented to them.
Eveleth’s experimentation, therefore, doesn’t just end at new things, but in revisiting old things.
For instance, today, you can hear that first season in a new, sharper sound, thanks to Eveleth hiring audio engineer Jeffrey Nils Gardner (Our Fair City, Unwell) to remaster it.
Remastering early pieces of your work is a step in experimentation by itself, because it’s work produced before you really knew what you were doing going through someone’s hands — your own, or someone else’s — to bring it up to date with what you’re producing now. From an audience perspective, it feels like someone played a matching game with sound quality; the gap between season one and the rest now is small in terms, at least, of audio. Eveleth is keenly aware of the real gap, one that exists for all artists when they’re starting out.
“I had gotten a bootleg copy of Pro Tools. I didn’t really know how to use it. I didn’t really understand mastering, I didn’t understand leveling. At the time, I was just doing phone calls, right? I was just taking phone calls with people. I didn’t know how to make phone calls sound better,” Eveleth laughs.
Eveleth essentially taught herself everything she needed to know, using YouTube tutorials when she got stuck. Going back to the first season and re-listening to it was daunting, but in the end, wasn’t as bad as she feared. And for the parts that were, Gardner had both the kindness and expertise to roll with it.
“There’s an element of vulnerability showing someone your Pro Tools sessions, especially when you didn’t know what you were doing, and it’s a fucking mess. And you’re just like, “Please don’t judge me, like, I swear, I didn’t know what I was doing.” So there’s just weird shit in those Pro Tools sessions. Jeffrey was great. They did not judge me. But it’s hard to listen back to old work.”
Vulnerability. Trust. Experimentation. Grounding elements and tenants in Flash Forward. This mix is built for one central result in Eveleth’s audience.
“The point of imagining better futures is that we can make a difference about the future. Like, we can dictate what the future holds. We just have to try,” Eveleth’s voice has gotten a shade urgent, just in the way that she does on the show when she’s telling her audience to not panic. “And it won’t be easy, right? It’s not like just imagining is going to make it happen. That’s naïve. But it is the first step. Giving up is the wrong way to think about the future.”
We’ve been talking about technology and privacy, something that Eveleth has discussed at length all over her digital spaces, and about the way that many people seem to say “the war has been lost; we can’t win now”. Eveleth disagrees.
“The future hasn’t happened yet. And it’s not predetermined.”
Flash Forward’s experimentation in design and storytelling is crucial in order to impart these thoughts to their audience. It needs flexibility, imagination, the occasional injection of newness, accessible scientific explanations, and the voices of everyone in order to fuel people’s preparedness, and therefore their hope.
“One of the scariest things about the future is that you don’t know what’s coming and that it surprises you and you’re caught off guard.” The goal is to give people the tools to be able to prepare for, respond to, and shape the future. Even for the bad ones and the dark ones, I do feel hopeful that the show made a difference to people in terms of keeping them from panicking,” Eveleth says. I can’t see her, but in playing back the audio, I can hear myself smile in my reply.
I’m not in the middle of suffering through a technological collapse due to a series of alterations in the laws of physics (nor, you might note, am I a character in S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire, one of the first post-apocalyptic scenarios I read as a teenager), but Flash Forward is the kind of show that would have provided me with the ability to live through it.
Yes, I’m afraid of what could happen in the future. More than that, I am afraid for the future.
It is audio storytelling like Flash Forward, audio that takes risks and asks us to not give up, that will help us to not dread worse outcomes, but to imagine better futures.
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