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"What if you saw your future six months from now? A glimpse of where you will be and who you will be with. Would you look forward to what was coming...or would you try to stop it?" Those are the questions viewers will be confronted with on ABC's new drama "FlashForward," premiering on Thursday nights this fall. (And yes, it has been officially rebranded as being one-word with the second "f" capitalized.) Co-creator David S. Goyer and fellow executive producer Marc Guggenheim hosted a screening of the pilot this morning and stuck around to answer a few questions.

Not surprisingly the chat opened with the big elephant in the room: is Dominic Monaghan joining the cast? "We're obviously not going to tell you that," Goyer smiles. "But we've heard that rumor as well. I will say part of the fun for us is... I read the stuff that comes over [on Google Alerts] and part of the fun for us is there's all this speculation about obviously Dominic Monaghan, where the show can go, where it can't go and I think the fun for us was we've had so much lead time on the show - when Brannon [Braga] and I wrote the pilot, we wrote the first half before the writers' strike and the second half after so there's actually a year in between. We had a long time to thing about it. For me personally and for Marc, knowing where we're at, how far ahead we are in terms of having things planned out - so much of the speculation is so fucking wrong that it's awesome.

And I think it just speaks to, I love [when] people say, we've shown you this so it obviously means A, B and C. But it doesn't and one of the things we can tell you, in the ensuing episodes, is we'll start to paint in more of the picture and there's obviously a lot more [going on] and part of the fun for us as storytellers is subverting expectations, especially in a post-'Lost' world. I think people see the pilot and make certain assumptions about where the story is going to go that we sort of deliberately pushed them in that direction. We're going to completely play fair with the audience, we're not going to trick anybody. There are sort of rules we're going to abide by. But a lot of the speculation about where we're going has been wildly off base which I love. So it's cool."

The other much-ballyhooed topic was how far ahead they've planned and whether or not they've set an end date. Goyer reveals that "this script ultimately went out as a spec and we staked a lot of creative flags and the various networks quite rightly said, 'Do you know where you're going or are you vamping?' And again because we had more than a year to really think about this we absolutely [do] - I know the last shot of the first season, we worked out the second season, I know how the whole series ends. And it depends on making [how we] expand or contract [the storyline] - we know what sort of the penultimate season finale is as well so we could go... I think for us to really tell the story we want to tell we have to have a minimum of three seasons but we could go out as far as seven.

And like I said the cool thing for us is the storytelling potential is limitless, so beyond limitless if that's even possible. And as will become clear in the ensuing episodes - because we've already actually written seven or so - we're treating season one, it's got standalone components but there are also, there are kind of three acts to the first season. And the first seven episodes are when we move all our chess pieces onto the board and the first seven episodes all have at least one sort of 'holy shit, I didn't see that [coming].' Not just plot twists but sort of, 'oh the rules aren't quite what we thought they were, they're something different.'"

But is it necessary science fiction? "It's often interesting to me to see this show as classified as a sci-fi show when we keep saying, 'Is it?'" Goyer notes. "At one point I read somebody's blog that said, 'Well, obviously aliens caused the flash forward,' and I said, 'Really?' I'm not sure that how you necessarily know it's even a sci-fi show because part of the fun for us, kind of the background radiation thing is obviously what caused it and why and was it random, was it not random and all these things, everything that we'll be exploring [on the show], lots of people have different theories as to what could have caused it - some of [the theories] are sci-fi related, some of them are faith related."

Guggenheim adds: "If [someone] sees a ghost is 'Grey's Anatomy' a sci-fi show? We approach it as a character drama." Goyer agrees, following up with, "It's meant to be a show about paradigm shifts, it's a story engine, which is... you know, I've also read some blogs that said 'oh, you took this premise but it's an FBI show.' Well, wait 'til you see the next six episodes. Not necessarily, which is again part of the fun for us... We're telling the story we want to tell but we're also mind of subverting expectations which I think we will have successfully done by the time the first seven episodes air."

Other hot items were questions about April 29, 2010, the date everyone experienced during the flash forward. "Yes, it is a Thursday but it obviously will go past - or maybe not obviously - the show will go past April 29. I will say that at the end of the first season - at least in terms of the pilot - all of the glimpses you've had of these series regulars' flash forwards, we will have caught up to those futures and they will be resolved. In terms of, obviously we're not going to tell you what are you going to do next." The pair also note that April 29 won't be the season finale, just one of the concluding episodes to the planned 24-episode season.

Guggenheim warns however that "one of the things we do in the first seven episodes is one way you can't watch the show, or shouldn't watch the show, is watch the pilot and then say, 'Okay, I'll tune in six months from now..." "You're obviously going to tread water until then," Goyer chimes in. "Wrong! Wait until you see the next couple of episodes. We're definitely not treading water. And again part of the fun was... audiences are going to assume, especially in a sophisticated TV storytelling world, in a post-'Lost' world - but also in a post-'Damages' world or something like that, I think part of the fun for us is anticipating the audiences', where they think we're going to go and decided ahead of the time how we're going to head that off at the pass.

One of the things we were able to do, ABC had a lot of confidence, Steve MacPherson and his team, in what we were doing and we were able to successfully lobby, even though we had I guess what I call a bible for the show, we were able to hire our writers about five weeks before we even got our pickup. Because I said, 'This isn't like a normal show where we could just meet for three weeks and then beat out episode two and go on from there. We need to know exactly down to the detail what's going to happen to these characters on April 29 in order for us to start breaking episode two... and how they are going to get there.' We spent a good month fully figuring out where our 10 series regulars will be on April 29 and what those stories are. Each of our series regulars has sort of tentpoles along the first season and some of them can move from episode to episode but we needed to know all that before we could start... so we weren't vamping. Because I think in this day and age the covenant you need to make with the audience is these guys aren't just jerking you around, they know where they're going."

So what ultimately can viewers expect from the show? Will episodes be character-specific as was the case for the early years of "Lost?" "The first 11 yes," Goyer says. "Not [character] specific, we're calling them centric, and [then] we start to change it up little and other characters enter and come and go and you know, things like that."

Goyer likewise warns not to get too caught up how the stories are told: "The initial impetus, I had read the book, I liked the book that it's loosely based on, I liked the premise, but I happened to be in France when 9/11 happened. And this experience, obviously there was this sort of outpouring of sympathy for Americans that doesn't typically happen in France, but 9/11 was this uniquely unifying moment and I just thought it was really interesting because for a long time afterwards and even today to a certain extent, people will say like, 'Well where were you on 9/11? What were you doing when 9/11 happened?' And so what we've done with this event is similar.

And the other thing we hope is that it won't just respond to sci-fi fanboys, it will respond to men, it will respond to women, the young and old because I'd like to believe the concept of we all seem to worry for our futures and the idea of getting a glimpse - this sort of Christmas Carol-like glimpse - of what you're going to be doing six months from now, it feels pretty universal... Am I supposed to be married to one guy but what if I see myself with another guy? Do I take the job or not take the job? Do I adopt the baby or not adopt the baby? And those are among the many stories that we'll be telling."

Viewers however seem gun-shy as of late when it comes to serialized shows like "FlashForward." Goyer however says it's silly to not watch over fears it will be canceled or that the complete story won't be told. "That's like saying I had a bad date and I've never going to go on a date again, I'm just going to be celibate for the rest of my life. Obviously we can't guarantee that it's going to be a success [but] you have to plan for success... and I hope we get there. I know that ABC has put tremendous faith in us. We have in our offices, we have this big [points to screen], it's almost this big, graph of..." "It's a grid," Guggenheim adds. "It's a corkboard, actually six corkboards arranged together: 24 episodes across [which would be the first season] and all of our characters down, and we put up cards for every episode." "That's what came out of the first month where we were writing before we were picked up," Goyer notes.

Rounding out the talk were questions about two of the pilot's seemingly superfluous moments - cameos by "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane as an FBI agent and the appearance of a kangaroo - as well as how Sonya Walger's involvement will affect any future appearances on "Lost." "Seth is a recurring character," Goyer reveals. "Seth called me up, he'd read the script. He said, 'I fucking love this! Can I be in it?' And I said, 'Yeah.' So we'd already written a role for this, Agent Kirby, it was very small role but he will be recurring. Part of the fun is a lot of people called us up and, another one was Alex Kingston, she called us up and said, 'Can I be in it?' People realized they liked the idea but they also realized, oh, there aren't any walk ons in this show. And there aren't because any one of these incidental people may or may not turn out to be important or critical. But also for instance, even the gardener, we're going to see his flash forward, we're going to go back to that. We're going to see - if you see somebody walking the dog across the street, these kind of infinite storytelling possibilities. It was a fun experience because we had a lot of actors volunteer to do things."

As for the kangaroo: "Obviously we're not going to tell you everything," Goyer again smiles. "I mean the fun thing with that was I was writing it, and I said there was a kangaroo in the street. Those was one of those things that they say are very cutable when you're in production because it was an expensive pilot. And our line producer on it [said], 'There's no fucking way that we're putting a kangaroo on Broadway... it's going to eat up our time because they are very hard to train.' And sure enough it ate up our time, it was a fucking pain in the ass... the trainer [had to be] like three feet away and had to be digitally erased from every single shot. It was way more expensive than we anticipated... I will say though that the kangaroo will be back."

Lastly, the pair had no comment about Walger's non-"FlashForward" commitments: "Obviously I can't answer that and by the way, nor would it be fair for me to answer that on behalf of the 'Lost' producers."

And while the show's September 24 launch is more than three months away, viewers can wet their appetites with some multi-media tie-ins like the Mosaic Collective web site. But that's just the beginning: "Well the other thing that's interesting about it is, what's unique about the show is... obviously it's got a heavy international component and the international response has been, they've been excited as well about it. And our hope is in terms of online and air tease, we're already planning some things like that are fun but my big dream would be we do... a 'FlashForward: Latin America' that exists independently of us, because we can tell 6.8 billion stories. I wouldn't want to do a 'FlashForward: Latin America' that just retells this story, you know, but in Spanish. I'd want to introduce six or seven wholly new characters and let the people in Latin America or we could do a 'FlashForward: Asia' or we could do a 'FlashForward: Russia,' you know, that's what's interesting - it's definitely not an FBI procedural show."

Until then Goyer is hard at work prepping to direct the show's second episode while he and Guggenheim co-wrote episodes two and three. As for fellow co-creator Brannon Braga, Goyer says "Brannon unfortunately, we tried to extricate him from '24' and we couldn't. And so Brannon is still an EP on the show, he's reading all the outlines, reading all the scripts. We meet with him once a week. He's sort of there as an emeritus figure."

"FlashForward" premieres Thursday, September 24 at 8:00/7:00c. You can read our "first look" at the series here.