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If you haven’t seen FlashForward yet — the new ABC drama created by the writer of Batman Begins, David S. Goyer, loosly based on the Robert J. Sawyer novel of the same name — you are missing out. It’s a pretty amazing series about a freak occurrence where the whole world loses consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. During this time, they have ultra-vivid visions of exactly six months into the future. When everyone snaps out of it, 20 million people have died and chaos breaks out across the globe. During the aftermath, several FBI operatives are left to pick up the pieces, or put together the pieces rather in order to figure out what happened and why.

FlashForward is just badass — very comparable to Heroes‘ amazing first season. But there’s something very weird about the show. You know almost every actor on the show, yet at the same time you really don’t know them at all. The faces of the cast are instantly recognizable, but their names remain on the tip of your tongue as you go just as blank as the entire world population did for 137 seconds on the show. There’s not one household name on the show, but at the same time almost every actor with dialogue has a very familiar face.

If you IDMb the show, you’ll see why the cast is so familiar. Some of the cast’s previous credits include film and TV hits like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Shakespeare in Love, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, True Blood, Firefly, King Kong, Million Dollar Baby, The Lord of the Rings, Lost, Transformers, Battlestar Galactica, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dangerous Minds, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Erin Brockovich, Friday Night Lights (film), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, CSI, Collateral, Heroes, Law & Order, and many, many more. Now you see why it feels like you know this cast. Seriously, just think about the mash-ups you could do with all of those hits, for instance…

The objective of this show’s casting was obviously to assemble a cast that people felt like they knew, but really didn’t know. That way people would be intrigued by the commercials, while the show still maintained a “new” feel. The actual process of that casting probably went something like this…