UK

Here’s a round-up of the Fringe-related news items that have taken our interest this morning.

USA Today provide commentary from those people who are skeptical over the science being portrayed in the show. JJ Abrams reminds them that whilst the show has a genuine scientific element, it’s also science fantasy. You tell em JJ!:

“The point of the show is not to be a classroom film on the state of science and technology,” says series co-creator J.J. Abrams, who is noted for TV’s Lost and Alias. “It’s science fantasy.” The show’s appeal is in the fun it has with science, the liberties it takes, he adds. “We’re trying to entertain people with interesting characters placed into exciting situations, not bore them.”

“Bottom line, it’s way out there,” says Michael Bell, the Associate Director for Infection Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “A lot of things in the show don’t bear much relationship to science as we know it,” such as:

•An LSD-trip treatment allows communication with an injured agent in a coma.

•Chemicals turn one victim’s flesh transparent. “Really way out there,” Bell says.

•A plague-infected airplane is burned as a disinfection move.

“We usually never burn planes whole,” Bell says. “That might be the worst thing you could do. It might spread things.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to remind people that the poisons they should fear are usually under their sinks in cleaners,” Bell adds. “Not spooky insane diseases.”

Fringe also paints a not-too-flattering portrait of science as inhabited by lunatics and malevolent corporations, he says. “I would hate for people to panic over infectious diseases based on anything they learn from television,” Bell says.

Sidney Perkowitz,a professor of physics at Emory University, also wishes the series relied a bit more on fact.”Science fiction isn’t supposed to be a science lecture but the balance doesn’t have to be as lopsided as it is in Fringe.”

“Plenty of real scientists have been inspired by watching science fiction as kids. I really don’t want to meet the kid who dreams of growing up like Walter,” says Perkowitz, author of Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World, via e-mail.

“We are playing with the very real, dual role that technology plays in our lives in Fringe, either as savior or destroyer,” Abrams says. “If anyone felt the first episodes were way out there, wait until Tuesday night. They’ll see some completely wild science.” – USA Today (more)

The UK’s Guardian prepares for the launch of Fringe on Sky 1 by mapping the rise of JJ. Abrams, whilst asking where the British equivalent is:

“I wrote this show for the weirdos,” says JJ Abrams, the man who helped bring sci-fi into television’s mainstream and creator of Alias and Lost, on the phone from LA. “I like telling stories that have other layers, so that one audience can watch the show and investigate the other levels whilst another can just enjoy the show. Like Lost.” He pauses. “Although I’m trying to make Fringe a little easier to follow.”

Lost, of course, is notorious for storylines so complex that it is almost impossible for first-time viewers to pick up the show without prior reference to the DVD box set. As a result, US viewers are trickling away at the rate of roughly 1 million a season. Fringe, Abrams says, is episodic, allowing viewers to dip in and out.

But what is really curious is that Abrams is by no means an oddity in today’s LA. Writers such as Judd Apatow, Tim Kring and Tina Fey are producing TV shows and movies, getting green lights for every project. In the UK, however, which prides itself on a history of great writers, there is almost no one as fecund or powerful in the TV and film industries. So what’s going on?

Take Abrams’s meteoric career. His film school script Taking Care of Business was snapped up by Hollywood Pictures – a subdivision of Disney – and released in 1990 starring Charles Grodin and James Belushi. By the late 90s he was writing for überproducer Jerry Bruckheimer on films such as the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon and – unusually for a movie writer at that time – branching out into TV, where he wrote, directed and produced Felicity, a glossy college drama.

These days, the migration of big-screen US talent on to the small screen is commonplace – with actors, writers and directors making high-quality extended shows such as The Sopranos without having to meet the demands of Hollywood studios. Fringe, for example, is not exactly short on ambition. Abrams describes the series as inspired by the likes of The X Files, The Twilight Zone and David Cronenberg films – although he warns it is not about aliens and monsters. – Guardian (more)

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