IGN have an extensive article on JJ. Abrams Fringe, as well as some exclusive behind the scenes photos from the Fringe set -we’ve included some below for you to look at:
US, September 2, 2008 -It seems that something big is about to happen in genre TV, an event which just could take sci-fi television out of the fringe, so to speak, and into the mainstream. We’re talking, of course, about the new J.J. Abrams series which debuts on FOX next week: Fringe. Coming from creator/executive-producer Abrams, the man who gave us Lost and Alias and who will soon be reintroducing Star Trek to the world on the big screen, Fringemight just be the next step in legitimizing the ever-ghettoized genre of sci-fi in primetime television.
But of course, readers of IGN TV need no introduction to Abrams, or his partners on the show Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who have been busy lately writing the live-action adventures of the Transformers — and Abrams’ Star Trek too — when not typing away at their computers, getting Fringe ready for broadcast. So rather than ask why you should watch Fringe, perhaps fans need to ask why not?
“We set out to just kind of blend our three tastes,” Orci recently said of the series’ inception, which he says was the boob-tube version of a planned pregnancy. “We literally said, ‘Let’s sit down in a room together and create a show.’ And the three of us just sat down for weeks on end and just went through the history of our TV loves and our movie loves.”
Certainly it is those very TV and movie loves which should add to the appeal of Fringe for genre fans. After all, Abrams and his crew are genre fans too.“The first thing I brought up was Real Genius,” says Orci of his initial inspiration behind Fringe, referring to the 1985 Val Kilmer film. “It was about a bunch of geniuses at a university solving scientific problems with science. So that was sort of my weird touch point. Alex was a big Twin Peaksfan, so he wanted a surrealistic FBI element to it. And J.J. loves [David] Cronenberg and he loves The Fly and he loves those kind of… where medical science or something like that goes just slightly wrong and it becomes kind of horror, you know? It’s just those three sensibilities mixed in together.”
The central concept behind Fringefeels somewhat familiar yet fresh at the same time. The show focuses on three main characters: FBI agent Olivia Dunham (newcomer Anna Torv), genius scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble from the Lord of the Rings films), and Bishop’s son Peter (Joshua Jackson, former resident of Dawson’s Creek). Together they investigate the strange and unknown, but Mulder and Scully fans can relax right now — the creators insist that they were not attempting to remake The X-Files with Fringe, FBI agents and supernatural weirdness notwithstanding.
“The title itself refers to fringe science,” says Orci. “So I think the idea is to keep it so that it’s maybe a couple of minutes in the future, but not weeks in the future, not years. We’re trying to do… you can read any of the tech science parts of the newspaper nowadays and there’s just really strange articles in there that 10 years ago would have been, you know, unbelievable, and now it’s like, ‘Oh, the Pentagon has an invisibility cloak.’ It’s like, ‘What?’”But beyond the science of the show, the strangeness of an X-Files or Twin Peaksis just as important an element. Kurtzman, the resident David Lynch fan on the creative staff, says that the otherworldly aspect of Agent Cooper’s universe will play into Fringe… though perhaps not to the degree that we’ll be seeing any Men From Another Place anytime soon.
“For me what was so great about Twin Peaksis it was so unpredictable,” says Kurtzman. “You could not stay ahead of the show from week to week; you had no idea what was coming. And I remember just spending so much time with friends, literally talking about it all week and trying to figure out, you know, what was behind the Log Lady? And why was that little guy dancing? And I think there was a lot of surrealism on that show too, which was very unique to David Lynch and the way he told stories. And what’s great about that is you have to watch it and interpret it and figure out what it’s trying to tell you. So I think while our stories are nowhere near as kind of, um, wacky or crazy … the spirit of that is something that we really interpreted and felt like was a very important element of the viewer’s experience.”
Abrams, meanwhile, is an avowed Twilight Zone fan as well — remember his homage on Felicityto the revered Rod Serling classic? — so it should come as no surprise to hear that that show is also a thematic predecessor to Fringe.
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