Fringe is an American
science fiction television series co-created
by
J. J.
Abrams,
Alex
Kurtzman and
Roberto Orci.
The series
follows a Federal Bureau of Investigation
"Fringe Division" team based in Boston,
Massachusetts
under the supervision of Homeland Security. The team uses
unorthodox
"fringe" science and FBI
investigative techniques to investigate "the Pattern", a series of
unexplained, often ghastly occurrences which are occurring all over
the world. The show has been described as a cross between
The X-Files,
Altered States,
The Twilight Zone,
and
Dark
Angel.
The series premiered in the United States on September 9, 2008, on
the
Fox network.
Fringe was part of a Fox initiative known as "Remote-Free
TV". Episodes of
Fringe were longer than standard dramas
on current network television. The show ran with half the
commercials during the first
season, adding about six minutes to the show's runtime. When the
show goes to a commercial, a short bumper will air informing the
viewer of roughly how much time commercials will consume before the
program resumes. On October 1, 2008,
Fringe first season
was extended to 22 episodes. This was then cut back to 20 episodes
with the season finale airing May 12. The series was renewed for a
second season. Season 2 premiered September 17, 2009.
Plot
Fringe follows the exploits of
special agent Olivia
Dunham,
mad scientist Walter Bishop, and his son,
jack of all trades,
Peter Bishop as they investigate
aspects of
fringe science (
rare diseases,
chimeras,
transhumans with
psychic abilities,
teleportation, and so forth). Unlike his other
series,
Lost, J.J. Abrams
promises the series' story arc will be easier to follow and more
accessible for those who skip an occasional episode. In an
interview first published in September 2008, Abrams said:
"
Lost has garnered a certain reputation for being a very
complicated show and one that you have to watch every episode.
Fringe is in many ways an experiment for us, which is, we
believe it is possible to do a show that does have an overall story
and end game, which
Fringe absolutely does… We can do a
show that has that, so that there's a direction the show is going
and there's an ultimate story that's being told, but also a show
that you don't have to watch episodes one, two and three to tune
into episode four." Roberto Orci, a cocreator, commented that
Fringe "took its inspiration from
The X-Files",
but with wholly “differentiate through the characters," and be a
whole new take on the genre.
Season 1
All over the world, a series of apparent experiments collectively
referred to as "the Pattern" (e.g., a newborn baby who
rapidly ages and dies within a few
minutes, a bus full of passengers trapped in a strange resin, like
mosquitoes trapped in amber) are occurring for reasons unknown.
Olivia,
Peter, and
Walter are in charge of investigating
these strange events to determine their source. Connected to the
Pattern is
Massive Dynamic, a
megacorporation which is a leading
global
technology company, holding the patents for a diverse number of
new and significant technologies. Their enemy is ZFT, a
bioterrorist organization which is
orchestrating all of the strange occurrences in order to prepare
for a destructive
technological singularity. Tying
both sides together is a
nootropic drug,
called Cortexiphan, that was developed by Walter and his partner,
William Bell (now chairman of Massive Dynamic), which Olivia and a
number of others were treated with as children.
The first season
closes with Olivia meeting William in a parallel universe where, among other differences,
the World Trade
Center
was not destroyed by the September 11 attacks.
Season 2
In the opening episode of season two, Olivia returns back from her
trip to the parallel universe, but can't remember any of it. She is
hunted down by a shape-shifting assassin assigned to find out what
William Bell said to her, then to kill her. Charlie Francis is
eventually killed and replaced by the shape-shifter unknown to
anybody. Eventually Olivia remembers her conversation with Bell who
told her that a "great storm" is coming and that it is up to Olivia
to prevent it. William Bell tells Olivia to make sure that she
prevents the shape-shifters from getting to a man who would help
them destroy one universe. Olivia then discovers that Charlie
Francis is dead, and that the man she thinks is him is really the
shape-shifter. Olivia kills the shape-shifter, but not before
unintentionally telling him the location of the man that the
shape-shifters are looking for.
Characters
- Anna
Torv as Olivia Dunham, a Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) special agent assigned to investigate the
spread of unexplained phenomena. Regular (Season 1 -
Present)
- Joshua Jackson
as Peter Bishop, a jack of all trades who is
brought in by Olivia to work with his father Walter. Regular
(Season 1 - Present)
- John Noble as
Dr. Walter Bishop, a mad
scientist - former government researcher in the field of
fringe science who was
institutionalized after a lab accident. Regular (Season 1 -
Present)
- Lance Reddick as
Phillip Broyles, a Homeland Security agent who runs the
Fringe Division. Regular (Season 1 - Present)
- Jasika Nicole as
Astrid Farnsworth, a young federal agent and
assistant to Olivia and Walter. Regular (Season 1 -
Present)
- Kirk Acevedo as
Charlie Francis, Olivia's colleague and close
friend at the FBI. He is second-in-command of the Fringe Division.
Regular (Season 1 - Season 2 episode 4)
- Blair Brown as
Nina Sharp, the CEO of Massive Dynamic, a leading
firm in science and technology research. Regular (Season 1 -
present)
- Mark Valley as
John Scott, Olivia's former FBI partner and lover.
Regular (Season 1; 13 Episodes)
- Leonard Nimoy as
William Bell, Walter's former lab partner, now
founder and chairman of Massive Dynamic. Recurring (Season 1 -
Present)
Production
Co-created by
J. J. Abrams,
Roberto Orci and
Alex
Kurtzman,
Fringe is produced by
Bad Robot in association with
Warner Bros. Television. Abrams's inspiration for
Fringe came from a range of sources, including the
writings of
Michael Crichton, the
Ken Russell film
Altered States, and the television
series
The X-Files and
The Twilight Zone.
Additionally, Orci stated that it is a combination of a
procedural and an "extremely serialized
and very culty" series, quoting as examples of each,
Law & Order and
Lost.
Jeff
Pinkner was selected to act as the head
show runner and
executive producer. Abrams noted that he
trusts Pinkner after working together with him on
Alias and
Lost.
Michael Giacchino, Abrams' frequent
collaborator, composed the music for the pilot of
Fringe,
before handing over duties to his assistants Chad Seiter and Chris
Tilton; Giacchino retains an on-screen credit. Abrams himself wrote
the series theme music.
The two-hour pilot episode, filmed in Toronto Canada, cost a total
of $10 million to create. A cow used in the pilot episode had to be
replaced when production of Season 1 was moved to New York, due to
livestock restrictions preventing it from being brought from Canada
to the United States. If viewers note the difference in the cow's
appearance, the production team members have said they will paint
new cows to match the original.
On
February 21, 2009, it was reported that in the event that
Fringe is renewed for a second season, the show will move
production to Vancouver
from New York City
as a cost-cutting measure.
On May 4, 2009,
Fringe was officially renewed for a second
season. The series now airs on Thursday nights at 9 following
Bones.
Casting
The first actors cast were
Kirk Acevedo
and
Mark Valley, who play FBI agents
Charlie Francis and John Scott, respectively.
John Noble and
Lance
Reddick, who play Dr. Walter Bishop and
Homeland Security agent Phillip Broyles
joined the cast later on.
[564474] Casting of
Anna
Torv,
Blair Brown, and
Jasika Nicole, who play Olivia Dunham, Massive
Dynamic employee Nina Sharp, and Astrid Farnsworth, a federal agent
and assistant to Olivia Dunham, respectively, followed; while
Joshua Jackson, who plays Peter
Bishop, was the last main character to be cast. Jackson auditioned
for
James T. Kirk in Abrams'
Star Trek and believed this is what
impressed the producer to cast him in his television project.
On April 8, 2009, it was announced that
Leonard Nimoy would appear as Walter Bishop's
former lab partner, Dr. William Bell in the season's finale, which
explores the existence of an ominous
parallel
universe. Nimoy will return as Dr. Bell this fall for an
extended arc, and according to Orci, Bell will be "the beginning of
the answers to even bigger questions." This choice led one reviewer
to question if
Fringe's plot might be an
homage to the
Star Trek episode
"
Mirror, Mirror", which
featured an alternate reality "
mirror universe" concept and an
evil version of Spock distinguished by
a goatee.
U.S. Ratings
The following is a table of seasonal USA rankings (based on total
viewers per episode including reruns) of
Fringe on
Fox.
| Season |
Timeslot (EST) |
Season Premiere |
Season Finale |
TV Season |
Rank |
Viewers
(in millions) |
|
| 1st |
Tuesday 9:00 P.M. |
September 9, 2008 |
May 12, 2009 |
2008–2009 |
#43 |
9.96 |
| 2nd |
Thursday 9:00 P.M. |
September 17, 2009 |
May 2010 |
2009–2010 |
TBA |
6.78 (to date) |
DVD & Blu-ray Disc
The first season was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc September 8,
2009 in the United States, on September 30, 2009 in Australia and
November 11, 2009 with an alternate cover. In Germany on September
25, 2009, United Kingdom on September 28, 2009, and France and
Norway on October 14, 2009. Hong Kong on September 10, 2009.
Setting
Fringe is set at Harvard
University
, but was actually filmed at Yale
University
.
Typically depicted are scenes of
Phelps
Hall and
Branford College.
Initially,
it was also filmed at The University of Toronto
's University
College
and Bahen
Centre for Information Technology
. Upon productions moving to Vancouver, Canada
for season 2, the University of British
Columbia
now stands in for Harvard.
Reception
The pilot episode was watched by 9.13 million viewers, garnering
3.2/9
Nielsen Ratings among adults
18–49, with ratings improving over the course of the episode.
Ratings improved greatly for the second episode, "The Same Old
Story" which 13.27 million people watched, making it the fifth most
watched show of the week. As of October 2008, the show had achieved
the first place in the 18–49
demographic among new shows. As a whole,
the series was well received by the critics. Barry Garron at
Hollywood Reporter found
it promising because "it is reminiscent of battle-of-the-sexes
charm." Robert Bianco,
USA Today,
said, "What Abrams brings to Fringe is a director's eye for plot
and pace, a fan's love of sci-fi excitement, and a story-teller's
gift for investing absurd events with real emotions and relatable
characters." Travis Fickett of
IGN gave
it 7.6 out of 10, calling it "a lackluster pilot that promises to
be a pretty good series." While Tim Goodman of the
San Francisco Chronicle
remarked that it was "boundlessly ambitious",
Chicago Sun-Times's Misha Davenport
called it an "update of
The
X-Files with the addition of terrorism and the office of
Homeland Security."
The pilot episode was negatively received by the
Parents Television Council, who
named the show the worst of the week and denounced the "excessive
violence and gore". In its
2008 Year in Review,
Television Without Pity declared
Fringe one of the year's biggest disappointments,
commenting that the show is "entertaining" and "the cast is largely
strong" but the character development is insufficient. The show's
main character, Olivia Dunham is "wooden and distant, and after
half a season, we still haven't gotten to
know her." The
untrustworthy Nina Sharp is well-acted but "one-note and lazily
written" and Lance Reddick's character is also
"under-developed".
The
Daily
Herald comments that
Fringe is promising and "it
may yet develop into a worthwhile program" but has "largely been
spinning its wheels".
Meanwhile, in other articles recounting the best and worst of 2008,
The New York Times stated that
Fringe "is the
best of a rash of new series that toy with the paranormal." The
author goes on to praise the cast saying that "Much credit belongs
to Anna Torv who stars as an F.B.I. agent investigating bizarre
murders that all appear to be linked to a powerful and mysterious
multinational corporation" and "Ms. Torv is backed up ably by John
Noble as a crazy but brilliant fringe scientist and his
level-headed but skeptical son, played by Joshua Jackson."
Additional praise came from
Entertainment Weekly, which
stated "The best new show of the year took a few weeks to grow on
me, but now it's a full-blown addiction", from iF Magazine, stating
that "the new X-Files is fun, weird and has just enough questions
that we aren’t re-creating LOST all over again just with new people
in a new setting" and from the
LA Times, calling Walter
Bishop one of the best characters of 2008, saying that "the role of
the modern-day mad scientist could so easily have been a disaster,
but the 'Fringe' writers and the masterful John Noble have
conspired to create a character that seems, as trite as it sounds,
more Shakespearean than sci-fi."
Chicago Tribune states that some
episodes are "distressingly predictable and formulaic" but adds
that there have also been some excellent episodes.
A version of the show (edited for time) premiered on the
Nine Network in Australia on September 17,
2008. The following month,
Fringe also premiered on
Ireland's TV3 (October 1), Sweden's
Kanal 5 (October 2), and the United
Kingdom's
Sky1 (October 5). Nine Network later
dropped the show from its primetime schedule temporarily; the show
returned during the December to January non-ratings period. Fringe
now airs on Nine's second digital channel GO!. In 2009,
Fringe made additional debuts on Norway's TVNorge (January
1), Finland's
MTV3 (January 5), South Africa's
M-Net (January 8), Italy's
Mediaset Premium (January 31), Canada's
CTV (February 3), and
Germany's
Pro Sieben (March 16). It will
be also broadcast on
TVN in
Poland.
Fringe has been nominated for a
2008 Writers Guild of America
Award in the category of New Series. Also, the pilot episode
has been nominated in the category of "Long Form - Original", for
which television programs longer than one hour are eligible.
Media information
The pilot episode was leaked via
BitTorrent, three months before the
series premiere similar to leaked fellow FOX series
Terminator: The Sarah
Connor Chronicles. An
alternate reality game, centered
around the fictional Massive Dynamic corporation, was introduced
during the pilot and featured "strange symbols paired with glowing
dots" appearing throughout the episode and an "advertisement" for
the company shown at the end with a web address for the game.
On August 27, 2008, a
prequel comic book for the series written by
Zack Whedon was released by
DC Comics under its
WildStorm imprint. This was to be the first issue
of a monthly 6-issue
limited series
but the others were delayed until January 2009, when monthly
publication resumed, with the sixth and final issue scheduled for
release on June 17. The Vice President of WildStorm,
Hank Kanalz, explained the publication
hiatus:
Mystery
Abrams revealed in an interview that the
glyphs in the show had a hidden meaning. "It's
something that we're doing for people who care to figure it out and
follow it, but it's not something that a viewer has to consider
when they watch the show." Abrams also revealed that the seemingly
unrelated frogs which have the
Greek
letter Phi (Φ) imprinted on their
back appeared in promos for the show have significance within the
context of the series, saying "it's part of the code of the show."
The glyph code was cracked by an editor at the technology site
Ars Technica, who discovered it to be a
simple substitution cypher used to spell out a single thematic word
for each episode. Whether there is a further second-order code to
be solved remains to be seen.
International broadcasters
|
| Country |
Broadcaster |
Series Premiere |
Argentina |
Warner Channel |
March 17, 2009 |
| Australia |
Previously: Nine
Presently: GO!
|
First Season - First-run premiere: September 17, 2008 (9
Episodes)
First Season - Second-run premiere: August 12, 2009 (Full
run)
|
Belgium |
La Deux |
May 28, 2009 |
Brazil |
Warner Channel
SBT
|
March 17, 2009
August 29, 2009
|
Bulgaria |
PRO.BG |
TBD |
Canada |
CTV/A (English)
V (French) |
September 9, 2008 (English)
September 3, 2009 (French) |
Chile |
Warner Channel |
March 17, 2009 |
Denmark |
6'eren |
September 20, 2009 |
Finland |
MTV3 |
January 9, 2009 |
Ecuador |
Warner Channel |
April 7, 2009 |
France |
TF1 |
June 10, 2009 |
Germany |
ProSieben |
March 16, 2009 |
Greece |
Star Channel |
October 5, 2009 |
Hungary |
RTL Klub |
March 13, 2009 |
Hong
Kong |
TVB Pearl
TVB HD Jade |
March 1, 2009
November 15, 2009 (First Season Rerun in High Definition) |
India |
WB |
September 25, 2009 |
Ireland |
TV3
3e |
October 1, 2008
Season 2 Sunday at 9pm from October 18, 2009 |
Italy |
Steel |
January 31, 2009 |
South Korea |
OCN
CatchOn |
September 15, 2009
August, 2009 |
Malaysia |
ntv7 |
TBD |
Mexico |
Warner Channel |
March 17, 2009 |
| Middle East |
MBC Action |
April 21, 2009 |
Netherlands |
Net 5 |
September 6, 2009 |
New Zealand |
TV 2 |
July 1, 2009 |
Norway |
TVNorge |
TBD |
Peru |
Warner Channel |
March 17, 2009 |
Philippines |
CS9 |
February 2009 |
Poland |
TVN |
September 10, 2009 |
Portugal |
RTP2 |
February 5, 2009 |
| Puerto Rico |
WAPA-TV |
June 1, 2009 |
Russia |
TV3 Russia |
September, 2009 |
Singapore |
Channel 5 |
August 10, 2009 |
Slovakia |
Markíza |
October 4, 2009 |
Slovenia |
POP TV |
TBD |
| South Africa |
M-Net |
January 8, 2009 |
Spain |
Canal+ |
December 28, 2008 |
Sweden |
Kanal 5 |
October 2, 2008 |
Switzerland |
SF zwei
TSR1 |
March 16, 2009
May 30, 2009 |
Thailand |
True Series |
February 7, 2009 |
Turkey |
DiziMax |
January, 2009 |
UK |
Sky1 |
October 5, 2008 |
Venezuela |
Warner Channel |
March 17, 2009 |
Ukraine |
Novyi Kanal |
September 14, 2009 |
|
References
External links
- Official tie-in sites
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