FRINGE

THE CREATORS OF LOST CRAFT A NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY SERIES THAT AIMS TO BE A NEW GENERATION'S X-FILES.

"THE WORLD OF THE DAVID CRONENBERG science pushed to its limits, mad science or science gone awry, corporate culture versus consumer culture, that place where the flesh and the synthetic begin ... these are kind of an obsession for me," says executive producer J.J. Abrams. "Altered States is a movie that I've been obsessed with since it came out. There have been these influences that have stayed with me. I was certainly obsessed with Twilight Zone. I loved Night Stalker. I loved X-Files.

"All these things have been percolating for me as a result of not seeing something like this or with this spirit on the air. I simply felt that coming up with something that would be in the spirit of those types of shows and movies, that would be fun to do. And then the specific story just came out of long discussions that I had with [co-creators] Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci," says Abrams.

What these longtime collaborators of such works as Alias, Lost and Transformers came up with is the new Fox mystery series Fringe. In the series, an FBI agent finds herself up against a rash of unexplained phenomena, and she recruits a possibly unstable genius and his son to help figure out what's going on. Fringe stars Australian actress Anna Torv as FBI agent Olivia Dunham, Joshua Jackson as Peter Bishop and John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop.

"I feel the show exists on the fringe," says Abrams. "It exists in that cutting-edge place where the things you would think are absolutely impossible are actually happening right this moment in the world or on the precipice. And that to me is a very cool and weird and dramatically fertile place to be."

"One of the themes of the show is that today's advancements can be used for unbelievably beautiful, wonderful things, but they can literally destroy us," says Orci. "And it is alluring for its potential benefits and its potential horror. That is a great thing literally; the science of the show and what happens with it is in the eye of the beholder."

"I think the other aspect of Fringe that is very exciting to us is that it's a really interesting character story," says Kurtzman. "We spent a lot of time thinking about what was our trifecta of characters that we knew we needed to put in this series.I think we came to the idea that telling a father/son story and a relationship story was a really compelling in [to the story]."

"It is a show about people who have real internal lives and real heartbeats and real points of view," says Abrams. "They're relatable characters. They're pitted against incredibly hyper-real and often terrifying situations. In other words, it's a recipe for my favorite kind of storytelling."

According to the producers, Fringe will be a mix of the procedural with strong mythology elements. "You still get crimes. You still get stories with a beginning, middle and an end. But then for the fans there will be slightly more engaging, more conspiratorial stuff.... The idea of literally crashing Law & Order with Lost is very exciting for us," says Kurtzman.

And yes, they are creating Fringe with an end in sight. "There is an answer. We know what's causing the Fringe," says Orci.

"We do know what the pattern is," Kurtzman laughs.

Beyond that, they aren't fighting the online buzz calling Fringe "The X-Files for a new generation."

When we did Alias, we were accused of ripping off Mission: Impossible, and when we wrote Mission: Impossible 3 we were accused of ripping off Alias. And so here we have The X-Files, which itself is a derivative of Night Stalker in the '60s, which is itself a derivative of The Twilight Zone. We'd love to be favorably compared to X-Files, but on the other hand I think we'd be doing this with or without The X-Files," says Orci.

- Kalhie Huddleston