Fringe Creators Reveal Secrets

J.J. Abrams and his co-creators and producers of Fox's upcoming SF series Fringe talked about the show's genesis in their favorite SF&F series of the past and how the series will deal with "the family you choose."

From J.J. Abrams and his Star Trek writing team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Fringe centers on FBI special agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), who finds herself drawn into an investigation of a mysterious aircraft disaster in Boston. Olivia's desperate search for help to save her gravely injured partner leads to brilliant scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who has been institutionalized for the last 17 years. And the only way to question him requires pulling his estranged son Peter (Joshua Jackson) in to help. The investigation gets weirder and weirder as Olivia discovers that things--and science--are not what they seem.

Abrams and executive producers Orci, Kurtzman, Bryan Burk and Jeff Pinkner spoke in a news conference in New York's meatpacking district on Aug. 26 about the series before attending a premiere party in Manhattan later that evening. SCI FI Wire was there; following are excerpts from the news conference with details of the upcoming series. (Abrams brought a box of cupcakes to apologize for showing up late.) Fringe premieres Sept. 9 and will air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

How did this show come together?

Orci: I call this a planned pregnancy. Which means 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 and just--planned pregnancy. So it was all three of us.

Did you set out to remake The X-Files?

Orci: We did not set out to remake The X-Files. We set out to kind of just blend our three tastes, you know?

What were your favorite films, TV shows that led to this?

Orci: The first thing I brought up was Real Genius. Remember the old Val Kilmer movie comedy? It was about a bunch of geniuses at the university, solving scientific problems with science? So that was my sort of weird touch point. ... Alex was a big Twin Peaks fan. So he wanted the sort of surrealistic FBI element to it. And J.J. loves [filmmaker David] Cronenberg. He loves The Fly. He loves those kind of [shows] where medical science or something like that goes just slightly wrong, and it becomes kind of horror, you know? Just kind of those three sensibilities mixed in together.

You would say this is a science fiction series first and foremost, where X-Files was supernatural?

Orci: Yeah, the title itself refers to fringe science, 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 what 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?" You know?

How far are you into it? In terms of scripts?

Orci: We are six scripts in. [Fox has ordered 13 episodes for the fall.]

How much of the mythology do you figure out before the show actually starts? Or is it make it up as you go, as you write the show?

Kurtzman: There's a large mythology that we all kind of decided on when we wrote the pilot, and we knew that when we went to series we were going to have to reach a certain end point. That end point's very flexible in terms of when we get there. If they let us run for 12 seasons, you'll see it in season 12. If they take us off the air by nine episodes, you'll see it in episode nine. So, um, there's a lot of room there.

Orci: Yeah, we were lucky to actually figure it out early. Sometimes you don't figure it out early; you kind of find it as you go, and this time we really do have a plan. ... [It's a lesson we learned from] Alias. We learned it from Alias. We learned a lot from Alias. ...

In J.J.'s previous shows that you guys have worked on, as much of a genre show that they are, there's always a central metaphor. Alias is sort of about a girl who's coming into her own. Lost is about this other thing, these characters dealing with their troubled pasts. Is this about that sort of thing as well?

Orci: I mean, for me it's about the family that you choose, you know? We're trying to crash a procedural with kind of the more genre-type stuff that we like. In a classic procedural, the characters are together because they're assigned to be. In this show, they're together because they kind of need each other. And one of them's father, and she needs him, and he can't be there without his son, who doesn't exactly want to be there, either. So it's a tenuous situation that they're in, which is obviously very exciting dramatically, because there's a lot you can milk out of it for that reason.

Kurtzman: And I think literally, Fringe refers both to fringe science and to these characters who are exploring the fringes of their personality. ... The demons that they face in these cases force them to confront their own demons that they haven't ever necessarily wanted to face in their lives. ...

How will you balance the case-of-the-week episodes with the serialized arc of the overarching conspiracy?
Orci: That's one thing that we demanded from the beginning when we all sat down and were going to do this show, that we have to learn our lessons from before, and we studied procedurals specifically to try and merge the two, and it's very against our instincts to do that. But when nine of the top 10 shows on TV are called Law and Order and C.S.I., you have to study them a little bit and figure out what they're doing that's such a satisfying ... stand-alone.

Kurtzman: I think where you can actually play with serialization a little bit more in a show like Fringe is that where we make sure that our episodes are self-contained--have a beginning, a middle and an end--the character stories can be serialized. They don't have to resolve themselves over the course of one show, and that's actually OK, as long as an audience comes in. If they haven't seen two or three shows before, they can still quickly enter the point of view of the characters, I think we're fine. ...

[Abrams comes in, carrying a bag with several boxes of cupcakes. He passes them around the room.]

Before you got in, Bob was talking a bit about the genesis of the show. Can you talk about that, how your love for a particular show, the genre, fed into this?

Abrams: Sure. My guess is my answer should probably be "What Bob said." But I will add, in probably the same spirit but slightly different language, that the fun of this for us was taking the kinds of things that we loved growing up and combining them and sort of playing with them and making them into something ... that's hopefully brand-new while being in the spirit of things that inspired us. So The Twilight Zone, you know, for me was the most impactful show, mostly because it combined characters that were ultimately damaged--and often heartbreaking--with situations that were absolutely terrifying and weird. And that combination, you know, those elements probably both stand on their own anyway, but together, you know, done well, is my favorite lethal combination. So the idea was "Let's come up with a world and characters that feel of that ilk and a situation that would put them constantly into [it]." Because I know you can't do an anthology show, I don't think, in the way Twilight Zone did, now, for a number of reasons. So it really is a way of doing that. And clearly The X-Files is a huge influence; Altered States is a huge influence; the David Cronenberg films. There were a lot of things that for me were obsessions, and I feel like we get to, you know, play in that arena now.

And regarding subtext, Bob said the show for him was about the family that you choose. For you, what is this show about?

Abrams: Bob is a much deeper thinker than I am [laughs]. I tend to feel more "What is cool?" and sort of find stuff in that. My feeling is that ... they're characters that are compelling to me in any situation, and the fact that they are together and they're thrown into these really weird situations--all I know is that it feels like fertile ground for drama and comedy and terror and romance and the unexpected, and that to me is the show I want to watch. ...

I'm curious about the mythology of this. There are so many shows now with mythology arcs they end getting less interesting the more they end up revealing. How do you make this different from those? It all seems like shows like this succeed most in the first season, before you reveal any of the stuff, and then once the reveals start to happen they start to run out of gas.
Orci: I don't think the stories that we're generating and will continue to generate are dependent on "the answer." So we can in theory indefinitely continue to do what we're going to do, whether or not we have the answer. The fact that we actually know what we're doing, and have an end point, is kind of a bonus that allows us to have everything sort of make sense retroactively. But I don't think our show is predicated on the notion that we're going to have to be revealing our secret every week.

Pinkner: The mythology of the show is one of the rails of the storytelling, but it is by no means the one that we all think that people are going to come back for. It's really just the cherry on the top of the sundae, and ... it's there already: It's there in the pilot. You won't even know it's there. And, ... unlike show's we've done, we're not asking the audience to be wondering [as in Alias] "Who is Rambaldi? What is Rambaldi about? What does Rambaldi want?" It's much more of an open mystery, and the sense of revelation won't be like "Oh, thank God they finally answered that question. Now I can move on to another." We're approaching it from a different point of view.

Can you talk about the casting of Joshua Jacskon?

Abrams: Well, I think he's finally going to leave the Creek after this season. Really, all I love to do is make Pacey jokes. ... Um, sorry. ... Literally one of the things he says [in] one of the very first episodes ... is he's like a babysitter. He's like, "What the hell am I doing here?" ... There is something that happens fairly early on that compels him to stay. And one of the fun things about his character, as you'll see as the series plays out, is ... he's been this odd sort of nomad, sort of journeyman guy, who has sort of had every job. ... He ends up having an important point of view. He's like sort of the third, you know, leg of the table. He's necessary to be there for the stability of the show. So part of it is about deciphering what the hell Walter [Noble] is talking about. Part of it is you know, sort of being a sort of bridge between Olivia and Walter. Part of it is that he's actually, despite himself, [he's found a purpose]. One of my favorite things about it is, he's this guy's son, and he's never really found a purpose. And the odd thing is, in his life, despite his screwed-up relationship with his father, despite really not wanting to be there and really not being good at staying in one place, this guy finds his purpose in this unlikely situation. So I think that his good qualities and the aspects of character that he brings to the group, beyond just sort of being critical for the solution of the mysteries, is also there's a compelling emotional reason understated.

J.J., how involved are you going to be in the show, given your career in feature films directing Star Trek and your other shows?

Pinkner: Have you met the other J.J. Abrams?

Abrams: I don't know. All I can tell you is my involvement in the show right now is about as involved as you could get. We are all talking far too often and to each other, and the truth is, because it's something we all care about, and we want to see be as sort of functional and as successful in the storytelling as possible, ... you can't walk away from something that matters like that. In a case of something like Lost, where I went off to do Mission Impossible III and [co-creator- Damon [Lindelof] really took over that show, day to day, it was so ... easy, because he simply ran with it and did just such an extraordinary job. And it wasn't like I was needed to do this or that. In fact it quickly became clear that I wasn't, necessarily, to have that show be what it's become. On Fringe, we [writers] have such a shorthand--we know each other so well--my gut is that we will be as involved as the show needs us to be, and that’s really going to be an evolution. --Patrick Lee, News Editor