Secrets of Fringe: A Look Back, Season 1

Fringe executive producer Jeff Pinkner discusses the vision of Season 1, Peter Bishop, William Bell, Olivia Dunham, Walter Bishop, and The Observer.

Season 2 of Fringe premieres September 17th, 2009 on FOX.

Fringe At Comic-Con 2009

The good folks over at SlashFilm just announced Fringe's slate at this month's infamous San Diego Comic-Con (which should really be renamed Media-Con in this day and age).

The Fringe Screening and Q&A will take place on Saturday, July 25th, featuring Anna Torv, Josh Jackson, and John Noble from the cast, along with writer/producers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, and J.H. Wyman.

Fans will be treated to a "special video presentation" (the season 2 premiere?), along with a question-and-answer session.

If you're planning on attending the Fringe panel at this year's Comic-Con, please let us know! You can email me at adam (at) fringetelevision.com.

Jeff Pinkner: Alternate Realities On Fringe

Fox's Official Fringe website has a new video featuring Fringe Showrunner Jeff Pinkner explaining the Alternate Realities as seen in "There's More Than One Of Everything"

What Would You Ask: Jeff Pinkner and JR Orci?

Excited about the return of Fringe? So are the writers and producers.

Writer and Supervising Producer J.R. Orci will join "Showrunner" Jeff Pinkner in an exclusive FringeTelevision.com interview to answer your questions about the future of Fringe.

What would you ask? We'll be accepting questions until tomorrow (3/17) at midnight (EST).

LA Times: Fringe Q&A with Jeff Pinkner

The LA Times Blog has an interview with Jeff Pinkner, the co-executive producer for Fringe, which was just picked up for a full season by Fox. Pinkner discusses how getting picked up for a full season affected the show, hidden Easter eggs, scientific accuracy in the series, and the necessity of exploding heads in a program about science.

Fringe: A Q&A with Jeff Pinkner
Patrick Kevin Day

Q. How did getting picked up for a full season change your planning on the show?

A. If we had only done 13 episodes, I think we all would have been immensely disappointed. The story that we’ve created for this show is a multi-year story. We started by figuring out what the ending was. If we’d only done 13 episodes, I don’t think there would have been a way to satisfyingly move everything up that quickly. The answer is, it doesn’t change our long-term plans, except it allows us to see our long-term plans through.

Q: Did you have a tentative 13th episode ending planned?

A: No, to a degree that would have been planning for failure. And we were all hoping for success.

Q: How many years do you have planned?

A: 75. It will go on longer than any of us. [laughs] No, it’s sort of like an accordian file. There are roads we would love to explore if we have the time. The basic framework I don’t want to say out loud because I think it’s a jinx.

Q: Will the format of Fringe evolve over time the way Lost has?

A: I think of Lost as a show that feels like it's changed, but the change is inevitable. It started on the island, then it went into the island and now it’s about protecting the island. Our show, the basic format will not change as drastically, but it will definitely feel like a deepening and enriching of the story we’re telling.

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Q: The first few episodes of the season seemed a bit repetitive. But the Observer, introduced in the fourth episode, really changed the scope of the show. Was his late introduction intentional?

A: In some ways the show is an experiment for us. We are not, by our own admission, the best at telling stand-alone stories. Because we’re fundamentally attracted to creating worlds, which inherently have an epic scope. While shows like Law & Order are spectacular, it doesn’t have the same epic quality of say, Harry Potter.

It’s our goal to both tell stories, where if you’ve seen nothing before and nothing after, you’ll see a very satisfying 50 minutes of television. But if you have seen what’s come before, you have a whole other level of appreciation.

We set out to populate our world from the start with characters and little mysteries that will only pay off over time. There’s things in the pilot that won’t pay off until Season 3.

I can tell you that there’s almost nothing that’s accidental on the show. There’s no throw-away lines of dialogue, the Observer being in shots is not an accident. There’s Easter eggs all over the place. Many of them are just for the fun of people who want to play along. Several of them have yet to be discovered. But they’re not necessary for the enjoyment of the show. They’re really just for run. If you were to crack the code, it will raise the level of satisfaction, hopefully. For example, in every episode there’s a clue about what the next episode is going to be about.

Q: Can you give a specific example?

A: In the pilot of the show, if you watch carefully in the establishing shot of Massive Dynamic, there’s a sign on the post that’s a little rebus of a pen and a rose. The serial killer’s dad in the second episode is Dr. Penrose. There’s little fun things like that in every episode.

Q: What can you tell us about what we’ll be seeing in the next few weeks?

A: The next episode is a foundational episode, and a lot of things will be set up which will come to pay off over the next several weeks. The next four episodes are stand-alone in quality, but at the same time we start to peel back another layer of the onion. The first six were a prologue, and now we’re getting into the next chapter.

Q: When will the Observer make a major return appearance?

A: He’s laying dormant at the moment. But in the way that pieces come together and interlock, his story is still being told.

Q: Lost has been very secretive regarding its story lines. Do you take secrecy as seriously on Fringe?

A: We don’t have the same level of fanaticism. With Lost, there’s a level of fanaticism that you wouldn’t believe, and so they’re secretive out of necessity. We are definitely protective, and we want the audience to discover the show how we want them to discover it. We definitely try to protect ourselves, but we haven’t found the necessity for the government level of secrecy that Lost has needed to maintain.

Q: Dr. Bishop seems like the most fun character to write.

A: He’s incredibly fun to write. I should say it’s fun to write all of our characters and how they see the world through their prism. I think to write a show solely about Walter Bishop might be a little frustrating. The two main characters, Peter and Olivia, balance him out. I think the three of them provide a very stable triangle for our show. He’s incredibly fun to write for because he can say and do anything, which is a blast for a writer. He’s incredibly brilliant and he’s forgotten just how brilliant he is. He’s scared of his own shadow, and he’s scared of the things he’s done in the past, and he’s incredibly childlike. Which is just really fun to write for.

Q: It seems like it would be easy to go too far with the character. Do the writers have rules for him?

A: I think the rule is you have to bring it back to humanity. It always has to be honest. John Noble, who plays Walter, is unbelievably smart and insisted on finding the humanity in the character. He plays it from a believable place and doesn't play him from a goofball, cuddly cute place. That's our prime directive: Keep it real and honest.

Q: The number of characters being abducted and given extraordinary powers made a lot of sense when someone in a recent episode alluded to the building of an army. Is that what’s going on here?

A: Yes, though I think "army" can be taken more than one way, it's more figurative than literal. But I think the basic premise that there are people who are using our world as a scientific playground is sort of the touchstone.

What scares me is what science is capable of and what we know government and private individuals are experimenting with and toying with in the name of science and the spirit of pure curiosity. Science has the capability of rocking the foundation of what we consider to be reality right now. There was a very real fear among very smart scientists when they fired up the Hadron supercollider that our universe would disappear. I suppose none of us would have known it; we just would have been gone. But these aren’t things to be taken lightly.

Our world, as we’ve seen with the recent financial collapse, is controlled largely by private industry, which does not have the same regulations as government. And when you have unfettered imagination married to technological resources we’ve never had before, plus money, it can become quite scary.

Literally everything we’ve done on our show is grounded in actual scientific fact. We’ve trying to tell entertaining stories. We have the license to get a little crazy, but it’s all grounded in fact.

Q: How much scientific fact is present in any episode?

A: In the last episode, "Bellini’s lymphocemia" was a made-up name, though the qualities of the disease are real. We just didn’t want to imply that individuals working on their own could cure it. We didn’t want to be irresponsible to people with the real disease.

Q: Do you always feel that outside pressure?

A: There’s always a degree of responsibility we feel, but all of our science is grounded in reality. We’re not telling any stories that are in the world of potential.

Q: If you’re playing with the reality anyway, why rely on scientific fact at all? Couldn’t you just completely make something up that sounds plausible and go with that?

A: Yes. But our rule is we don’t want to do it if it’s totally made up. I’m sure people would tell you everything we’re doing is totally unbelievable, but for us, if we set out to do an utterly fictional show, it would probably be easier in some ways, but it would be less exciting. I think we all quite like the idea that we’re working in the realm of the real, as opposed to the entirely made-up. Again, it’s not necessary to watch the show and see how it’s ripped from the headlines, because it’s not. But there’s a certain quality of authenticity that it’s much easier to create if you know the parameters.

Q: The show’s more graphic than anything we’ve seen on network TV in a while.

A: I think we always want to have a quality of “Oh, my God, can you believe what they did on Fringe last night?” When I was a kid growing up, one my best friends’ dads was an ophthamologist, and at their house he had films of all of his surgeries. All of his surgeries were locked-down camera close-ups of eyeballs with scalpels cutting into them and peeling back the corneas. And they’d be running all the time. It was very real and honest — they were created for the purpose of education. Science is kind of disgusting. The human body is kind of disgusting when you look at it inside out, and our show needs to acknowledge that.

Q: Have you encounted any censor problems with things like expoding heads?

A: No. There’s been one or two shots they’ve asked us to trim back, but I think they do far more upsetting things on 24. Not to say that 24 is mean-spirited, but none of our stories involve torture. It’s all very organic.

Q: How’s the experiment with Fringe having limited commercials going?

A: We’re doing an extra act of television every week. Storytelling-wise, we’ve gotten used to it. It’s fanastic when storytellers are given an extra seven minutes of time, but it’s been hard. It’s impossible on prodouction. We’re doing an extra 20% of television every week. We don’t have 20% extra money and time. We’re getting comfortable with the pace of our production. But the writing is challenging, because with those seven minutes we’re still trying to keep the story energy up, and it’s a very fine line between going deeper with the story and keeping it moving.

Secrets of Fringe, with Kurtzman, Pinkner, & Orci

There's no new episode of Fringe tonight, but Executive Producers Alex Kurtzman, Jeff Pinkner, and Roberto Orci have something to tide you over until next week - The Secrets Of Fringe. They discuss seven important insights about Olivia Dunham, Walter Bishop, Peter Bishop, Phillip Broyles, The Observer, The Pattern, and Agent Scott.

If that only whets your Fringe appetite, why not catch up on some Fringe podcasts, or head over to the Fringe wiki, and contribute to Fringe community!

UPDATE: E!'s Watch With Krisitn has some more Q&A with Kurtzman and Orci. Specifically, they address some concerns I have seen in the comments:

Is It All About Walter? So far almost every case has tied directly back to Walter's (John Noble) work. Isn't that a lot of weirdness leading back to one man? Said Orci: "There is a much larger mosaic at play here, and Walter's work is part of it. A lot of the work that Walter did before he was committed, and before he lost a lot of his memory, was stolen from him. The question is, who stole it and why, and does the Pattern have something to do with the work that he's done?" However, Kurtzman said, "It won't always be about his work." And thank goodness, because I love the guy, but Walter was thisclose to becoming the Mary Sue of mad scientists...

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SciFi Wire Interview: FRINGE Premiere

Sci Fi Wire has an interview with FRINGE creators J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Jeff Pinkner, at a FRINGE news conference the evening of the premiere, where they discussed the show's genesis in their favorite SF&F series of the past and how the series will deal with "the family you choose."

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.

Abrams: 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 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.

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?

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.

Click here to read the full article, or visit SciFi.com.

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

Executive Producer Jeff Pinkner Explains Fringe

Newsarams.com's Bryan Cairns interviews Fringe Executive Producer Jeff Pinkner who, despite being named showrunner late in the game, gives an exceptional interview--chock-full of interesting details about the show, the characters, the actors, the team, the process. It's a must read for anyone curious about Fringe. So much so that it's bordering on spoilerish, so I've excerpted a few of the interesting bits and the link after the jump...

“The premise is that an event happens that brings FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, onto a case,” explains Executive Producer Jeff Pinkner. “In the course of it, her partner is actually injured and in an effort to try and save him, she seeks out a brilliant scientist who himself has been incarcerated in an institution for the last 17 years for various reasons. He is doing research in the fringe sciences, the very out there concepts, which of course are all very real like telekinesis and reanimation. The only way she is able to get him out of the asylum is with the help of a family member so she is forced to seek out his son Peter who has had no relationship with him over the last 20 years. He has no interest in helping but does so because he sees how emotionally invested Olivia is.

"The three of them are able to actually solve the case and during the course of it, it is revealed to her that there is actually a very specialized department of Homeland securities unit looking into a series of recent events that the government is referring to as The Pattern. These are unexplained events which seem to call into question what we understand as reality. With the help of the scientist, Walter Bishop, played by John Noble, and his son Peter, played by Joshua Jackson, the three of them set out to discover what the hell is going on.”

“Olivia is just an incredibly driven, incredibly brilliant agent with her own complicated past that we will peel back over time,” reveals Pinkner. “She is exposed to these events which seem to be taking place around the globe at more regular intervals than previously and sets out to solve these cases, if anyone is behind them, if they are simply freak natural occurrences, and at the same time, figure out her life.”

“Peter is sort of a jack of all trades. He is a brilliant person with a lot of his father’s innate intelligence but given his relationship with his Dad, he has turned his back on science and what he believes in. He has sort of lived by the seat of his pants for many years and in the process, has left a wake of disappointment with business partners and vengeful ex girlfriends.

"Peter is sort of a guy running from his own shadow, living by the seat of his pants, and cutting business deals as he globe trots. He is forced by honor and duty to join the team as well. He has one foot in and out and isn’t happy about being his father’s babysitter. Peter is understandably freaked out with the matters they are looking into but he finds a certain satisfaction in his own degree of expertise and being able to help. He has feelings for Olivia, a complicated relationship with his father, and starts to find his faith in the world as he moves along.”

“Walter is perhaps one of the most brilliant scientists known but in the name of science, and on behalf of the government back in the 70’s and the Vietnam/Cold War era, he has perhaps left a lot of harm in his wake. He has potentially damaged a lot of people and developed a lot of technologies that others may have exploited in the past. As a consequence, there either was or wasn’t a series of events that caused him to lose his mind and break down. He was found criminally guilty and put into an institution where they have done all kinds of advanced therapies to him, which have further damaged his mind. Despite all that, he’s the only person we can rely on to help us solve all these cases.”

“To be honest, Josh was one of the first people who read for us,” recalls Pinkner. “People also had Pacey in mind and Josh is not Pacey by any means. He is very much all grown up. Josh is an adult now and Pacey was an adolescent. Every other actor we auditioned, it was like ‘We need Joshua Jackson.’ Josh is perfect for the role and interestingly enough, he forced everyone to reconsider him because everyone had a little bit of a Pacey hangover. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing but actually great. The character is just not Pacey. This character is a lot darker, a lot more soulful, and Josh came in and nailed the role and convinced everyone he is Peter. He is incredibly talented and pretty much emails me every couple of days going ‘When can we get started?’ The other fantastic thing about Joshua is he is wildly intelligent, as is his character, so he just brings a depth and gravity to everything he does.”

“As for Anna Torov, the process for Olivia had gone well past the 12th hour because nobody was willing to settle. Somehow, someone discovered Anna, an Australian actress who hadn’t really worked in New York before. She was put on tape in Australia and as soon as everybody saw her audition, it was instantly ‘There’s our girl! We found her! Moving on!’”

"Fringe, unlike Alias or Lost, will have cases of the week, cases that we well get involved with and may solve at the end of each episode,” reports Pinkner. “At the same time, there will be a much larger mythology running through the whole series. What I enjoy about that is we are literally exploring a world. The show is about things much larger than itself. What I enjoy about TV is spending time with characters that grow. What is great about these shows with mythologies is that at the same time that the characters are changing, we are exploring different aspects of a real fictional universe so our canvas is very vast. We as writers and creators can explore themes or ideas that interest us. We don’t feel limited because anything that interests us we can chase down. That is really fun for me.”

To steer Fringe along, a diverse team of writers including Without A Trace’s David Goodman, The Sopranos Jason Cahill, and Gossip Girl’s Felicia Henderson have been assembled.

Read the article in its entirety at Newsarama.com.

Fringe Q&A at Comic-Con: Creators and Cast Fully Represented

Comic-Con has posted the complete 2008 program schedule. Fringe, in addition to the 6:00–7:30 and 7:30-9:00 screenings on Wednesday, July 23, will screen the trailer again on Saturday, July 26, followed by a powerhouse Q&A:

4:45-5:45 Fringe Q&A and Trailer Screening—J. J. Abrams (Lost), Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman—the team behind Mission: Impossible 3, Alias, and the upcoming Star Trek feature—join fellow Fringe executive producers Bryan Burk (Cloverfield) and Jeff Pinkner (Lost), as well as stars Anna Torv (The Pacific), Josh Jackson (Shutter), and John Noble (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), for an exclusive Q&A about one of the most anticipated new television series of the fall season, a drama that will thrill, terrify and explore the blurring line between science fiction and reality. The session will kick off with the screening of a trailer for the series. Television Week deputy editor and columnist Joe Adalian moderates. From Bad Robot Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television, Fringe premieres September 9 and airs Tuesdays at 9:00 PM on FOX. Ballroom 20

Edit: Don't miss Fringe at Comic-Con. See our Complete Fringe Schedule for Comic-Con 2008.

Entertainment Weekly: 'Lost' writer to run new J.J. Abrams drama 'Fringe'

Uber-producer J.J. Abrams has recruited longtime Lost scribe Jeff Pinkner to serve as the showrunner on Fringe, Abrams' much-anticipated sci-fi drama in the works for fall at Fox. Pinkner, who also worked with Abrams on Alias, will oversee the drama, which stars Dawson Creek's Joshua Jackson (...) as a member of a unit investigating other-worldly mysteries. The group also includes an insane scientist (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King's John Noble) and an FBI agent (Australian actress Anna Torv). The series, which Abrams has described as similar in spirit to The X-Files, Altered States, and The Twilight Zone, is currently shooting a two-hour pilot with a reported $10 million-plus budget. -- EW.com