Fringe Will Return In Three Weeks

Fringe will be taking a 3-week break for Thanksgiving and college football, but will return with 3 all-new episodes, starting with "The Human Kind" on FRIDAY, December 7th at 9:00PM .

Fringe Schedule Update: Only Three More Episodes This Year

The mysterious @MaskedScheduled has confirmed that we will only get three more episodes of Fringe this year (instead of four), due to the preemption by the World Series.

The remaining Fringe schedule for 2011 will be:

11/04 - "Novation" (#405)
11/11 - "And Those We Left Behind" (#406)
11/18 - "Wallflower" (#407) - Fall Season Finale

Fringe will resume with new episodes on January 13th.

Yes, it's very unfortunate, but chalk it up to bad luck. If there hadn't been rain-out on Game 6, of if the Texas Rangers would have won game 6, everything would have continued as normal.

Before the wave of complaints start rolling in, lets be perfectly clear. I am as big of a Fringe fan as anyone, but if I were Fox, I would have done the same thing. Well... maybe I wouldn't have shown a rerun on 10/21, but hindsight is 20/20.

Here's the facts: Although some of you may not enjoy baseball, most people watched the World Series. In fact, Game 7 was the highest rated show on any network this season, pulling in 25.4 million viewers. Compare that to Fringe ratings, which have been averaging about 3 million per episode. Also, consider that the price of a 30-second commercial during the World Series is almost 8 times more than during Fringe ($450,000 vs $57,589). 

Feel free to complain in the comments, but can anyone argue with those numbers?

Now about that almost two month break - breaks happen. There are 35 weeks in a normal television season, and Fringe has a standard season order of 22 episodes. That means there are always going to be 13 weeks of either repeats or breaks. Fringe has always had a winter break, and will actually be coming back a week earlier than I expected.

We will have lots of fun stuff going on during the rest of the season and during the break, so check back often. And don't forget to enter our "Watch Fringe Live And Win!" contest every week!

Fringe: Baseball Happened

Here is a tongue-in-check promo announcing the one-week postponement of Fringe due to the World Series game 7.

Fringe will return on November 4th with the episode "Novation"!
There is a new clip from "Novation" in this video, so you may not want to watch if you are avoiding spoilers.

What did you do Friday night with no Fringe?

Game 7 of World Series to Preempt 'Novation' on Friday

With the St. Louis Cardinals taking out Game 6 of the World Series tonight, there will be NO Fringe tomorrow on Fox.

'Novation' will now be screened next week, where we can all Witness The Return!.

World Series Could Preeemt Fringe This Friday

Yesterday's Game 6 of the World Series was officially postponed due to rain, and will be played tonight. This means that if the Saint Louis Cardinals win tonight, game 7 would be on Friday, which would preempt the return of Fringe this week.

What will happen if Fringe gets preempeted? According to the @MaskedScheduler, this week's episode will air next week. Unfortunately, that could push the Fringe "Fall Finale" out of November Sweeps.

Historically speaking, there is only about a 35% chance of the World Series going to seven games, but the Cardinals are playing at home so it could go either way. It might not be a bad idea to start rooting for the Texas Rangers (or for rain on Friday!)

The good news about the World Series airing on Friday would be that it could be a huge blow to the season premiere of NBC's Grimm (i.e. the competition). The World Series has been pulling in over 14 million viewers vs. the usual 3 million for Fringe.

Fringe Schedule For The Rest Of 2011

Tonight on Fringe is the all new episode "Subject 9", but next week's episode will be a re-run of the Season 4 premiere "Neither Here Nor There".

Taking a one week break right now queues up the next four Fringe episodes for "Novermber Sweeps", which runs October 27 – November 23.

This block of four episodes will end with the "Fall Season Finale", making them the last four we see this year. Here is the remaining schedule for 2011:

10/14 - Subject 9 (#404) 
10/21 - Neither Here Nor There (#401 Repeat)
10/28 - Novation (#405)
11/04 - And Those We've Left Behind (#406)
11/11 - Wallflower (#407)
11/18 - Back To Where You've Never Been (#408 - Fall Finale!)

All of the Fringe episodes are now listed in the Fringe US Google Calendar.

Fringe Rerun: Last 4 Episodes of Season 3

As we know, season 4 of Fringe premieres September 23 and Fox will rerun the last 4 episodes of Season 3 begining this Friday at 9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT.

Here's the schedule:

26/08: 3x19 "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide - LSD"

02/09: 3x20 "6:02 AM EST"

09/09: 3x21 "The Last Sam Weiss"

16/09: 3x22 "The Day We Died"

23/09: 4X01 "Neither Here Nor There"

Fringe Fall 2011 Season 4 Schedule

Fox announced their Fall 2011 schedule at today's "upfront", and Fringe will remain at 9:00pm on Fridays (no official season 4 premiere date yet).

There were rumors that JJ Abrams' new show Alcatraz would be the lead-in, but it looks like Fox is going to stick with Kitchen Nightmares at 8:00pm.

Fringe will be up against CSI:NY on CBS, as well as some new competition, with NBC's new fairy-tale crime drama Grimm, and ABC's reality series Shark Tank.

Here is the entire Fox line-up for this fall and spring:

Read more »

Fringe Exclusive: Remaining Schedule For Season 3

We just got word from FOX on the schedule for the remaining season 3 episodes of Fringe.

First the bad news: After this week's 'over-there' episode "Bloodline", there will be two weeks of reruns.

Hmmm. Seems like it would have made more sense to show reruns when you were up against the NCAA playoffs...

It also means we don't get a new episode on April 1st. :(

The good news is, once Fringe returns with new episodes on April 15, we will run the last four episodes of the season straight through to the season finale on May 6th.

Here is the remaining schedule:

3/25 - Bloodline (#318)
4/01 - The Firefly (#310 repeat)
4/08 - Reciprocity (#311 repeat)
4/15 - Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (#319)*
4/22 - 6:02 AM EST (#320) ***
4/29 - The Last Sam Weiss (#321) **
5/06 - The Day We Died (#322 Season Finale!) **

* According to SpoilerTV
** According to TV Line
** According to J.H. Wyman

These dates have been added to the FringeTelevision Google calendar.

UPDATE: According to The Futon Critic, Fringe will continue to air repeats all summer in the "Saturday Night Fringe" timeslot, Saturdays at 11:00PM.

"Fox's 'Fringe' not going gently into Friday night"

Christopher Lawrence LIFE ON THE COUCH

Fox's 'Fringe' not going gently into Friday night From left, Lance Reddick, Blair Brown, Joshua Jackson, Anna Torv, John Noble and Jasika Nicole star in "Fringe," which is moving to 9 p.m. Fridays on KVVU-TV, Channel 5.

Remember "The X-Files"? The guy from "Californication" and the redhead chasing little green men nearly two decades ago? That was the last time Fox made any real noise airing sci-fi on Fridays.

"Sliders." "Millennium." "The Visitor." "Harsh Realm." "FreakyLinks." "Dark Angel." "Firefly." "John Doe." "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." "Dollhouse." Since the mid-'90s, Fox Fridays have done more to break the hearts of nerds than school dances and Jar Jar Binks combined.

Yet that 0-for-15 years streak isn't keeping Fox from hoisting its critically acclaimed "Fringe" (9 p.m. Friday, KVVU-TV, Channel 5) onto the altar of bad scheduling and setting it ablaze.

At the beginning of the season, and for the first time in years, the networks were putting actual effort into programming Fridays. It looked for all the world as though there might be a renaissance on the night given all the series headed there.

But four months later, only The CW's "Supernatural" is really taking hold on its new night. Fox's "The Good Guys" bombed. NBC's "Outlaw" crashed and burned. Fox's "Human Target" and CBS' "Blue Bloods" both escaped to Wednesdays. And ABC pushed Dana Delany's "Body of Proof" from last fall all the way to March 29 just to get it away from Fridays.

So why move "Fringe" there when it was putting up solid if unspectacular ratings on Thursdays, the toughest night of the week? To make room for "American Idol" (8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, Channel 5).

A fixture for years on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, "Idol" kicks off its 10th season by shifting back a day. On the surface, the move lets Fox get a bigger piece of the lucrative Thursday ad budgets as movie studios make their last-gasp efforts to reach viewers before the weekend. But it also allows "Idol" to get its performance shows out of the way of the "Dancing with the Stars" results shows, and it positions Fox to be able to blame the expected ratings drop-off on the new night instead of the loss of Simon Cowell.

Remember "The X-Files"? It was hard not to when "Fringe" launched in 2008, with its coed duo investigating seemingly impossible phenomena under the auspices of the FBI, with a taciturn, bald boss running interference for them. But the drama, from "Lost's" J.J. Abrams, has since morphed into a staggeringly complex tale of parallel universes about to go to war with each other, and it's proudly letting its geek flag fly.

"Fringe" sort of had to ease into this new direction, as it never would have survived its first episode in its current state -- assuming it would have made it to the air at all. But while the progression has been gradual, "Fringe" has covered so much ground in its two-plus seasons, it would be like "Lost" having gone from "Was that a polar bear?" to "Whaddya mean we're all dead?" in a little over a month.

A heartbreaking episode last season revealed that mad scientist Walter Bishop (John Noble) lost his son, Peter, to a rare illness as a child. Looking into the alternate universe through a portal he'd designed, Walter saw that the Peter in that world, being genetically identical to his own, also was dying. So when Walter discovered the cure, he created a wormhole, traveled to the other universe and brought that Peter to our world to save him. Only once Peter was cured, Walter couldn't bring himself to return the boy that by almost every measure was his son.

Ethical issues aside, Walter's meddling created tears that are slowly destroying the other world. Worse, it emboldened that world's Walter, dubbed the Walternate, who is now actively working at the highest levels of government to destroy our universe in the belief that it will save his.

Yeah, it's pretty heady stuff. But it plays surprisingly well even for those of us who are fluent in neither Vulcan nor Na'vi.

In our world, Fringe Division seems to consist primarily of the doddering former mental patient Walter; Peter (Joshua Jackson); FBI agents Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole); their boss, Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick); and a cow named Gene. But over there, Fringe Division has eclipsed the now-defunct FBI and is a part of the Department of Defense, run by Walternate with a ruthless streak that would make Donald Rumsfeld look like the Girl Scout other Girl Scouts picked on.

It's a fascinating, emotional tale that's improving every week. And now all that's at risk after having been sent to what's commonly referred to as "the death slot." But at least "Fringe" isn't going quietly.

A cheeky promo assembled a string of media quotes bemoaning the show's upheaval, with the tagline "You might think Friday night is dead ... but we're gonna re-animate it" -- an allusion to one of the fringe sciences at the heart of the series.

And after learning of the move, producers titled this week's episode "Firefly," an homage to Joss Whedon's late, great Friday night casualty.

In announcing the decision, Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly, who still champions the show, stressed that DVR use already accounts for nearly half the show's audience. So, in theory, if anybody at all shows up to watch "Fringe" live on Fridays, it could thrive there for years to come.

Stranger things have happened.

Remember "The X-Files"?
Source:Las Vegas Review-Journal

Saturday Night Fringe Reruns Return This Saturday!

In an unexpected turn of events, Fringe reruns are returning to Saturday nights. The spot was previously occupied by "The Good Guys", and will give Fringe fans another opportunity to catch new episodes.

Since there is no new Fringe episode this week, this Saturday's Fringe rerun will be "Marionette". But starting next week, we will get a new Fringe episodes on Friday nights at 9:00pm, then that episode will air again on Saturdays at 11:00pm.

"J.J. Abrams 'horrified' by 'Fringe' Move"

Wednesday, January 12 2011, 10:17am EST
By Catriona Wightman

J. J. Abrams has admitted that he is "horrified" by the news that his show Fringe is being moved to Friday nights.

The drama's network Fox announced in November that the series will be pushed back to make way for American Idol.

"Oh, I'm horrified beyond belief," Abrams told Collider. "But as a fan of the genre and the show, I'm hoping that fans will tune in."

He continued: "I certainly can promise that it will be worth their while. The episodes that are coming up are spectacular. I guess you can just be hopeful and say that if the work is good enough, it will find the audience. I think they're doing better work now, even in the second half of season three, than they've ever done in the series. I'm just crossing my fingers that fans of the show show up."

Abrams admitted that he doesn't see an upside to the move because "the audience on Friday nights is harder to find", but insisted that he is still on good terms with Fox.

"Certainly, I would be lying to you if I said I'm thrilled about the move," he said. "But what I am thrilled about is that the network has been incredibly supportive and, despite its move to Friday, they've been nothing but encouraging of the show. It's still on the air in its third season and it's not easy to do that. It's not easy to get to season three of anything. They've allowed the show to become truly great, I think. The question is, will audiences find a great show on Friday nights? I pray that they do."

Source:Digital Spy

Fringe Winter Break Update

This week's Fringe episode "Marionette" is the "winter finale", and will be the last new episode this year (and in the Thursday time slot).

Fringe will return a little earlier than expected, in its new day/time on Friday, January 21st at 9:00pm. The "midseason premiere" episode "Firefly" will kick off a string of six all-new Fringe episodes.

For more information on "Firefly", check out the Fringe Spoilers section.

Fringe Exec Producer Not Worried About Move To Friday

Fringe executive producers Jeff Pinkner spoke with Fancast about the move to Friday nights (in January), and he seems very optimistic:

“What is ironic is that for the last year, all the message boards have been saying ‘Please move the show off of Thursday nights,’ so it is sort of one of those ‘Be careful what you wish for things,’” executive producer Jeff Pinkner says of the move, which starts in January.

“From the inside, you know when you are losing support from your network and studio partners”, Pinkner says. “For us it has been just the opposite.”
“Our show has developed a devoted, rabid fan base. Our critical praise has never been higher. And our fan support has never been more passionate. If we can translate that to Friday nights, which has much lower expectations, we will be around for a good long time.”

Matt Roush of TV Guide also had this to say:

"It's worth noting that [Fringe] is a fairly well-established show whose creative vitals are still strong. Fox executives note that its DVR playback numbers are robust, which counts for something. And many in the media like it — Fringe was just spotlighted on the cover of TV Guide's Sci-Fi Preview — and we aren't likely to let it stay unnoticed in its new period. Plus, expectations will be so low that if Fringe holds on to a fair percentage of its loyal Thursday audience, it will be seen as a win."

So, while it seems that Fringe's move to Friday may not be the end of the world, it is important to keep showing your enthusiastic support. Recording Fringe on your Tivo/DVR, watching it online (at Fringe Episodes, Fox.com, or Hulu), and buying episodes on Amazon or iTunes helps a little, but the most important thing you can do is to WATCH FRINGE LIVE ON FRIDAY NIGHTS! Nothing else even comes close to showing your support by keeping those Neilson ratings up, and that can only happen if you watch it live on FOX.

Fringe to move to Friday night in January

Fox has released it's mid season schedule shake up, and Fringe finds itself being bumped to Friday night 9PM starting on 28th January. Known as the 'death' night in the US TV stakes, fans are understandably upset and disappointed by the move. That being said, there are also some positives that can come from the move. No longer will it be competing with the Thursday night powerhouses, but I believe it can make an ever bigger name for itself here.

Fans need to step up to the plate here and keep watching!! Fringe fans are loyal, so let's get together and make sure that we follow it wherever it goes, and spread to the word far and wide - Fringe is an awesome show that many, many more people SHOULD be watching!

Below is the press release from FOX Network President Kevin Reilly on Fringe's move and we can definitely take some positives from it:

"As for the decision to bump Fringe to Fridays, “Fringe has a very particular, loyal audience,” Reilly said. With the show picking up almost half of its viewrship via DVR, he doesn’t expect the sci-fi series to take a big ratings hit in moving to Fridays where it will be paired with solid reality performer Kitchen Nightmares. “If (Fringe) could stay near the current levels, we’ll get a big trade-up on Friday and will solve our problem there.” - Kevin Reilly (FOX Network President)

What are your thoughts Fringe fans?!

Saturday Night Fringe Encores & Baseball Hiatus *UPDATED*

For the next 6 weeks, Fox will showing encore episodes of Fringe (i.e. repeats) on Saturdays at 11:00PM (10:00 Central). "Saturday Night Fringe" will kick off with "Over There, Part 1".

In the regular Fringe time slot, we only have one new episode left before baseball takes over FOX (NLCS and World Series). If the NLCS ends in 4 games or less, there will be an encore of "Peter" on 10/21.

UPDATE: If the World Series wraps up in less than 7 games, we WILL have a new episode on 11/4 (titled "Amber 31422"), otherwise new Fringe episodes will resume on 11/11.

Fringe Summer Special Repeats and Season 3 Premiere

Fox has just released the Fringe schedule that will run us right up to the season 3 premier. The "summer special repeat run" will kick off  Thursday, August 26 with the Fringe episode "White Tulip", and run until the Fringe Season 3 premiere "Olivia" on September 23rd. Here's the schedule:

• Thursday, Aug. 26 - “White Tulip”
• Thursday, Sept. 2 - “The Man from the Other Side”
• Thursday, Sept. 9 - “Northwest Passage”
• Thursday, Sept. 16 - “Over There, Part One” & “Over There, Part Two”
• Thursday, Sept. 23 - Season Three Premiere “Olivia”

You can also find all episode dates, and other important Fringe events in the Fringe US Calendar Google app, over on the right.

Fringe Returns Two Weeks Early

Fringe will return two weeks early with 'encore' episodes starting March 18th, thanks to early demise of Past Life. The Fringe episode August (208) will re-air this Thursday, and the "winter finale" episode Jacksonville (214) will repeat on March 25th. The Fringe "spring premiere" episode Peter will air on April 1st, followed by the final seven episodes of season two.

For more information on the upcoming episode Peter, including the official press release and promotional photos, head over the the Fringe Spoilers section.