Fringe: Pilot
By fred | June 17, 2008
(PreAir) This is so cool !! I have not hidden the fact that of all the new series coming up next season, there weren’t that many that I was really excited about. In fact, only two of them really sound truly exciting, both are new sci-ci shows to air on Fox, and both come from people we know and trust : J.J. Abrams (Fringe) and Joss Whedon (Dollhouse).
And recently, I was lucky enough to put my eyes on a screener of one of those, J.J. Abrams’ latest creation : Fringe. This show is the show everyone is talking about, this is the show everyone thinks might be the next big hit, next season’s top new series, and with the names associated behind it, pushed by the promo Fox is making about the show and thanks to the $10 million budget for the two-hour pilot only, needless to say there are enormous hype and expectations when it comes to Fringe.
I got to sit and watch this two-hour pilot, and while I’ll try as much as possible to remain spoiler-free not to ruin things for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, let me tell you this : I’m still incredibly excited about the show !!
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Shows: Fringe
In Series: Fringe Season 1
(S01E01) This is it, the big series premiere everyone has been waiting for, the debut of J.J. Abrams’ latest creation after the such of Alias, Felicity or of course Lost. This wasn’t the first time I watched this two-hour episode, since I had already seen and screener. But watching the show a second time was still a lot of fun, I have to say, and I didn’t change my mind on what I thought of this episode.
(S01E02) So here we go, the second episode of the famous new series Fringe, and the first one to give us a real idea of what the show will look like. The pilot divided people in two camps, some thought the show was great, others not so much. One thing for sure is this : this is the latest creation of J.J. Abrams.
(S01E03) Long before it even premiered a few weeks back, Fringe was compared to many different series, one of them being, of course, The X-Files. I think the producers themselves might have even referred to the show, among others, when trying to describe Fringe, but they also insisted that this show wouldn’t be like The X-Files, or anything like another J.J. Abrams’ creation, Lost, when it comes to the serialization aspect of things.
(S01E04) Long before anyone saw the first episode of this new series, J.J. Abrams & co made sure to tell everyone that Fringe wouldn’t be anything like Lost, read that it wouldn’t be a show you need to watch every single week in order to understand something, because otherwise you would rapidly get lost and have no clue of what’s going on. This would be a show you can watch an episode, any episode, without having watch any of the previous one, and still fully enjoy it.
(S01E05) Allow me to start by mentioning something I’ve already talked about in the past, but it really irritates me. Fringe isn’t the only show I watch, far from it, but it seems to be about the only one where I often myself having to turn the volume down a notch whenever there’s some music playing. Should it be actual music, like early on when Joseph was listening to some himself, or when it’s music used to, well, here I’d say yell to the audience how to feel, it’s always much louder than the rest of the time, and it’s incredibly annoying. Seriously guys, please, you gotta fix that.
(S01E06) After five episodes of Fringe, one thing had become clear on how each episode seemed to be constructed, one thing that wasn’t really a good thing : they all went by the same formula. No matter what the topic of the weekly fringe science was, every episode would open with the latest weird experiment gone wrong or something similar, then Broyles, alongside Olivia, Peter and of course Walter would show up to the scene, after a little investigation Walter would link it to his past work, come up with an experiment of his own allowing for Olivia to catch the bad guy in the end.
(S01E07) Fringe is a good show, so far. I think it would be fair to say that, and while it’s not a complete hit or far from being what I’m sure many thought it would be, being the latest J.J. Abrams’ creation and all, it’s still a very good, modest hit. But it’s also very true to say it isn’t great, it still fails to become really appointment television, the thing you don’t want to miss and can’t wait for.
(S01E08) I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this show, as I explained last week. And as a matter of fact I’m even not sure how I felt about this episode, I don’t know if it was a really good one or not. I’ve said many times that this show failed, so far, to create real excitement within each episode, that it always relied on the same old formula to construct all episodes, which does leave a big mystery part out of the equation, as well as having this tendency to fall back on serialized plots to try to create a sense of excitement.