Fall '08: The J.J. Files
Now that the movies and their tall, tall dollars have come a-calling, J.J. Abrams apparently can’t really be bothered to work on TV shows anymore. Unfortunately for viewers, that hasn’t stopped him from creating more of them.
His neglect killed the first-rate Alias stone dead, and nearly did in Lost until co-honchos Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse regained their bearings and yanked the show back on course. None of which bodes well for Fringe, Abrams’ admittedly enjoyable new series for Fox, with which he has once again promised to be totally involved. He swears. This time. Really.
It doesn’t help that his partners on Fringe, who are also too busy cashing fat movie checks to do anything more than casually supervise the series with their names all over it, are arguably among the least talented members of his usual stable of writers. I honestly don’t know how Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci went from jobbing for Hercules: The Legendary Journeys to writing securely mediocre big-budget spectacles for the likes of Michael Bay. The best thing I can say about their work on movies like Transformers and The Legend of Zorro is that it mostly isn’t painful to sit through, and occasionally entertaining, provided things are blowing up or people are fighting or there’s maybe an attractive woman on the screen now and then.
The result, in Fringe’s case, is well below Abrams’ previous high water marks for entertainment, though it’d be a fine effort for nearly any other producer. Fringe is slick, spooky, fun, and watchable, but it also feels like the halfhearted work of an understandably distracted guy. (I have a very strong suspicion that Abrams’ new Star Trek movie will set phasers to awesome.) Where the pilots for Alias and Lost grabbed you by the throat and refused to let go, Fringe’s 90-minute opener feels like it’s coasting on Abrams’ entirely deserved reputation, and the lingering goodwill for that other well-known Fox series about FBI agents investigating the paranormal.
Sure, you could boil Alias down to Felicity in the CIA, and reduce Lost to Survivor (With Polar Bears). But both had a spine-tingly charge of the otherworldly about them, whether through Alias’s Renaissance techno-prophet Milo Rambaldi or Lost’s eerie Dharma Initiative, that made them feel fresh and new. Fringe, in contrast, is basically a remake of The X-Files. Government agents investigate a rash of bizarre incidents, some of which may be related to a ruthless, far-reaching conspiracy. There it was alien abductions and government spooks; here, things kick off with a face-melting synthetic virus unleashed on an airplane, and the creepy corporation that may or may not be behind it. The specifics and the character dynamics may be different, but the premise is exactly the same.
Those character dynamics, in all fairness, are pretty interesting. Abrams’ seemingly unerring knack for casting hugely charismatic female leads hasn’t deserted him here; as FBI agent Olivia Dunham, Anna Torv’s only weak spot is her on-again off-again American accent. The character seems pretty flat on the page — most of the characters do, honestly — but even when the script’s letting her down, you can see Torv digging deep to make Olivia a whole and believable person. She’s smart, dogged, open-minded, and not above the occasional sly bit of duplicity. There’s a part at the end where the script, for some reason, calls for Olivia to be all smiley and flirty immediately after what have got to be several of the very worst days of her life. But Torv pushes that happiness right to the ragged edge of hysteria; she finds the heartbreak and desperation just underneath Olivia’s smile. Whether or not Fringe goes anywhere, Torv’s definitely one to watch.
As good as she is, John Noble’s even better. The actor best known to geeky Americans as Denethor from The Lord of the Rings here plays Walter Bishop, a massively brainy and mentally unstable scientist whose decades-old research is linked to the in-flight horrorshow Olivia’s investigating. I’ll give the script credit where it’s due here; crazy is a hard thing to pull off in drama, and both the writing and Noble’s performance really nail it. Bishop seems not so much insane as just off on his own abstract plane of reality, by turns touching, mysterious, and slightly frightening. Walter’s left hand also has an eerie habit of trembling involuntarily, which left me wondering whether that’s a callback to Doctor Strangelove (his dark side approaching the surface) or Saving Private Ryan (the flutterings of his conscience). His character is the best, most distinctive, and most intriguing aspect of the pilot.
As the wobbly third corner of this triangle, we have Joshua Jackson as Walter’s son Matthew Peter, an unfortunate collision of just-OK acting and really bad, lazy writing. Pete’s role as a mediator and translator of sorts between off-on-Mars Walter and grounded Olivia is actually fairly compelling, which makes the two-dimensionality of his character all the more disappointing. Despite never graduating from college, Peter’s got an IQ of 190. How do we know this? Um… other characters tell us so, and occasionally he spouts polysyllabic technobabble. We also know he’s a total jerk because he repeatedly calls Torv’s character “sweetheart” — although apparently, all it takes is a smile from her and the realization that she totally hoodwinked him for Pete to quit sulking, fire up the ol’ Sexual Tension Engines to Maximum Smolder, and go running around punching people on her behalf. Seriously, there is zero other motive for his character’s change of heart beyond “I am having a change of heart,” and possibly, “Wow, blonde FBI gal pretty.” Jackson’s performance is perfectly serviceable in this hugely underwritten role; he seems to have two expressions, Smirk and Brood, and he gives both of them a workout. The poor guy’s probably just glad to be in something that isn’t a crappy horror movie or, you know, Dawson’s Creek.
The cast also includes the awesome Lance Reddick, doing the best he can with a far more thankless variant of his steely-eyed bossman from The Wire. (Like The X-Files’ Walter Skinner, his real allegiance in the murky goings-on is left deliberately uncertain.) And in the pilot’s one true moment of deliciously weird Abrams-ness, Blair Brown shows up as a functionary of the sinister Massive Dynamic corporation. She’s perhaps deceptively pleasant, entirely too reasonable, and her character has a really great, unnerving quirk to her that I hesitate to spoil here. She also gets the best and last line of the pilot, in a closing scene that again comes temptingly close to the spooktacular goodness of Abrams’ previous work.
Like I said, Fringe is slickly made, and every penny of the pilot’s big budget shows. Director Alex Graves is no Abrams when it comes to weaving together startling visuals and nail-biting action; I was hoping for something more like Abrams’ riveting pilots for Alias and Lost, and I didn’t get it. But the opening flesh-dissolving sequence on the plane is imaginatively staged (bonus points for having the unfortunate Patient Zero’s kindly, concerned seatmate be an Arab guy), and Graves makes the most of the pilot’s freedom to shoot in gorgeously gray and wintry Massachusetts surroundings.
The story? Eh, not bad. It kept me watching, and there was one big twist I could see coming in general — the series would have had no premise without a turnabout of some sort — but which pleasantly surprised me in its particulars.
On the minus side, the script dips into cliche too often. At one point, they ask the crazy guy, “What do we do now?” And instead of saying something great and weird, as he has in previous scenes, he just says, “… We wait.” Guys, Joss Whedon would have knocked a softball like that out of the park, and you know it. Also, for what feels like the umpteenth time in popular culture, we get a scene where Crazy Person Long Removed From the World finds profundity in an episode of Currently Popular Cartoon Show. (While eating takeout Chinese food! Someone in the writers’ room won Cliche Bingo that day.)
On the plus side, there’s a cow. Far too few science fiction dramas involve cows as regular cast members. I wholeheartedly approve of this bold leap forward for bovine representation on TV.
I also admired the series’ attention to detail. Stray cats prowl outside the windows of Walter Bishop’s basement lab, and after Torv’s character gets banged up in an explosion, her arms and legs show nasty bruises when she strips down to her skivvies for a stint in an isolation tank. (It’s a J.J. Abrams pilot. Of course the lead gal’s going to show off her undies, and of course she’s pretty damn spectacular. Although unlike Evangeline Lilly’s pause-the-TiVo moment in the Lost pilot, here Torv’s getting a metal probe shoved in her skull while tripping on ketamine and LSD, which tends to distract somewhat from her considerable Australian splendor.)
Apparently, Fringe’s premiere was a big disappointment ratingswise — surprising, given the heavy promotion it got, and Abrams’ strong pedigree among sci-fi fans. After watching the pilot, I’m not quite sure I’d mourn it if it went away, although it seems to promise a fun ride in future episodes. I’ll be interested to see whether Abrams keeps his promises to be more involved this time around. Perhaps it’s better that Fringe ultimately comes across as J.J. Abrams Lite. It’ll be that much less disappointing if Abrams ditches this latest effort to go off and do something involving, oh, even fatter stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
The truth is out there — except, you know, in a completely novel and different way — Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Fox.
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