10 Reasons Why You Should Watch "Fringe"

Under lesser writers and producers, Fringe could very easily give viewers unbearable migraines. Entering its fourth season, the show has firmly established a parallel universe where the characters’ duplicates exist with opposite personalities, and most episodes flip-flop back and forth between worlds without announcements. And in the midst of all the universe-hopping, Peter Bishop, one of Fringe’s major players, has, per the mind-blowing Season Three finale, never even existed. Or has he?

That question is the crux of Season Four, but as faithful viewers tune in to see where the hell the show is about to go, they all do so with ease, knowing that the brains behind Fringe are master storytellers. It’s as if the Bad Robot team has learned from their Lost follies (i.e., muddled narratives and meandering subplots) and have been using Fringe to demonstrate their written maturity.

This doesn’t mean that the uninitiated should jump right into Season Four without any background preparation, though—Fringe is still an intricate series that demands to be experienced from its pilot onward. But the millions of sleepers out there can feel confident that their brains will be massaged throughout, but not with any pain.

Rarely are love connections handled as well on television as Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham's is. In Fringe’s first season, the show’s producers opted for the X-Files approach, keeping the relationship platonic, a la Mulder and Scully, but always doing so with the awareness that viewers were on edge, anticipating an inevitable hook-up. The move paid off, giving the characters plenty of time to develop a concrete bond through genuine friendship and mutual survival during an endless series of dangerous, otherworldly cases.

Once Peter and Olivia finally gave into their attraction, Fringe’s overseers found new, clever ways to challenge their feelings. For most of Season Three, Olivia is trapped in the parallel universe, meaning that her doppelganger, called “Fauxlivia,” takes her place in our world. Looser in demeanor and much less prudish, the darker-haired Fauxlivia turns up the heat with Peter, who seems to think he’s dealing with an improved Olivia; meanwhile, Olivia endures the parallel universe’s deadlier ways by holding onto the hope that she’ll one day see Peter again.

Credit the fine acting of Joshua Jackson and Anna Torv, or award extensive props to Fringe’s writing team—either way, the Peter/Olivia saga is the closest most sci-fi geeks will ever get to true romance.

The dilemmas on Fringe aren’t completely different from traditional genre show issues: characters can die at any moment, and the world is constantly on the verge of destruction. But what makes Fringe so compelling is the fact that all of the show’s predicaments are doubled. With its investment in two parallel universes, Fringe’s mythology threatens each character with not one but two deaths, and there are two societies in need of protection and salvation.

If a fan’s favorite character dies in one universe, like, say, Homeland Security senior agent Broyles (Lance Reddick) in the alternate land, said Fringe head then has to relive the anguish of “will he or won’t he live” all over again in the other world. And, with the two interlocked universes combating against one another, the downfall of one can have dramatic aftereffects on the other.

Too much for your brain to handle? Don’t worry, MTV usually airs Jersey Shore re-runs on Friday nights. And there’s definitely only one Snooki.

In September 2008, right when Fringe was the talk of the fall TV season on the strength of J.J. Abrams’ involvement, many of the sci-fi folks excited about the prospect of a new-age X-Files had one inescapable reservation: The show’s male lead, Joshua Jackson, once starred on the pussy-willow teen soap Dawson’s Creek. And shitty movies such as The Skulls, Cursed, and Shutter.

At best, those curious about Fringe were hoping for contentment akin to watching one-time Party Of Five softie Matthew Fox hold his own as a level-headed badass on Lost; at the worst, they’d have one less TV show to follow. So imagine the shock they felt once Jackson strolled through the pilot episode with likeable charm, intelligent wit, and strong front-man presence.

Now having embodied Peter Bishop for three years, Jackson has finally come into his own as an actor. He’s required to nail a load of emotions, particularly in scenes with Peter’s father, Walter, who actually stole Peter from his parallel universe counterpart, dubbed Walternate, after his own Peter baby died from a rare genetic disease. Once Peter finds out that Walter has lied to him over the years, Jackson gets tasked with heavy dramatic lifting, and his back has yet to break.

Last season, the story’s focus on the back-and-forth universe drama prevented Fringe from showing off its gory effects prowess with as much reckless abandon as in the past, but we’ll always have seasons one and two. During the show’s earlier seasons, episodes begin with cold opens that establish the episode’s primary antagonist, which is usually some kind of mutative germ or disease that causes people’s skin to melt, brains to implode, throats to slit open, and one poor girl to give birth to an elderly man (see the episode titled “The Same Old Story”).

And, despite Fringe’s network TV existence, the visuals never look painfully cheesy. More often than not, the effects impress with eye-gouging imagery that rivals most big-budget movie productions. In the Season Two episode “Snakehead,” for example, a huge worm with long tentacles bursts out of a dude’s mouth, a shocking and nicely rendered sight that’s reminiscent of the infamous chest-busting scene from director Ridley Scott’s Alien. To put it bluntly, Fringe’s sparingly used gruesomeness makes the The Walking Dead’s rampant gore look like Party City makeup work.

The Fringe family’s ultimate burden has to be watching Emmy Awards announcement ceremonies and broadcasts knowing that their beloved show deserves to be nominated in the place of inconsistent shows like Dexter. The chances of ever seeing Fringe as an Emmy contender are slimmer than Jonah Hill, but there is one small hope that’s worth keeping: John Noble as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.

And why not? Anyone who’s seen at least two or three Fringe episodes knows that Noble, an Australian actor previously recognized as Denethor in Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, is the show’s emotional core. As Dr. Walter Bishop, he’s a real heartbreaker, endlessly worrying about his son Peter, battling with the knowledge that Peter knows he’s really Walternate’s son, and doing his best to maintain integrity in spite of his weirdness and obsessive quirks (the man sure does love those strawberry milkshakes).

How about Walternate? The polar opposite of licorice-devouring Walter, Noble’s character in the parallel universe is a confident and tyrannical man of devastating science, which allows Noble to show his range. But we’re more partial to plain old Walter, one of television’s most sympathetic do-gooders who’s worthy of statuesque recognition.

We should take a momentary break from all of this Fringe-slobbing and call the show out for a major fuck-up: Why the hell isn’t Gene, every viewer’s favorite member of the bovine community, a series regular by now? He’s the show’s unofficial mascot, hanging out inside Dr. Walter Bishop’s laboratory and popping up in random episodes to the delight of fans. With all of the strangeness that goes down on Fringe, you’d think that the writers could dream up a storytelling device that’d send Gene out on missions with Olivia, Peter, and Sir Walt—but, no, the cow is stuck indoors as a recurring character.

Gene has been on board since the show’s pilot, acting as Walter’s preferred experimental test subject for human problems, being that, per Walter’s insight, cows are so genetically similar to flesh-and-blood men and women. Though, we can count the amount of Gene-assisted experiments on one hand; mostly, the cow just watches SpongeBob SquarePants and eats Chinese food. What’s cooler than that?

J.J. Abrams and his colleagues took a major risk when they cast an unknown Anna Torv as Fringe’s female lead back in 2008; save for a few Australian productions, the blond Aussie’s credits were minimal. Their gamble has paid off tremendously, though, since Torv continues to evolve as an actress on a per-episode basis, and it’s not like she wasn’t any good in the first season.

From day one, Torv has played steely FBI agent Olivia Dunham with a delicate mixture of take-no-prisoners toughness and susceptible fragility, and with Olivia’s romance with Peter Bishop and Fauxlivia’s sassier personality, her performance is a triple threat.

So why is Torv still somewhat “unknown”? It all goes back to just how underrated Fringe is altogether, of course, but that’s not totally acceptable. Take a look at the picture above: She clearly photographs well, she’s beautiful, and also a first-rate actress. Where’s the Hollywood love?

One of the midseason’s most anticipated TV premieres is Alcatraz, the new FOX genre procedural about a San Francisco detective (Sarah Jones) who teams up with a comic book nerd (Lost’s Jorge Garcia) to track down inmates who disappeared from the Alcatraz island prison in the 1960s and are resurfacing in modern times looking like they haven’t aged a day. We’ve seen the pilot episode, and it’s definitely one of the more promising new shows on TV’s horizon, benefitting from a natural rapport between Jones and Garcia, a boldly high-concept premise, and the pedigree of executive producers J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk.

Based on the pilot alone, however, Alcatraz also reeks of the Abrams-and-Burk-produced Fringe’s influence. The similarities are undeniable: Both Fringe and Alcatraz have blond female leads (Anna Torv and Jones), the male leads (Joshua Jackson and Garcia) are former whiz kids prone to wisecracks, and the good guys are government-backed experts specializing in the supernatural. If Alcatraz’s big reveal ends up being that vanished inmates have been stuck in a parallel universe, Abrams and Burk will have some explaining to do.

Last November, it was announced that FOX was moving Fringe from its plum mid-week time slot to the deathly cauldrons of Friday night, when hardly anyone actually watches television, putting their DVRs to use instead. Naturally, the show’s loyal fans were up in arms, spewing profanity in the network’s direction for seemingly dooming the series. But the hate wasn’t entirely fair—most other networks would have canned the show without hesitation. What’s worse: watching Fringe go unnoticed on Fridays, or no Fringe at all?

The beloved program has never been a ratings behemoth, and its last two seasons have flirted with Nielsen statistics low enough to bring possible cancellation back into the blogosphere conversation. Yet, creatively, Fringe is still going strong; actually, it’s better than ever, rocking along as arguably one of TV’s best all-around shows. And we have FOX’s highly commendable faith in quality over viewership quantity to thank for this new, fourth season. Will there be a fifth? That’s where you come in, Fringe virgins—it’s time to wake up and smell Gene the cow’s dung.