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J.J. Abrams Promises 'Fringe' Will Die Fighting
An anonymous reader writes "Fringe creator J.J. Abrams has said of the show's much-maligned move to Friday nights, 'Fringe deserves to live beyond season 3. If we're going to fail, let's go down doing the most bad ***, weirdest, interesting, sophisticated version of a series that we could possibly do.' Previous announcements about the move were more defensive, claiming that Fringe's shift to Fridays was an attempt to draw younger viewers back to the 'dead zone' of Friday nights. But season three has been confused enough in tone and approach that it's no surprise to hear yet another contradictory statement about its future..." Good episodes of Fringe have been great TV. I've really enjoyed the first half of the season and am looking forward to seeing what they do with it. A lot of mediocre SciFi has been shut down recently (Caprica? SGU?) and a lot of bad SciFi continues (V?) but Fringe flirts with greatness with regularity. I hope it makes it... even though on Friday it's not likely.
This is one of those series that I keep hearing fellow geeks talk about (like Eureka) that I just don't get. I tried watching a couple of episodes of this show early on, and all I saw was a pretty boring, predictable, and pedestrian "incident of the week" show with some pretty silly supernatural or pseudo-scientific themes. It reminded me of the X-files in that regard (with the notable exceptions of the frickin' *brilliant* X-files episodes that Darin Morgan wrote).
So what is supposed to be so great about this series, again?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
SGU, like any show, took some time to find its footing, but it had certainly started to pick up the pace.
Compared to the original two series, it was much better than the "go through a Stargate and everyone speaks English" tripe. Not that SG and SGA weren't fun, but they weren't "great scifi".
This is easily my favorite show. It's smart, fun, and Olivia Dunham is one of the best leading characters ever.
D
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...when Hulkamania runs wild on your program schedule?
I don't see how Fringe could possibly compete with wrasslin' on Friday night. I mean, that's what hardcore sci-fi geeks are really after, right?
yeah, fuck all that fictional science-based science fiction!
I want more drama fiction!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The big sales pitch was that this show would expose fringe science to the average person. I watched probably six or seven episodes of the first season and had precisely zero basis in reality. Fictional shows have a right to be fictional, except this was mismarketed.
The X-Files took a fairly simple plot idea (that the government would conspire with aliens for their benefit while possibly selling out the rest of humanity) and used that to tie together a good character drama. What really made the show work was chemistry between the characters.
In Fringe, I never connected with the characters. I couldn't care one bit about them, or their interactions. And since Lost, shows try too hard to have this mega-supernatural mystery plot. Abrams already showed with Alias that he doesn't understand the basics of good storytelling. He twists for the sake of twisting without ever keeping sight of a consistent and meaningful story arch.
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Season 2 finished in May last year. It wasn't available for me to rent on DVD until September. I watched Season 1 over the summer and, because season 2 wasn't available I couldn't add it to my rental queue. I forgot about it until just now.
When I rent a DVD, the studio gets some money. There's no need to persuade advertisers that I might buy something they advertise, it's a direct transaction - I exchange money for something they've created. Very often, however, they don't even bother releasing the DVD until after they've already cancelled the show.
There's no reason for DVDs to take this long. They can produce the menus concurrently with the show and just drop in the episodes once they're done. Some shows have come out with half-season DVD releases at the mid-season break, which is great. ITV managed to release DVDs of the last two dramatisations of Sharpe the day after they were first broadcast.
In short, if you want to sell a TV show to a relatively small market, sell it to them, don't sell it to a network, who will sell it to advertisers, who will sell things to the viewers, and hope that after the two layers of indirection taking their cut that you have enough money to continue.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1408101/fullcredits#cast Just FYI.
I rarely watch live TV anymore, as a matter of fact I cannot tell you what night anything is on since my affair with my DVR began...
Fringe isn't science based. Fringe is pseudoscientific bullshit based, with a light sprinkling of scientific words to try to fool...someone.
That's the biggest reason for the move. American Idol airs in Bones' time slot now and Bones is in Fringe's typical time slot on Thursdays. Bones gets better ratings because of the perpetual parade of buxom wenches in tight clothing being flashed across the screen. Apparently the womenfolk find that David Boreanaz fellow quite fetching as well.
I don't imagine John Noble (Walter Bishop) has the same draw with the ladies.
Besides, Fringe requires you to pay attention. You don't necessarily have to think about it because if you're patient enough, they explain it all in the course of the show. But that patience thing is a deal killer for most of the slack-jawed, mouth-breathers out there who dismiss anything even remotely based in higher subjects like math and science as boring. It's pathetic that people would rather watch garbage like "American Idol", "Real Housewives of..." or "Jersey Shore" than anything that requires you to flex some gray matter. It is, however, some high level subject matter and most superficial people I know have dismissed it without giving it any inkling of a chance as "nerd entertainment" and they can't follow it because it's all "sciency and stuff". Is that even a word?
It's a shame too because it honestly is good TV. It stands up as a drama as well as a Sci-Fi show. My girlfriend didn't give it a chance until Season 2 when I was not wanting to do anything on Thursdays so I could watch Fringe and the re-broadcast of another spectacular show, "Breaking Bad". Now she's hooked on both and is usually occupying the seat next to me on the couch, riveted to the TV for the hour or two for each show.
Thank God for the DVR though! It already records every new episode for me so even if I have to miss it, I'm still gonna get to see it! I've been eagerly awaiting the rest of the current season. If FOX cancels it like the morons they are, I think there should be another letter writing campaign on the level of the "Family Guy" debacle several years ago.
I mean, fewer and fewer people watch TV live any more, except for actual live events.
Obviously, it is hard to collect metrics on DVR viewership (and it is still something they're trying to figure out), but really what matters is:
1) Are you in a conflict-heavy slot? Then you might lose if you exceed the typical number of tuners on people's DVRs (dual-tuner is getting pretty common...)
2) Are you in a slot that often gets its schedule broken? I disagree that Friday night is a "death slot" for this reason. Think "sci-fi Fridays" back before Sci-Fi became SyFy and started sucking. Sunday, however, is a "death slot" because half the time someone's DVR catches the previous show because football shifted the damn schedule back. (CSI: Miami went from "Record and watch at my convenience" to "Don't even bother recording" because of this. CSI: Miami recordings became a simple waste of hard drive space because 3/4 of them were of Undercover Boss instead.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Thank god we have people like you. If we didn't have so many people who were eager to cancel anything that doesn't meet their personal expectations, people might actually be exposed to a wider range of choices. Top 40 radio might die!
My hat is off to you, sir, for keeping the world safe for mediocrity and sheep-like behavior.
Yep, the failure of "Arrested Development" was directly attributed to the fan base never knowing when it would be on.
"Family Guy" was, however, just flat out canceled because FOX had no idea that's massive fan base was not represented by Nielsen ratings. Hence the letter writing campaign that got it put back on the air and prompted the syndication of the show on 4 separate networks.
I wonder when FOX will figure out that you can't put everything in a nice little box and have it accurately explain the population overall.
At least it's acknowledged as fiction and (hopefully) won't be viewed as informative in the least.
Fuck you Discovery Channel and Auction Kings, Sons of Guns, Flying Wild, American Choppers, Duel Survival, American Loggers, Gold Rush, Swamp Loggers, Deadliest Catch, Man, Woman, Wild, Brew Masters, Storm Chasers, Pitchmen, Surviving the Cut, Swords, Howe & Howe Tech, The Colony, and FUCK YOU ESPECIALLY GHOST LAB.
sci-fi where the fictional part is the science is not my cup of tea.
You just disregarded 99% of all science fiction, including stuff from the old greats like Asimov, Heinlein, etc. Any story that has interstellar travel, levitation, teleportation, sentient robots, "the force", are stories where the science part is the fiction.
Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon's science was fiction; they shot the people to the moon in a cannon. About the only science fiction movie I ever saw that was true to science was 2001, and it even had a sentient computer (although HAL's sentience could have easily been pseudosentience).
Free Martian Whores!
Which still makes it thousands of magnitudes better than American Idol, America's Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, etc.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Seasons 2 through 4 of B5 are really great. There's a proper arc there, and because they thought they were getting cancelled after S4 they pretty much threw every good idea they had at the show and wrapped up everything.
Then they did a season 5, which we will not talk of again.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There is a big difference between speculative science that is based on the information at the time and pseudo-science that goes against the information of its time.
Nielsen has been irrelevant for nearly a decade. Cable TV companies get better data from their cable boxes, I could tell you from reading the database that at 11:15 pm last night the number of subscribers and boxes that were turned to a channel at that time, cross reference with the billing database and we can get age demographics as well as race demographics (Yes that data is in the customer database, Comcast mines you) to the point that I was able to give sales people targeted data to report to customers buying advertising.
My project only covered a single state and was a technology demonstration but was simple to do and was only SQL queries. Getting numbers from real viewers instead of a select few is far more accurate. In fact I used to correct the Nielsen data we paid heavily for with my numbers to better reflect the state.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Geek here. I greatly enjoy Fringe. Is the circlejerk of confirming your respective superiority to the series worth the fact that you are chronically incapable of enjoying a good show?
I guess I could see older folks still staring mindlessly at live TV while they cut up their Swanson salsbury steak on the tv tray. But these are the people who wouldn't go out on Fridays anyway.
For anyone born after 1980, there's DVR and network tv.
I only watch 3 or 4 shows a week (life is too short for mediocre tv) but if you put a gun to my head, I couldn't tell you what day they air or even what channel. Any effect this "time slot" thing still has is diminishing rapidly.
But... let's assume for the sake of argument that everything they said is true, and moving Fringe to Fridays was an attempt to increase viewership in the young demographic on a day that's traditionally dead in that age group.
Then what? Just for a moment, let's try to think less like geeks. Do the network flunkies really think that Joe Teenager will blow off his chance to get to second base with Jill Cheerleader because Fringe is on? Seriously?
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