[The following conversation took place on September 24th, 2009. The second season of Fringe had premiered one week earlier; the first episode of FlashForward, a big-budget paranormal drama tipped as ABC's successor to Lost, was set to air that night.]
GQ: JJ, is there anything in particular that you learned from the Lost experience that you brought to Fringe?
Roberto Orci [writer/executive producer, Alias; co-creator/executive producer, Fringe; executive producer/co-writer, Star Trek]: We needed Damon and Carlton.
JJ Abrams [co-creator/executive producer/director, Lost, Fringe and Alias; director/co-writer/executive producer, Star Trek]: And they weren't available. No—my involvement with Lost really ended within the first season. And so a lot of what I learned from Lost was what people watching the show learned, which is what great characters and story looked like. I think the work that Damon and Carlton do on that show is obviously a high-water mark for TV, and the ambition. In terms of this show, it's a very different show. Every show's a different show. It's easy, in retrospect, to make comparisons, but when you're in the thick of it, when you're working on something, even if it's the same people, it's suddenly a whole new nightmare challenge. And you scramble the best you can to do your best work, and it's especially difficult when you're doing a mythology show that's also aspiring to be a standalone show. Lost was very lucky early on to get really good ratings. So the network was okay with mythology, and the show's never apologized for it. Fringe, up front, said, "Hey, it's a standalone show, and every week you're going to get your own little separate mystery." But the fans who come back to watch the show-- and tonight, fingers crossed, that happens again-- are the people who typically like the mythology. So there's a weird dynamic that goes on that I still haven't learned, from Alias to Lost to Fringe, how to necessarily solve.
GQ: How to please those two audiences simultaneously, you mean.
Abrams: Yeah. This group dealt with that with Star Trek. How do we do something that's wholly original, while also doing something that's wholly reverent of what's come before? And how do you do a show that's a week to week closed story and still tell a larger overarching story? It's hard to please both sides of that all the time. It can be done in some instances, and other times, y'know, we fail miserably. But that's definitely one of the challenges that we face, doing the show.
GQ: Was that always your intention, that Fringe would be more of a one-and-done show that didn't depend as much on people following the mythology over a season-long arc, the way Lost does?
Alex Kurtzman [writer/executive producer, Alias; co-creator and executive producer, Fringe; co-writer/executive producer, Star Trek]: Yeah.
Orci: We always thought it would be both. That we'd have a little clue in each episode, but then every few episodes, you can have a highly mythological serialized episode. But in general, we always try to have that right balance.
Kurtzman: Which is a challenge, because I think our collective instincts veer toward serialization.
Orci: From watching Lost, I learned characters. That characters are key. The smallest character moment can be a gigantic revelation, as a viewer.
Damon Lindelof [co-creator/executive producer, Lost]: From the outside looking in, though, as a fan, and someone who had nothing at all to do with the development of Fringe, I felt the pilot clearly signified both shows. And the show that was more interesting to me as a viewer was the mythology, because of Nina Sharp and the mysterious and elusive William Bell. There's a moment in the pilot where Walter looks into Peter's eye, and I'm like, "What was that all about?" The problem with mystery of the week shows is, at the end of the episodes it's just like that [brushes his hands off] and that's not compelling television to me.
Orci: I agree.
Bryan Burk [co-producer, Alias; executive producer, Lost/Fringe/Star Trek]: [On Fringe] I found us, referencing Alias more often than Lost, in the sense that that was a serialized show, and then in the middle of the series we started dabbling with making them self-contained.
Abrams: Well, ABC insisted on it.
Burk: Yeah. And it was hard to go there. Particularly when it's such a serialized show. So from the beginning, the idea was, is it possible, how can we do it—how do we service two different audiences, those who just pop in for the individual episodes and doing what we all love, which is the mythology.
Kurtzman [to Carlton Cuse]: You and Damon have both worked on shows that were standalone, procedural shows. Do you feel that that can be as satisfying, storytellingwise?
Carlton Cuse [creator, Nash Bridges; executive producer, Lost]: I think they're apples and oranges. A lot of people like the satisfaction that comes with seeing that case resolved every week. There's a certain artificiality to it, but there's also kind of a wish-fulfillment quality—a dead body falls at the beginning, and by the end of the episode you know who did it. The puzzle's solved. I think those shows—I did Nash Bridges for six years, and that show had a little bit of ongoing sort of character mythology, but it was just a case every week. And there's a certain satisfaction in doing that. And obviously the audience can just drop in whenever they want to that kind of a show.
Lindelof: There's a difference between serialization and mythology, though. Like Grey's Anatomy is heavily serialized, in terms of the character relationships—who's sleeping with who, who's angry at who, who's just been fired. And you have to watch every episode to understand the depth of it.
Abrams: But there's never a crazy backstory with the patients…
Lindelof [writer, Nash Bridges; executive story editor, Crossing Jordan]: Yeah. That's different from a mythology, where you're not entirely sure what's going on unless you have an insular knowledge. Nash was like that—when I came on in season 6, we inherited arcs, but then there were season-long arcs, of character relationships, that were built upon preexisting things. Y'know, there were two characters who'd had a relationship and were now broken up. The character stuff-- you have to have that. Except on Law & Order, where it's like Tom & Jerry—last week never happened.
Kurtzman: I think that speaks to why we're drawn to serialization. Because mystery as a form of storytelling is always the thing that intrigues us as viewers the most, and mystery is contingent on not getting an answer quickly. It's contingent on a long protracted exploration. So maybe the difference between genre storytelling or procedural storytelling is what we're talking about. Although I think Fringe is an attempt to be both.
Orci: I hate serialization. And I'll tell you why next week. [laughter all around]
Burk: I also think with the shift in how television is now, it's possible to watch serialized shows on DVD, which you couldn't do twenty years ago, let alone 30 years ago. There are loyal viewers who watch it every week, but you can also wait and watch it all as a box set and still be in the loop as to what's going on in television. When we started Lost, doing serialized television was unacceptable. None of the shows were working, that were serialized. I remember vividly saying [to the network] that they'd be standalone episodes. The episodes will be serialized, but they'll also be standalone.
Lindelof: We lied.
Burk: It wasn't possible.
Cuse: Yeah, the advent of technological change has basically allowed serialized shows to kind of resurge on television. You couldn't sell a show that was heavily serialized, because they say if someone falls out of an episode or two they won't watch it anymore. But now with Hulu and the availability of the episodes on the networks' own websites and on DVD, it's actually become successful. And those DVDs became a huge profit center for those kinds of shows.
GQ: So do you feel like it's easier, five years after the premiere of Lost, to sell a heavily-serialized show? Technology's made it a lot easier for people to join the show already in progress, but shows still have to survive long enough on regular TV to fill a box set.
Orci: Networks don't want serialized.
Lindelof: Yeah, serialized is still a dirty word.
Abrams: Literally-- I was at a network pitch recently, and someone mentioned how the show we were discussing would be a standalone show, and there was applause in the room. Literally. They don't want shows that people have to invest that kind of time in, and make that kind of commitment to.
Burk: They sell better overseas, if they're not that way. You can air 'em in any order.
Kurtzman: What was the statistic we read?
Orci: 43% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Kurtzman: That a regular viewer sees 3 out of every 22 episodes of a show. It used to be something like 1 out of 4. You can't do serialized storytelling, when that's your number.
Orci: You can have character serialization, I think we're saying, but not plot serialization.
Lindelof: But all the top 10 shows are serialized shows. Including reality-- there's no show more heavily serialized than American Idol. You can drop into any episode of Idol and not know anything about it and still understand it, but to really appreciate it, you have to have built a relationship with those people over the course of the season.
Burk: The top ten shows are serialized?
Lindelof: Yeah. Desperate Housewives, Gray's Anatomy—House is probably the most standalone in the Top 10. But do you watch House? House has become heavily serialized on a character level. I can't follow House other than the medical mystery. I watched the premiere and I was like, "What is he doing in a mental institution?"
Cuse: But that, I think, is in a different category, in my mind. You can serialize the character dramas, but if you have a standalone case [every week], the show is still viewed as being accessible.
Abrams: But shows like Desperate Housewives, or Grey's Anatomy—they're like soap operas. You can miss X number of episodes, but you can tune in and still get who's screwing who.
Lindelof: That's the difference between serialization and mythology. Although Desperate Housewives—at least last year, when I started watching it again—has basically re-embraced a mythological spine. In its first season, it was heavily mythologized.
Abrams: The pilot was hugely mythological…
Lindelof: There was an entire season-long murder-mystery arc. And they started doing that again, and I think people are into that.
GQ: Once it was clear there was going to be some kind of mythology in Fringe, was there pressure from the network to bring in the payoffs more quickly than you might have in the past?
Kurtzman: Yeah. For sure, there was.
Orci: Yes and no. I think they were confused about it.
Abrams: They don't want mythology, but when you have a [recurring, mysterious] character like The Observer, they want to make a big deal about The Observer. They want it, and then they don't want it, at the same time.
Kurtzman: I think the core story has to be the mystery of the week. It has to be set up in the teaser and resolved by the last act. But there are things like the Observer that don't. And as we've been talking about, with all these shows, there's also the deeper backstory of these characters, and that goes on forever and ever, and that's the serialized element of the show.
GQ: Fringe has found its footing now, but as a viewer, it seemed like it took you guys a little while to figure out what kind of show it was going to be. Where do you think the turning point was, where the vision for the show came into focus?
Kurtzman: I wonder if we all have different answers to that question.
Abrams: I think it was [the seventh episode], "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones." That episode, to me, was one where you felt, "Oh, I see-- there's a bad guy. They're playing out a story." There was a character who seemed to be someone who could give us some answers, and he's got this connection to [Anna Torv's FBI-agent character], and then all of a sudden he's teleporting out of [jail.] Even the name of the episode—I think it was [Fringe executive producer Jeff] Pinkner who came up with the name—it just felt like the show arrived, in a way that it needed to.
Kurtzman: You know what's funny about that, though? That was the episode where it felt like we were going back to the Alias template, in a way. That was the kind of thing we would have done on Alias.
Lindelof: Well, you had no Sloane, on Fringe, until then. There was conflict to play, in the Fringe Division, but you always had to manufacture it from outside. So like some FBI guy would come in and say "What are you guys up to?" or whatever. But from Broyles to Walter to Peter to Olivia and Astrid—they all kind of get along with each other. By having Sloane in Alias as a regular from the word "Go," you had built-in antagonism.
Kurtzman: That's true.
Lindelof: Not to make this about Lost, but when we introduced Ben Linus in the middle of Season 2—I can't imagine the show without that.
Cuse: We were struggling, because we didn't have any force of antagonism. It wasn't the tenth iteration of a cop show, or a law show, or a medical show—and that was a real struggle, at the beginning of the show, to figure out every week, "What is the force of antagonism?"
Abrams: That's why I think your instinct, so early on, to bring the Others in sooner…
Lindelof: That was always the issue—when are we going to bring them in?
Cuse: And then once we'd brought in Benjamin Linus and established him as the leader of the Others, it kinda helped kick things into a higher gear. Because we were kind of out of the natural-disaster-of-the-week zone at that point. It's funny, because the networks always make you write out synopses of possible stories, and try to get you to pitch things out, and it's a completely ridiculous and ludicrous exercise. The only way to basically find a show is to make it. And hopefully, somewhere during the first season of the show, you start to figure out what the show is. But it's a process of trial and error. You do certain things and they work, you do certain things and they don't work. You have to treat the show organically, and the show will sort of tell you what's working and not working, and eventually you'll figure out, "Okay, this is what we need to make an episode." So now we have a paradigm for Lost episodes. We kind of know what the elements are that it takes to put together the cocktail that is a Lost episode.
Lindelof: It's like saying to a pregnant woman, "So you're having a girl—would you like to sign her up for soccer, or ballet?" And you go, "I don't know, all things being equal, ballet sounds great, I like ballet"—but you haven't had the baby yet. Until you get to know your kid, you can't really make any plans whatsoever. It's a farce. But you do it every time. My favorite story is that those guys who do 24 had to basically do this same exercise. Because 24 is a premise that everybody thought would never work in a million years, myself included. Like, how do you do a real-time show? And the pilot promises—someone is threatening to assassinate this presidential candidate, David Palmer, and Jack Bauer, Keifer Sutherland, has to stop the assassination, and the plan that they pitched the network was, in episode 24, he stops the assassination. And then they got into the writing of it, and they realized, "Because it's a real-time show, we have to move up our entire timetable." So he stops Palmer from being assassinated in episode 5 or 6. And then they had to wing it! They were only a quarter of the way through. That's why the Others thing is so interesting. Because the first day that Bryan and JJ and myself, and a couple other guys—Jeff Pinkner and [Lost co-executive producer] Jesse Alexander were there too—were talking about Lost, JJ pitched the Hatch. He said, "They find a hatch." We talked about the Others. We talked about Rousseau. We talked about all that, in the very first meeting. It's like you're a football coach, and you have these plays, but you don't know when to run the play. You're basically like, "Okay, when is the right time? When should they find the hatch? When do we need to bring the Others in? And how do we bring them in?" So the compromise was, Ethan starts farting around with Claire, and you realize he wasn't on the plane. Where did he come from? But that's all you get in Season 1. It isn't until the end of Season 2, or midway through Season 2, that you start to see the faces of these indigenous people.
Burk: I remember Damon doing that outline of what some of the episodes would be. And I remember the word "submarine" was on there. And I was like, "A submarine's gonna show up?" And it did—it just didn't happen in the first season or 2. But there were just these crazy ideas that would pop in.
Lindelof: And it's hubris to save it, too. Sometimes. Because you're like, "Let's hold that back." Like right now, David Goyer's talking about FlashForward, and he's saying, "Everybody sees six months into the future, so in our season finale, in May, they're gonna catch up with this vision that they saw." And I was like, "You might not want to be promising that, before you get into the show!" Because you might change your mind. Don't tell people what you're going to do-- because wouldn't it be interesting if, in episode eight, suddenly you decided to compress the time scheme and then figure out where you're going to go from there?
GQ: You're saying their finale might be too late to play that card, or too soon?
Lindelof: Well, who's to say they're going to get to May? I mean, y'know—that's the hubris, right there. It's like that show The Nine. It was all these hostages in a bank crisis. And they promised that at the end of the season, they would reveal the mystery of the crisis. It got cancelled after thirteen episodes! Good, they took their time—but it doesn't matter. We had a rare opportunity-- we were in the sweet spot. We were writing the seventh episode of Lost when the show premiered. And that was when we were engaged in our most intensive creative battle with the network. It was about how weird the show could be. Because Claire went and saw a psychic, and the psychic said, y'know, "Get on this plane," and the implication was that the psychic knew the plane was going to crash. And that was also the episode where we introduced Ethan. So they started freaking out. And then the show premiered, and we were able to kind of cram it down their throats.
Burk: I was on the dub stage doing—what was Sayeed's first episode, episode six?
Lindelof: Eight. "Solitary." Seven and eight, we were doing them at the same time.
Burk: I was on the mixing stage, finishing that. And as scripted, at the end of the episode, Sayeed is walking through the jungle, and he starts hearing whispers. And it's now seven o'clock, I'm an hour over, I gotta finish the mix. And I get a call from the network. "Under no circumstances do we want to hear the whispers."
Lindelof: And you've got Naveen Andrews onscreen going like this [looks around, terrified]
Burk: …for no reason! And I said "Guys, there's going to be wind, there's going to be other things, but here's the thing—if you don't hear the whispers, there's going to be an actor just looking around and acting crazy for no reason." But that was it. They were very nervous about how far we were going to push anything that seemed like science fiction.
GQ: It's funny, because stuff like the whispers in the jungle seems so bush-league now compared to what's happened since.
Burk: Sure.
Cuse: You have to take your territory inch by inch.
Burk: And in defense of the network, there had been a plethora of science fiction shows before that, that all failed, for a variety of reasons. So they were obviously nervous about what we were going to turn this into.
Abrams: And we were going to kill Jack, in the pilot. And they said "Don't kill Jack." So they have given us some good notes.
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