Lunatic fringe

There is very little of interest for me among the new fall shows; as a die-hard sitcom fan, I'll probably give a couple of those a shot (Worst Week has a leading man who seems sorta doofus-cute, and Gary Unmarried has Jay Mohr who was good a few years ago in Action). We decided to give the new JJ Abrams show Fringe a shot. It was pushed as a kind of cross between X-Files and Lost, but it's really X-Files all the way. I liked X-Files well enough, and watched it for a good 5 or 6 years, a long time by my standards since I rarely follow hour-long dramas that long (CSI only got about 4 years out of me). But Fringe feels like X-Files reheated (in the microwave) and there are too many things wrong with it to fix in a short time--and don't ask me what that halved-apple image they're using as a logo is all about.

The double-layer premise, with 1) an overarching background "mythology" story, and 2) individual episode stories, is right out of X-Files, although the stated plan here is to make the background story less intimidating or complex so viewers can feel free to drop in and out to enjoy freestanding tales of weird science. The set-up: there have been numerous strange, almost paranormal things happening around the world and our three main characters have been drafted by Homeland Security to investigate these matters, the totality of which has been dubbed The Pattern, because, um, they think there's a pattern to the events. But we know from the beginning that the government knows more than it's letting on, and so do the folks at Massive Dynamics, a huge worldwide corporation with their fingers in all kinds of pies.

So all the bits of the formula are here: spooky doings, paranoia, lots of dark and dank interiors, and superiors who are not quite what they seem. Anna Torv is an FBI agent assigned to this fringe unit, John Noble is a "mad scientist" who is plucked out of an asylum to help out with the science, and Joshua Jackson is his skeptical son who's along for the ride because he's his father's legal guardian. The problem so far is the amateurish writing and weak acting. The dialogue is terrible and the "science" is ridiculously fantastic--in the second episode, they've already hit the bottom of the barrel by giving scientific credence to the theory that the last thing a person sees before he or she dies is somehow imprinted on the eyes and is recoverable.

Torv is OK, though because she resembles Gwyneth Paltrow, I'm having a hard time warming up to her. I don't like Noble at all: he's too predictably (and artificially) sad and goofy and funny by turns. Jackson (above) is a cutie-pie but the tossed-off, sarcastic humor his character uses does not come easily to him. It's nice that Blair Brown is back on network TV, but she's had a thankless role so far as a spokesperson for Massive Dynamics, and Lance Reddick, as Torv's boss, is so skeletal looking, he's the creepiest thing on the show. I think we'll give it one more shot, but I don't foresee keeping up with this one.