Fringe and the Art of World Building

A good tv show tells a story. A great tv show builds an entire world, and then tells a story within it. The Wire brought Baltimore to bitter, bleak life. Twin Peaks radiated weirdness and suspense from every tree and owl. OZ made you feel trapped in the prison. The Office made you feel trapped in that awful, awful work environment.

When a show builds a world, it makes the viewers feel like there are other stories at play, other characters we haven’t met yet. It makes everything that happens feel bigger and more expansive, because it has a context that reverberates.

No show has ever done this better than Fringe. They got so good at it, that after a while they built a new world every season.

Fringe – for the poor, pitiful souls that don’t know – follows FBI Agent Olivia Dunham as she works for the secretive Fringe Division, investigating cases involving mad science and the supernatural. She recruits Walter Bishop, a deranged genius fresh out of the asylum, and his son Peter Bishop, a con man who goes by the name of Pacey. Together, they solve bizarre cases and save the world one week at a time.

Sound a little like X-Files? It is. But what starts as a sort of X-Files 2.0 rapidly comes into it’s own, and stands after 100 episodes as one of the best, most perfectly crafted shows ever made.

The cast is outstanding, and the stories are great, but where Fringe was ahead of its time was in world-building. (Spoilers to follow – I’ll do my best, but there is no way to discuss the show without revealing some secrets)

Season One introduces us to a world where fringe science has arrived. And although the public doesn’t know about it, the government does. Fringe Division works in the shadows, in conjunction with Massive Dynamic, a global tech corporation so rich and powerful it just HAS to be sinister. Right?

The first season is filled with hints and suspicions, but the season finale breaks open the world and changes the status quo – Yes, Olivia, there is an alternative universe, filled with a planet of our exact (or almost exact) duplicates. Season Two explores this idea to the fullest, and then raises the stakes for Season Three.

Now here’s where it gets brilliant. It’s also the same moment that loses a lot of people. During the season three finale, Peter Bishop gets thrown into an alternate future where one of the two universes has been destroyed. For a mere hour, the show creates a haunting and imaginative version of the Fringe world, and then goes back to the status quo…

For about thirty seconds. Then with whiplash speed it tosses the status quo into a dumpster and walks away whistling.

Season Four, at its outset, is set in a different version of the Fringe world. There are still two parallel universes, and all the characters we love, but it’s different now. Peter Bishop never existed in this world, and that one small change has radically affected every aspect of the Fringe world we have come to know and love. 

Of course Peter tries to find his way back to the original Fringe-verse, but what he discovers along the way changes everything! Or perhaps it changes nothing. Fringe is way deeper on an existential level than anyone would believe.

But wait, they aren’t done yet! After giving viewers some resolution at the end of Season Four, Season Five jumps ahead into a grim and desperate future. The final 13 episode season has the feel of an epic Fringe movie, with a new world to explore, and higher stakes than ever. The drama is at an all-time fever pitch, and so is the action.

Instead of giving fans of the show what they expect, Fringe goes in a new a dark path, building yet another world in which to tell their stories of love and redemption.

Oh, I didn’t mention Fringe has one of the greatest love stories ever filmed for TV? It does, but don’t let it stop you from watching it.

Most shows are heralded for building a compelling original world. Fringe never was, even when it reinvented itself and rebuilt the wheel time and time again. And what makes this a work of genius, and not just a gimmick, is that every new world ties into the old, and leads into the next. It’s a tight, cohesive, staggeringly well-plotted tale that unfolds across worlds and universes.

The complete series of Fringe, all 5 seasons, is available streaming on Netflix. Watch it. And if you don’t have Netflix, sign up for it just to watch Fringe. It’s that good.

The Perils of Binge Watching

Binging on food is bad. Binging on booze is bad (allegedly). Binging on credit card shopping sprees is bad. Basically, anything you can do that can be described with the word “binge” is frowned upon. Except for watching TV and movies, in which case binging is considered a selling point.

I prefer to watch TV shows after they run on TV. This way you get to skip the blasted commercials, watch at your own pace, and basically take control of your own entertainment schedule. This works for me.

But what doesn’t work for me is binge-watching. Maybe it’s a young man’s game, or maybe I broke my binge-bone, but in any event I have come to the realization that binging out on TV is no bueno.

You Don’t Chug Champagne

Remember those wonderful nights in your youth where you and your pals would just chug Boone’s Farm wine straight from the bottle? More than likely in a parking lot of some kind? Even though it’s a fond memory, you still know better than to try the same thing with a magnum of fine bubbly.

Champagne needs to be savored. You sip it, you admire the taste on your tongue, the way the fizz tickles your throat, and the way it gets your light headed with surprising quickness. Guzzling out of a beer bong would only detract from the experience.

And how, pray tell, is Breaking Bad any different?

It’s a textured show, with intricate plot lines, unpredictable stories, and mind-blowing acting (don’t take my word for it, ask Sir Anthony Hopkins; if he were any more of a Breaking fanboy he’d be wearing Aaron Paul’s face as a mask). Why on earth would anyone not want to savor its excellence?

Sure it’s great, and sure you can watch an entire season in one sitting… but Snickers bars are great too, and
common sense tells you not to eat 12 of them in one sitting.

What happens if you do? You stop enjoying them, and start forcing them down your gluttonous maw mechanically, with no more joy.

And that, my friends, leads to the death of loving something great.

It’s Great and I Just Don’t Care

Netflix has two very, very good original shows that I have yet to finish watching. Orange is the New Black, and House of Cards. I won’t give plot summaries for them, because I assume you do not live under a rock. But you know the ones I mean.

Both shows were met with a wave of critical success, and a tsunami of binge-watching. Caught up in the swell, I grabbed onto the bandwagon and climbed aboard.

Both experiences were uncannily similar – on the first exposure to these excellent shows, I binged. I watched 3 episodes of House of Cards in one sitting. When the credits rolled, on instinct I hit NEXT to start the following episode.

About five minutes into it, I paused it. That was three weeks ago, and I haven’t gone back yet. It’s not that I didn’t like the show – in fact I’d be hard pressed to give a negative assessment of any of what I saw – it was just too much of the same thing.

Soon after, I sampled Orange. What a treat that pilot was; smart and funny, yet still well conceived and dramatic. I immediately plowed into the second episode, and the third…

I was chugging the champagne, and it gave me an Orange headache. As I finished that third episode, I said “maybe from here on out I’ll just watch one a week.”

Just because you live in America, and are used to over-indulging, doesn’t mean that you should. And while there are many good reasons to avoid binge-watching tv shows, ultimately there is only one that really matters:

What’s the damn hurry?

Unlike champagne, and unlike Snickers bars, truly great tv shows are not in infinite supply. There are not dozens of warehouses filled with pallets of great stories. They are actually pretty rare.

They are so rare that even shows which are merely “decent” or “pretty good” will get lumped in with
the great ones, simply to shore up the numbers. There are 100 episodes of Fringe, and there won’t be any more. Breaking Bad and Dexter, Twin Peaks and Sopranos,  are all finished and finite.

If you chug them now, you’ll be left with nothing good to drink for a while. So why not slow down the pace, savor every episode, and enjoy them while you can.

And when you run out of champagne, then go back to chugging the Boone’s.  Or in this case, Revolution.