Fringe Benefits

JJ Abrams has done it again. He's taken a former tv star in Joshua Jackson and revived his career just like he did with Matthew Fox when Fox became Dr. Jack Shephard on ABC's hit show Lost. Only this time he didn't make Jackson the star of the show. That distinction belongs to Anna Torv, a relative unknown, who plays Federal Agent Olivia Dunham. Dunham, Jackson's character Peter Bishop and his father Dr. Walter Bishop, who just spent 10 years locked up in an insane aslyum, come together to solve a series of crimes that all have one thing in common: they all involve weird occurrences that can be traced back to fringe science.

We're talking everything from reading the thoughts of someone whose been dead for six hours to turning someone into a human microwave. Which is where the comparisons to the X-Files get drawn. But to characterize the show as being something that only a true conspiracy theorist could love wouldn't be fair. It also has plenty of similarities to other shows.

Mostly, it reminds me of crime scene driven shows like CSI in which the characters on the show are given a different mystery to solve each week and have to use their intuition and scientific expertise to figure it out. That element of the show figures to draw in a larger audience than if it was just focused on the X-Files aspect to it but it can also lead to predictability because from here on out we know that every episode is going to be basically the same thing but with a different "pattern" related case to solve.

However, the creators of the show have done a great job so far of delving into larger story lines that destract from the episode specific plot. If their goal was to develop a plot that could engage their viewers while also making it possible to miss an episode and not miss a beat then they have succeeded. The characters, the plot, the CSIesque episodes, the Alias like double crosses, the Lost like mysteries, and the X files like sci fi element, all add up to make for the best new show of the Fall season.