I recently finished rewatching FRINGE, J.H. Wyman's gem about a mad scientist, his son and two FBI agents drawn into a strange war whose purpose or even antagonist no one can quite understand.
I could spend weeks writing about the show. There's so much interesting stuff going on there.
But this week I want to pull out just a few of the techniques it uses that make it so strong as a show.
The first has to do with the way it uses its format: FRINGE presents as a case-of-the-week procedural. Almost every episode in fact begins with a new case which the team will then investigate. And yet, it also has an enormous mythology tied into it. ENORMOUS. In many ways it feels like a latter day X-FILES, in fact.
But X-FILES generally viewed mythology/case of the week as an either/or. You'll have an episode about Bigfoot, then a three parter about Mulder's sister, then an insane story about people living in a rural town -- and there's absolutely no intersection between those eps. The cases are strictly cases; the myth episodes are strictly myth.
FRINGE, on the other hand, works from both/and. Every episode has a case they're being called in on, and, the cases always end up having some connection with the broader mythology of the series.
Which on the surface sounds like it could repetitive real fast--oh look, another strange weapon being deployed for no good reason. One reason for splitting cases of the week and mythology is to keep either from getting stale. Tired of Mulder arguing with the Cigarette Smoking Man? Great, here's a werewolf. Especially when you're doing a 22 episode season, keeping the audience's attention is a real project.
But somehow instead of coming off as repetitive FRINGE feels much more focused and compelling than a show like X-FILES. And I think the reason is that its mythology has such disparate elements. There's "the war" they are fighting, which is the main storyline. But then there's also the history of our mad scientist Walter Bishop and his frenemy William Bell, which keeps coming to the surface in different ways. It will eventually be very clearly connected to that war, but not right away.
Walter's history is also very much connected to two other massive mythologies of the show, that of leads Agent Olivia Dunham and Walter's son Peter. But once again the connections emerge so gradually (or in the case of Peter present so slowly) as to make them seem like completely different things.
And let's not even start on the spooky alien dudes in suits who seem to be everywhere watching everything.
Point being, FRINGE overcomes the threat of audience boredom by way of having many seemingly separate mythologies to shift between. And a tidy result of that is that each case of the week ends up being significant, a part of something bigger. Every episode is of value to the broader narrative. It all "counts".
