Abrams on William Bell: You will definitely meet him, he'll definitely be a featured part of the show. We want to make sure that when you meet him it's something you're hungry for, as opposed to something that you're just experiencing. So the way it's going to happen, which will happen over time, but by the end of the first season you'll meet William Bell.
Abrams on his expectations for Fringe's success: You can never guess or assume what anyone is going to think. I can say that it's one of those shows that if I had nothing to do with it and saw it coming out, I'd want to kill myself. I'd be so miserable because it is so the show that I'd want to watch. That doesn't mean that anyone else will. That doesn't mean that it's good or bad. It just means it is so the kind of the show that I am excited to see.
In terms of the other series, I don't know how to compare. Fringe is a very different show, but I would say that one of the experiments that we're doing on Fringe is writing the show so that it is not as overtly serialized as certainly Alias and Lost are or were.
Because I'm so drawn to overarching and sort of long-term stories, there will still be the mythology, the evolution of characters, the revelations of their story and what "The Pattern" means and what they're doing and how they connect to that. So there's all the stuff that's happening. But we're doing it in a way that is much less week to week installments of that story, which then requires you to reset things every time you do an episode that is a mythology episode, which makes it, I hope, something you can watch without feeling like you're not in the club if you've missed an episode.
Abrams on long story arcs: I'm such a fan of not just X-Files, but The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite shows of all time. I love the original Nightstalker was great. What I love about shows, The X-Files did so well is they could do creepy stuff Twilight Zone style, and like you said, it was actually even more than half the season, but they would do a number of shows that had nothing to do with the overall storytelling, the overall mythology and then they would jump in and do one. That is definitely closer to the model. I would even say closer to that -- it's closer to ER almost where you have these ongoing relationships, these ongoing storylines and yet week to week when the door bursts open you're faced with the insane urgent situation of the week.
A show I loved when it was on was The Practice. That's another show that would do that well, which is they would deal with the interpersonal relationship stuff. The funny thing about, I am so interested in those relationships. When I look back at doing Felicity, and I'm sure Josh felt this way on Dawson's Creek as well, that the problem with those shows is that there's nothing to interrupt the relationship story.
So I think a show like ER is a good example of a show where if these characters were not doctors and they were just hanging out, you go through their emotional stories in a few episodes. But because of what's happening everyday, every week on those shows, there's stuff they have to deal with, there're fires to put out.
Abrams on the climate for new shows: I think it is a particularly difficult time. Obviously I'm thrilled that Fringe, the show was not based on a format from another country or something that was imported, just because I feel beyond feeling lucky that we got a show on the air, it's good to see that what is probably a fad, a limited phenomenon of importing these foreign shows. It's nice to see an anomaly to that, although all the actors are imported.
I feel like it is at least 51% luck that I've been able to view any of what I've done. I would say the great news about writing and being a show runner is that it's free to write. You don't need equipment. You don't need permission. For anyone who wants to run a show, it literally is just about exercising that muscle. Because writing as much as you can, it's been said that if you write a great a script and you throw it off the Brooklyn Bridge, someone will find it and make it because people are desperate for good material.
But really, the only real answer, the practical one is, if you want to be a show runner, the key is write the pilot that is something you want to make, which just goes back to: what is it you want to see? Don't write what you think they want to see or what you believe or what you're told is selling. Write the show that you desperately want to see and that is the closest you can get to certainty that will appeal to a lot of people.
Abrams on pushing the believability of "fringe" science: The truth is that when we did the pilot for Lost, we had the monster appear at the end of the first act. We did that very consciously because we wanted to say to the audience, "We're jumping the shark now," like we're doing crazy stuff from the beginning. We're not going to wait. On Fringe, we very consciously did what is in many ways a preposterous out there, far-fetched scientific story point in order to say to the audience, "This is what you're going to be getting on the show." Now it may be more extreme in some cases, less so in others.
