Thursday, October 16, 2008

TV: Fringe

STARRING: Anna Torv (newcomer), Joshua Jackson (Dawson’s Creek), John Noble (Lord of the Rings)
CREATORS: JJ Abrams (Lost, Alias), Alex Kurtzman & Robert Orci (Alias)
PLOT: A female FBI agent works with a former institutionalized scientist and his genius son in order to rationalize a string of unexplained phenomena (called The Pattern) using fringe science.

FIVE OBSERVATIONS
4 Pretty good X-Files substitute. They need to have a little more humour to pull it off though.
4 The show has an interesting mythology, unfortunately, they are having trouble naming things within the mythology (The Pattern, The Observer)
4 Joshua Jackson isn’t given much to work with as he is consistently annoyed with his father and never believes him. Cut him some slack.
4 John Noble is pretty awesome as Walter Bishop. He gets to have some fun crazy lines in every episode.
4 I’m a big fan of the seriousness and intrigue brought to the series by Lance Reddick (The Wire, Lost)

RECOMMENDATION
Casual View (for now, unless the mythology begins to pick up)

COMING SOON
TV reviews of My Own Worst Enemy, Life on Mars

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I totally agree with your review, Mr. Pop Culture Pusher. I love John Noble - he easily the best thing about the series hands down. I haven't watched this week's ep yet, but it seemed that the end of the ep with the Observer that they were maybe going to soften up Joshua Jackson's character a touch, which was needed. His one note annoyance, lack of belief in his dad was getting annoying.

I look forward to your review of Life on Mars as I loved the British series and thought the US one looked a little bit hokey.