Geekdom's Council of Elders: Part One, Two and Three

Thanks to Llegaron Para Quedarse and Annie for the heads up.

Here are Parts Two and Three

[The following conversation took place on September 24th, 2009. The second season of Fringe had premiered one week earlier; the first episode of FlashForward, a big-budget paranormal drama tipped as ABC's successor to Lost, was set to air that night.]

GQ: JJ, is there anything in particular that you learned from the Lost experience that you brought to Fringe?

Roberto Orci [writer/executive producer, Alias; co-creator/executive producer, Fringe; executive producer/co-writer, Star Trek]: We needed Damon and Carlton.

JJ Abrams [co-creator/executive producer/director, Lost, Fringe and Alias; director/co-writer/executive producer, Star Trek]: And they weren't available. No—my involvement with Lost really ended within the first season. And so a lot of what I learned from Lost was what people watching the show learned, which is what great characters and story looked like. I think the work that Damon and Carlton do on that show is obviously a high-water mark for TV, and the ambition. In terms of this show, it's a very different show. Every show's a different show. It's easy, in retrospect, to make comparisons, but when you're in the thick of it, when you're working on something, even if it's the same people, it's suddenly a whole new nightmare challenge. And you scramble the best you can to do your best work, and it's especially difficult when you're doing a mythology show that's also aspiring to be a standalone show. Lost was very lucky early on to get really good ratings. So the network was okay with mythology, and the show's never apologized for it. Fringe, up front, said, "Hey, it's a standalone show, and every week you're going to get your own little separate mystery." But the fans who come back to watch the show-- and tonight, fingers crossed, that happens again-- are the people who typically like the mythology. So there's a weird dynamic that goes on that I still haven't learned, from Alias to Lost to Fringe, how to necessarily solve.

GQ: How to please those two audiences simultaneously, you mean.

Abrams: Yeah. This group dealt with that with Star Trek. How do we do something that's wholly original, while also doing something that's wholly reverent of what's come before? And how do you do a show that's a week to week closed story and still tell a larger overarching story? It's hard to please both sides of that all the time. It can be done in some instances, and other times, y'know, we fail miserably. But that's definitely one of the challenges that we face, doing the show.

GQ: Was that always your intention, that Fringe would be more of a one-and-done show that didn't depend as much on people following the mythology over a season-long arc, the way Lost does?

Alex Kurtzman [writer/executive producer, Alias; co-creator and executive producer, Fringe; co-writer/executive producer, Star Trek]: Yeah.

Orci: We always thought it would be both. That we'd have a little clue in each episode, but then every few episodes, you can have a highly mythological serialized episode. But in general, we always try to have that right balance.

Kurtzman: Which is a challenge, because I think our collective instincts veer toward serialization.

Orci: From watching Lost, I learned characters. That characters are key. The smallest character moment can be a gigantic revelation, as a viewer.

Full Interview @ GQ

Source: Full Interview @ GQ