The NeXt-Files

Hollywood goes back to the well pretty often, and the results are often pretty, well, bad. The new Knight Rider is a waste of time, people are up in arms about the upcoming take on Life on Mars and the jury's out on the 90210 reboot. So while Fringe comes with a pretty solid pedigree (created by J.J. Abrams of Lost, Alias and Felicity fame), it also carries the baggage of looking like nothing more than an X-Files update. But in a world where even The X-Files can't update itself successfully, that might not be so bad.

And fortunately, it's pretty damn good. Fringe wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve, but also with its tongue slightly in its cheek. There are similarities to a Mulder/Scully relationship with the two leads, but this time she's the believer and he's the skeptic. And the show launches with echoes of a Lost-like airplane disaster, but with notably different twists. So it ends up being much less of an X-Files clone and much more of a spiritual successor.

The plot (so far – it's pretty clear that we're going to encounter layers and layers of story) concerns a female FBI agent named Dunham who stumbles across a case that the CDC can't handle – victim's skins are crystallizing, turning translucent as they die. When the symptoms start to hit closer to home, she turns to the lone expert in what's called "fringe science," i.e. stuff that seems almost supernatural but has some foundation in reality. Unfortunately, that lone expert – Walter Bishop – has been in an asylum for decades, and only accessible to next of kin. Enter Pacey from Dawson's Creek, playing Bishop's son Peter, a high-school drop-out with an incredibly high IQ... and gambling debt. They team up to delve into the fallout from Bishop's 1970s-era experiments to uncover "the pattern," a series of unexplainable phenomena that seem to be connected to a mysterious corporation called Massive Dynamic.

Whew.

So yes, it's fairly X-Files and yes, it's a lot to swallow, but so far it's pretty tasty. Dunham and Bishop cook up solid chemistry, the scientific oddities they're encountering are interesting and it's shot with style – including the oddly entertaining touch of Panic Room-style supers that seem to actually cast shadows on the scene they're explaining. Hopefully Abrams and co. can learn from the shows they're following and avoid drowning in overly intricate backstory – based on Lost, I'd say they've got a leg up. We'll have to see where it goes, but based on this pilot I'm ready to follow. If you missed last night's premiere, it encores on Sunday night – give it a watch.