photo: fox
Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman, Executive Producers and Writers, Fringe
Don’t ask them if there will be a fifth season. Executive Producers and Writers of the cult favorite Fringe get that all the time. And even though they admit that last night’s hinge episode, The End of All Things, is a game-changer, they still don’t know if this season will be the last. They, like their millions of fans, are waiting with baited breath to see if Peter and Olivia get their happily ever after.
And speaking of those millions of fans, we got to chat with Pinkner and Wyman about the importance of social networking at this time of renewal and non (as well as where Fringe Division is heading and, we couldn’t help it, the rumors of a fifth season).
TheTwoCents: How important do you think social networking is to the success and especially with the new Fringinuity in Twitter and GetGlue campaigns and everything?
J. Pinkner: I think we all operate now in a world that is so different than it was even two or three years ago. The fans have access to the show and access to the creators even if it’s not direct. I don’t know any television creators that don’t follow the message boards. Just the feedback is so immediate to see what is working and what isn’t working and what’s working better than you anticipated.
Then there’s such a temptation to just constantly write things that are going to make the fans happy. You know, constantly just want to satisfy the fans and not sort of stay true to whatever the vision was of–oh, sometimes it takes a little bit of unhappiness to make those happy payoffs work better. That’s something that is fascinating to us and has really changed the way that stories are told I think.
J.H. Wyman: Yes. You get an immediate reaction. Jeff is right. I think, Twitter for us is important because we have incredible fans that are always fighting for us and trying to spread the word and so devoted. For us, that’s why we do it. So to hear them and to like see the responses instantaneously it’s really amazing because you get to see, like Jeff said, what’s working and what’s not. But I feel really close to the fans because we have dialogues with them on Twitter. I think they feel closer to us and I don’t think that was possible several years ago. Nobody kind of felt connected to the show. I think our fans are really connected to the show in a deep way not just because they’re fans, but because we interact with them.
TTC: I hate to ask, but what is the word on a fifth season?
JHW: Obviously that’s a big question. We get that every year. This is the God-honest truth. We, Jeff and I, just do what we do. You have no control. We didn’t have control last year, the year before either, and the year before. So we can only do what we do and that’s make the show that we love, continue to follow the path, the stories that we want to tell, great compelling stories, week to week that interests our fans and really hope for the best. I think that any show that doesn’t have huge ratings that’s kind of what you’re always up against. Meanwhile, conversations are ongoing. Everything is running the way that things usually run in these types of situations. I guess, we’ll find out like everybody else. But we don’t fret about it because, really, it’s out of our control. We can only step back and do our work and therein lies the path to serenity. So we’re hoping for the best and just doing what we love.
JP: One of my favorite stories when I was a kid was The Little Engine That Could. So I think we’re the little engine that could constantly. You know, I think I can, I think I can. We’re always struggling, and struggling, and struggling, and hoping, and hoping, and hoping. We just keep making the shows that we love and the good news is we can never rest on our laurels of just like knowing we’re going to be on forever. So we’re constantly challenged to write the very best story we can week in and week out hoping that that will just allow us to keep telling more of them.
JHW: Yes. I mean, it’s a strange thing. It’s a sci-fi show on network television and everybody knows that that in itself is an amazing feat that we’ve been on for so many years. It’s like, you guys, the press and everything has been so incredibly kind and so incredibly supportive that we feel like it’s a success in any way, shape or form. It’s an expensive canvas, everybody knows it. To do what we do every week it costs a lot of money and you have to have a return on it. That’s show business and you’ve got to do it. We just hope that the dollars and cents can make sense and we can continue doing it. But if this was the last season, at least I’ll speak for myself and Jeff can comment on it. If this is the last season I would feel, obviously, incredibly sad because I know how much of the story that we have left to tell and that we would love to tell.
But in the same breath I kind of feel like I would feel that I could take care of the fans. That’s the most important to us that we feel like we have an ending that would leave people feeling like, wow, I feel sad but satiated. I feel like that was definitely worth my four years of investment. I really love these characters and I can see where it would have gone. But I feel good. That’s all we’re concerned about is to make sure that the fans don’t feel like, “Wait, what? What happened? I’ve invested four years of my life and I don’t get any kind of resolution that makes sense.” That’s not what’s going on. And to be 100% frank, our partners at Fox would never want to consciously allow that to happen. So everybody knows that Jeff and I are very prepared. We’re ready for anything. Hopefully we go on. But it’s out of our control.
TTC: Have you written the finale yet and would it work well as a series finale?
JP: No, we have not written it. In fact, we are talking about it sort of specifically as soon as we get off this phone call. But we do know what it is. We’ve known the shape of our season before we even started this year.
JHW: Fortunately, at the end of every season we sort of close the chapter and start a new. That’s the sort of the language of the series now. So it just sort of organically can come to a conclusion that we love.
TTC: Lets talk about ratings. This show is seemingly so popular Online, but the ratings aren’t that great. Why do you think that is?
JHW: I don’t know, honestly, because if you look at the DVR numbers, Friday night is a tricky spot. I truly believe that there needs to be some new way of measuring who’s watching what and some way. Because I feel like there’s satellites that can see a Levi’s tab on the back of your jeans but they can’t tell you who’s watching which television show. I’m a little suspicious. But, look, the truth is that people–it’s changed. Times have changed. People, it’s busy. People have hard lives. They’re making it work. They’re coming home from work. They’re telling us when they want to watch the show because the DVRs, they go up like crazy. I mean, 80% is nuts.
So they’re watching. They’re just not watching on Friday. You know, those other shows (opposite Fringe) are great. I don’t know that their ratings have gone up so much that it would be like they’re taking viewers or anything. I just think that, in general, people are–there’s only the people who have the Nielsen boxes and if they’re not watching live or they’re not watching it, you’re done. It has nothing to do with what the mass is because when the big numbers come out on DVRs you understand there are a lot of people watching the program, just not on Friday nights. So they’re dictating to us, well, another time. I don’t want to watch it right now. I want to watch it tomorrow morning or I want to watch it on Saturday night with my girlfriend or I don’t know.
JP: There are TV producers, we can tell you from experience, they spend a lot of time analyzing numbers and analyzing the competition and sort of knocking on the doors of the people that work at the studio and saying, “Change our night. Change our time. Don’t you see what you’re doing to us by having us on …?” We don’t do that. Our approach has always been, and maybe to our detriment, but our approach has always been that the best thing that we can do for our show is to write the best show possible. So as Joel said earlier, we sort of leave these questions and these issues that we can’t control to people who can and we just write the best version of Fringe we know how. The one that satisfies us. The one that makes us excited to go into work everyday. The one that makes us feel something. We’ve been really, really gratified that the people that watch the show respond to it in the way that they do. Beyond that, we just sort of leave it to the gods.
TTC: This season has had some really great stand-alone episodes but last night’s episode was mythology heavy and really spoke to the larger arc this season. How is The End of All Things going to affect what we see in the next couple in the final stretch of the season?
JP: Well it’s definitely, as they say, a game changer in that our characters learn a lot more and the audience is going to learn a lot more about sort of the Uber plot of our season, and our season bad guy David Robert Jones. The characters, certainly for Peter this season and Olivia and Walter, are going to start to unfold in ways that, hopefully, will be really both satisfying and challenging to our characters. It’s sort of like, the 14th out of 22 episodes and it’s very much a hinge episode that’s going to launch us into the back half of the season.
Fringe will be back in four weeks, so you have time catch up on all the episodes here and get involved in the Fringinuity campaign here.
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