Lesson Learned: Creator of Fringe promises you won't get lost in the plot

If you've ever been utterly baffled by a television show that J.J. Abrams had a hand in creating -- too confused to follow the serpentine plot twists of Lost or Alias or, heck, even Felicity -- know that Abrams, the prolific writer, producer and director, has been annoyed, too. With you.

"I just got tired of hearing people say to me, over and over, ‘Yeah, I was watching it, but I missed one, I got really confused, and I stopped watching it,'" he said in a recent phone interview.

If viewers find this kind of show frustrating, it's his own fault. He practically invented it. Over the past 10 years Abrams, 42, has helped pioneer a storytelling style that demands total commitment from audience members, requiring that they keep up not only with complicated single-episode plotlines (can a time-traveling castaway alter past events to help himself in the present?) but also with fiendishly intricate narratives (how did the Oceanic Six get off their mysterious island, and how might they get back?) that can take an entire season -- or seasons, plural -- to play out.

It is a strategy that has built cult followings for Abrams' series and won him praise for his braininess. Yet even he recognizes that when it comes to recruiting new viewers, it's about as effective as proposing to go steady on a first date.

Abrams is especially mindful of the television-series-as-relationship metaphor as he prepares Fringe, which will have its premiere on Fox on Sept. 9. Created with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the screenwriters of Transformers and Abrams' forthcoming Star Trek film, Fringe is an hourlong drama about an investigative team whose explorations lead to a shadowy world of science fiction and the seemingly supernatural.

It is also Abrams' attempt to rectify the narrative (and viewer attention span) problems he faced on previous shows and to synthesize the many lessons he has learned from them into a series that is both complex and accessible, and that is capable of arriving at a determined conclusion over an undecided number of episodes.

"The evolution from your ideas and expectations and intent to what actually occurs in the series is a massive gulf," Abrams said. "It's a best-effort scenario. But I think that's what a series is anyway."

His newest show was born from pragmatism. In 2007 he was preparing to direct Star Trek for Paramount, but he also owed a television series to Warner Brothers, the studio that produces Fringe, and he turned to Kurtzman and Orci for help. They traded ideas about beloved fantasy films and television series --The X-Files, Altered States, the early movies of David Cronenberg -- but also looked carefully at procedural crime dramas dominating the networks. "When six of the Top 10 shows are Law & Order and C.S.I.," Orci said, "you have to be a fool not to go study what it is that they're doing."

Cross-pollinating these genres, they came up with three characters -- a neophyte FBI agent (played by Anna Torv), a brilliant but mad scientist (John Noble) and his wayward son (Joshua Jackson) -- who solve a single mystery each week. (For starters: Who unleashed a flesh-melting virus on an airplane, killing all its passengers?)

The initial goal, Abrams said, was to create a show that suggested complexity but was comprehensible in any given episode -- a goal he felt eluded him on Alias. On that series, the internecine warfare between the CIA and a rival agency called SD-6 became so bewildering that, Abrams said, no casual viewer could keep up.

"You're trying to track this show," he said, "in which these bad guys are acting like good guys, the good guys are acting like bad guys, and the good guys are letting the bad guys exist. I can completely understand tuning in to Episode 3 and being like, ‘Huh?'" In the second season of Alias, ABC asked Abrams to conclude the CIA/SD-6 storyline, an abrupt move that he said hurt the show.

But not all of Abrams' colleagues agree. "I was often taking the side of the studio and the network," said Orci, who produced Alias with Kurtzman. The lesson of Alias, Orci said, is that "you can slow down, and you can tell stand-alone episodes with the same scale of story and mystery."

As the Fringe creators further developed the show, they decided that it should have an overarching narrative -- that its many paranormal phenomena and mysteries would turn out be part of a larger pattern, referred to simply as "the Pattern" -- to tie its individual episodes together. They have figured out a finale that could be deployed at any point in the series. "If we're canceled at Episode 13," Orci said, "we'll tell you at Episode 13, and if we go on, you could literally find this out in seven years."