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Fringe season 3 thread (1 Viewer)

Joe_H

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Originally Posted by Paul D G

During the 2nd half of the episode I noticed a #Fringe bug just above the FOX bug (it's visible in the above screen shot). Does anyone know what this was? I intended to scan back through the ep to see when it appeared but forgot and deleted it. I have not noticed it on any other shows yet. I thought maybe it was something to identify the show but that's even more ridiculous than the network bug idea. Was there some sort of Twitter promotion going on during it's airing that I wasn't aware of?

It was there from the beginning of this episode here. I think they were just trying to use it to generate hype on Twitter, no specific promo, though I could be wrong.
 

Joseph DeMartino

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Well, I've really enjoyed the last few episodes with Torv playing Nimoy playing Bell inhabiting her body. I thought she did a very good job of evoking Nimoy's performance and the charcter of Bell, which is a damned tricky thing to pull off. (If you want to see a version of the trick that should have won an Oscar (tm) watch All of Me with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin sometime.)

In addition to getting Nimoy on screen I'm sure the crowd scenes and the hybrid New York were both a lot cheaper to do in 2D line animation than they would have been in fully-rendered "3D" modeled CGI, so they had another reason for taking that approach.

And, of course, they dropped a major bombshell in the very last line of the episode. I'm really enjoying the writing on this show. (So many sly little references, like the copy of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Spock among Bell's things.) I hope it a) gets renewed for another year and b) the producers and powers that be get together and decide which year will be the last, so they can build to a rational and satisfying conclusion. I hate when shows with stories like this get cut off in mid mystery. (I'm looking at you, Flash Forward.)

Regards,


Joe
 

Josh Dial

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Originally Posted by Joseph DeMartino
I hope it a) gets renewed for another year


Do you mean the year after next? I assume you know Fringe has already been renewed for a fourth season.
 

Greg_S_H

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That last line seems to tie into rumors floating around. Pure speculation, but I'll bet Olivia is killed by that guy and is soul magneted into Bolivia. I'm not sure I'll care for that if so.
 

Joseph DeMartino

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Originally Posted by Josh Dial


Now that I know we're getting season 4, I'm a little torn. Sure I'd like to roll the dice and go to season 5 and preferably wrap everything up in a nice bow. But I'd hate to get six episodes into that season and see the show disappear. I think I'd rather have them plan on making their exit at the end of S4 than risk them. (Babylon 5, of course, famously pulled stand-alone episodes and whol plot threads out of S4 and pushed them into the S5 outline so they could either end with year 4 or continue to year five. Not every show can do that, of course, and not every show has a planned final episode set 20 years after the main action that could air at the end of either season.)


Regards,


Joe
 

Quentin

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I think it would be wise to plan on ending the show after 4 seasons. I think that's enough time to wrap things up nicely.
 

Joseph DeMartino

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Originally Posted by Quentin

I think it would be wise to plan on ending the show after 4 seasons. I think that's enough time to wrap things up nicely.

Purely from a story-telling standpoint, sure. But there's a reason it is called show business. The network would like to collect the ad revenues as long as the show getting the same ratings or better (in the key demos) that a comparably expensive show would. The studio would like to keep it running as long as possible because the more episodes the easier it is to syndicate a show. Four seasons would give Fringe about 88 episoidesk, and that's "on the bubble" for syndication. Syndicators would prefer 100+ episodes, roughly five seasons. If you're "stripping" a show - running it 5 days a week in the same timeslot - anything less than 100 tends to "burn through" too quickly. You have to cycle back to episode one every couople of months and the audience loses interest. (Star Trek, at 79 episodes, was an exception as it was in so many other ways.) Then you have to find a new show for that slot. Serialized shows fare even more poorly in reruns, which makes it even more important that you don't go into your second and third cycle of the episodes too quickly. Sitcoms with lots of standalone episodes hold up better to this kind of treatment.

Most network shows that are produced at a deficit. The studio pays more to make them than the network pays in fees. When the studio and the network are corporate siblings this is less of an issue, but when Warner Bros. is losing money on every episode of a show that airs on Fox, they depend on foreign sales, home video and syndication to turn a profit. So the more episodes they can produce, the better. Conversely the network has no incentive to keep a show with spotty ratings on, whereas they might with a show produced "in house" because the syndication money benefits the parent company. Sadly Fringe is not a Fox studio production.

Regards,


Joe
 

Yee-Ming

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Originally Posted by Joseph DeMartino


Syndicators would prefer 100+ episodes, roughly five seasons. If you're "stripping" a show - running it 5 days a week in the same timeslot - anything less than 100 tends to "burn through" too quickly. You have to cycle back to episode one every couople of months and the audience loses interest. (Star Trek, at 79 episodes, was an exception as it was in so many other ways.) Then you have to find a new show for that slot. Serialized shows fare even more poorly in reruns, which makes it even more important that you don't go into your second and third cycle of the episodes too quickly. Sitcoms with lots of standalone episodes hold up better to this kind of treatment.


Not being in the US, in the past I wasn't familiar with any of these sort of considerations -- heck even the whole concept of network v. cable was alien. In the early days we literally only had one English-language broadcast channel, and whatever was shown on that channel was it. We could also receive broadcast signals from Malaysia up north, but their one English-language programming channel was even scantier, and usually slower as well. So thank you for the full explanation (of course today with HTFer's helpful explanations, I understand network v. cable v. syndication etc etc, although the rationale of the 100 ep mark for syndication wasn't clear to me -- until now).


Sorry to digress, but my actual point was that curiously, out here on our cable channels, one of them is semi-stripping the latest seasons. We usually get the latest shows somewhat behind the US broadcasts, e.g. the season which started in September would only start here around February (or even later), but then would usually be shown once a week without fail to season finale without disruption, since we wouldn't need to spread 22 eps over 9 mths like you have to do. But oddly, with the latest seasons of CSI, CSI NY, Hawaii 5-0 and Leverage, the cable channel that airs them (AXN) was showing 3 eps a week, burning through them pretty quickly and therefore "running out", since these seasons haven't been concluded yet even in the US. Most peculiar. Perhaps they're trying to encourage viewers to tune in to catch the latest shows (rather than download...), but personally I'm found it to be overload -- there are already plenty of shows on the roster once a week, ramming 3 eps of the show down my throat is a bit too much. And it's disruptive: these shows have to 'return' to the line-up later, since not all episodes of the current season have been aired yet, even in the US.


Another recent annoyance: instead of going by on-the-hour or on-the-half-hour, they've squeezed their schedule, so shows can start e.g. at 9.40pm and end at 10.30pm. Or even more bizzarely, 8.55pm to 9.50pm. Of course, that means practically no ads at all, which I can't really complain about, but it makes keeping track of when anything starts really hard. Do you guys have that problem with cable in the US?
 

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Originally Posted by mattCR

Yes, Fringe already has a front 12 order for next year, so it's renewed.

Not to nitpick, and I only do this because it's really good news, but according to multiple publications, Fringe was picked up for a full 22 next season. (Obviously they can still cancel it if they choose to, but I think that they picked them up for a full season shows that the network actually has some faith in what the show is doing.)
 

Greg_S_H

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Originally Posted by Yee-Ming

Another recent annoyance: instead of going by on-the-hour or on-the-half-hour, they've squeezed their schedule, so shows can start e.g. at 9.40pm and end at 10.30pm. Or even more bizzarely, 8.55pm to 9.50pm. Of course, that means practically no ads at all, which I can't really complain about, but it makes keeping track of when anything starts really hard. Do you guys have that problem with cable in the US?
I don't watch a lot of cable, but a show like Boardwalk Empire has a set time to run a week and that's when it runs. Then, until the next episode, you can pick several other airings if you missed it. Sporadic scheduling and arbitrary start times doesn't seem to be a problem. On the other hand, network programs sometimes have little annoyances like Castle starting at 9:01 or V ending at 9:01. When a show runs over a minute--presumably the old "make them miss the start of another program and they'll just stay with us" gambit--it can screw up DVR recordings. I can only record two shows at once, so that extra minute causes one of my shows not to record if I have two shows set at 9.


TBS, one of our basic cable channels, used to always start their programs at five minutes past the hour. I don't know if they still do that. TV Land will sometimes get out of whack and have programs ending at 10:10 or whatever, but it's not standard operating procedure.
 

Josh Steinberg

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I think the HBO/pay cable model of having a weekly "premiere" of the new episode and then rerunning it multiple times during the week is the way to go. There are a lot of reasons I'm sure people could think of why it wouldn't work, but I can think of many why it should. To begin with, it's kind of crazy that most networks business model has to do with trying to make the other network fail, and being that there are always going to be multiple channels, that's a pretty silly way to go about things. I think, frankly, there are also too many shows on television, as evidenced by how many shows come out and don't survive - part of it has to do with quality or lack thereof, and part to do with there being only so many hours in the day. Finally, the concept of watching something at the time the network wants you to watch it and only being able to watch it at that exact moment - that's history. HBO is smart by giving their viewers a chance to see the show when it's convenient to them, and I think that's why they've had such success with serialized shows, a type of show that can be difficult for viewers to keep up with if they miss even a single episode.


I know there was some mild controversy when Fringe got moved to the "Friday at 9 death slot" but I think in ten years from now, the night a show originally aired on is going to be an almost completely irrelevant, outdated concept. For anything that's not a live program (like a baseball game), these days I could generally care less about when it airs. I just hate that networks use outdated systems like Nielsen to determine how successful something is, when that's just not the way most people watch television anymore. One hopes that as special effects become cheaper, as digital cameras replace the expense of film stock (which could be key to keeping a show's production costs down), that budgets can go down or at least that you can get more bang for the buck, and that someone network executive somewhere will realize that a show having a million or two million loyal fans every week will be enough to keep something going. I think the days of worldwide television events, where practically everyone in the country is tuned in at the same time to watch the same thing, are over, and yet, whether a show lives or dies is still based on that outdated concept.


Fringe is a quality show, and what makes it even more special is that rather than saying on day one "this is a show about parallel universes at war with each other", the hidden truth about the show was allowed to play out over time. I like that they built to that revelation over a long period of time, using the device of having Olivia being brought in to investigate strange happenings, letting us (and her) gradually discover that there was a much larger picture. I have to admit, I've been a little baffled that some people haven't enjoyed that, that some people say they hate the episodes "over there" and that they wish the show would stop wasting time and go back to solving quirky weekly cases. I'd have given up on the show if that's all it was. That there are two worlds, that one may not survive, that all of the destruction caused and yet to be caused is in many ways the result of good intentions turning out very very badly. I love that we often see (nearly) identical characters faced with the same decisions, making different choices, and seeing how those choices make such a difference in the context of a much larger picture. I think that's all pretty awesome stuff. And, if you go beyond the sci-fi exterior and think about those concepts as being metaphors for how people live their lives, I think the show has a lot to say. The best sci-fi uses the impossible to allow us to explore whats in our own hearts and minds, and that's something that Fringe has truly succeeded at doing.


(Sorry for the off-topic rant, clearly that was bugging me...)
 

Yee-Ming

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^^ I'd hardly say that was off-topic ranting, your comments on Fringe itself are quite spot-on. If Fringe had only been a weekly "investigate the weird stuff" show, I suspect I would have lost interest too, but the whole alternate parallel universe meta-story has me hooked for the long term.


And I'd agree "viewing live" is a dead concept. I myself almost never watch anything at the scheduled time, even if I'm home at the time, preferring to DVR everything and watch later at my leisure (and so I can FF ads), mostly on the weekends. The present exception is the occasional favourite show airing in HD, since my DVR can't record in HD -- and even that may change soon if I decide to get the local equivalent of TiVo which does have an HD option.

Our cable channels do a decent compromise, airing new programming mostly at prime time, and then repeating the episode a few times later that night and the next daytime, and then sometimes another repeat at the weekend.
 

Joseph DeMartino

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I just hate that networks use outdated systems like Nielsen to determine how successful something is, when that's just not the way most people watch television anymore.

There is nothing outdated about Neilsen for determining how successful a show is in delivering eyeballs to the advertisers' commercials. And that's the only way commercial televsion measures (or can measure) "success." Remember, this is show business. The reason the broadcast and basic cable networks can't emulate the programming pattern of the pay-cable channels is that they have a different revenue stream. They aren't selling time to advertisers, they're selling us. That's why ratings derived from DVR recordings are discounted - advertisers know darned well that most of the time most of us are fast forwarding through their commercials. So neither the advertisers nor the networks care all that much about who is watching the show, because they have no economic incentive to do so. (HBO and Showtime, conversely, care very much about who is watching their shows, because that is how they attract subscribers.) Pay cable makes money from people watching the shows. In commercial television it is often the case that literally nobody makes money base on who watches the show. The network doesn't, the advertisers don't, even the studio doesn't. (See deficit financing, above.) The network makes money selling eyeballs to advertisers, the advertisers make money based on increased sales, and studio makes money on foreign sales, syndication and home video.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody else, of course. When I mention a favorite show and someone ask, "When is that on?" I often have no idea. Fringe? In my house it is usually on Saturday mornings. Yes, technology is changing viewing patterns, but in doing so it may kill the goose that lays the (free) golden eggs. Because advertising-supported free media requires that people actually be exposed to the advertising. Just as the existing film industry is slowly being killed by home theater ("I won't bother go out to see that, I'll wait for the DVD/Blu Ray" is eventually going to lead to "there are no films being released in theaters becaue they're all empty") the non-pay television my be killed by TiVo, Hulu and YouTube.

Regards,


Joe
 

Josh Steinberg

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Originally Posted by Joseph DeMartino



There is nothing outdated about Neilsen for determining how successful a show is in delivering eyeballs to the advertisers' commercials. And that's the only way commercial televsion measures (or can measure) "success." Remember, this is show business.



I understand that. What I meant to suggest is twofold: I'm not sure how accurate Nielsen's system is in a real-world application. It's based on sampling data and extrapolating that small sample into a larger picture that's supposed to be representative of the whole. Forty years ago, that might have been the best (and only) way to try to estimate those numbers, but can anyone truly have an idea of how accurate that is today? That is to say, how can we know that Nielsen's sample is truly reflective of the actual viewing audience? It's a guess, a very good guess, or a poll, if you will, and a pretty intelligently designed one at that - but much like any polling system, it has its limits and weaknesses.






But my larger point is, the model of how we as viewers consume our entertainment today is completely different than it was forty years ago. It's not a problem specifically with Nielsen; it's a problem with the entire system of measuring viewers and quantifying their worth. Thus, I think my earlier point holds: we don't view television the way we used to. I also think, and this is just my opinion here, that as a culture we're a bit more savvy to advertising than we used to be. I think in decades past, there was a certain "innocence" to the viewer, more of a willingness to believe advertiser claims and to accept the messages being sent over the air. I'm not sure that that holds true today; commercials might be shinier than ever, more slickly produced. While they may be reaching as many people as they used to, I'm not sure that they're being accepted as they once were.






I'm not suggesting that I have the perfect solution; I don't. What I am suggesting is that at some point, those in charge of running television networks will need to rethink their entire business from top to bottom. Things that were once absolute facts no longer are: the VCR was the first step in allowing people to watch the programs of their choice on their terms; the DVR and DVD/Blu-ray/digital distribution systems are the evolution of that concept. Television shows used to have an identity that was defined not only by the day/time they aired, but the networks they aired on. That kind of viewer loyalty is gone and will never return. While a show being on, say, NBC, used to be a selling point to an audience, today's audience for the most part doesn't feel a loyalty to a certain network. They certainly don't feel a loyalty towards a certain timeslot. Many people today are enjoying shows in ways completely removed from the original broadcast, whether it be a DVR or a DVD rental. Thus, today's viewer doesn't give a show a chance solely on the basis of it being the production of a certain network. Today's viewer doesn't look for a show to fill a certain slot in their weekday schedule, much less plan their lives around something airing at a certain time. Fringe is currently my favorite show on TV, and while I always want to catch it as close to air as possible simply because I don't want to wait a minute longer than I have to in order to see what's going to happen next, that's no longer a requirement. If I don't see it at Friday at 9, that doesn't mean that I won't have a chance to see it - and that simple fact, that simple change of attitude, changes everything.








I think what we're witnessing now is the death of the old model. I'm not sure what replaces it. But I do believe that if networks cling to the old model without attempting to be ahead of the curve, ultimately advertising will dry up, and they will find themselves out of business. Because while there are plenty of people who might be loyal to a show like Fringe, or any show for that matter, it's no longer a given that that loyalty will extend to the network, the timeslot, or the advertisers. I think in the end what we're likely to see, from a viewer's perspective, is three different kinds of audiences: those that will watch the show live at broadcast (those numbers will not go back to the highs that once were held, probably not ever); those who will watch the show timeshifted to their own convenience (be it DVR or internet streaming or OnDemand - the number of viewers watching shows this way will only continue to grow); and finally, those who will completely avoid the actual broadcast of a show and only watch it in "aftermarket" formats like DVD or Blu-ray (this will also continue to grow).


Ironically, I think content is as valuable as ever, perhaps even more so; it’s just that the traditional way of transmitting that content no longer holds the value it once did. Television shows in a way last longer than ever before, because it’s about more than just the original air date. Networks need to come up with a new model that takes into account the changing way we choose to watch things. Just the way home video used to be an afterthought for film studios, studios are now very conscious of the potential for DVD/Blu-ray/On-Demand/pay-TV airings to contribute a significant amount to a film's gross. Any new model for television revenue, in my opinion, must also take this into account. Sure, there will be the occasional smash hit that people flock to en masse the way people used to, but that's going to be the exception and not the rule.


Like I said, I'm not sure what the solution is. But I'm pretty sure the days of us, the viewer, being sold like a commodity to the advertiser, are by and large coming to an end. I hope that people smarter than I can figure out a way to make sense of all of this, because as a culture, I think our demand for entertainment has probably never been higher; but at the same time, our willingness to take that entertainment on anyone's terms other than our own is at an all-time low.
 

Yee-Ming

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Originally Posted by Josh Steinberg



Ironically, I think content is as valuable as ever, perhaps even more so; it’s just that the traditional way of transmitting that content no longer holds the value it once did. Television shows in a way last longer than ever before, because it’s about more than just the original air date. Networks need to come up with a new model that takes into account the changing way we choose to watch things. Just the way home video used to be an afterthought for film studios, studios are now very conscious of the potential for DVD/Blu-ray/On-Demand/pay-TV airings to contribute a significant amount to a film's gross. Any new model for television revenue, in my opinion, must also take this into account. Sure, there will be the occasional smash hit that people flock to en masse the way people used to, but that's going to be the exception and not the rule.


Like I said, I'm not sure what the solution is. But I'm pretty sure the days of us, the viewer, being sold like a commodity to the advertiser, are by and large coming to an end. I hope that people smarter than I can figure out a way to make sense of all of this, because as a culture, I think our demand for entertainment has probably never been higher; but at the same time, our willingness to take that entertainment on anyone's terms other than our own is at an all-time low.


Not sure that what follows is a complete or comprehensive answer, but IMHO perhaps network free-to-air funded by advertising is probably dead (or will be in the not-too-distant future), while subscription cable is the immediate way forward, with video-on-demand being the future?


Or for networks to survive, their programming will either come entirely from in-house studios (so they own the show themselves), or any deal to broadcast a show on a network will include a "cut" of subsequent revenues from home video, foreign and/or syndication sales?

Sheesh, we're digressing a fair bit away from Fringe. So: is Belly really gone (i.e. dead) for good? Perhaps in the added context of Nimoy having retired from acting, probably.
 

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Originally Posted by Yee-Ming

Sheesh, we're digressing a fair bit away from Fringe. So: is Belly really gone (i.e. dead) for good? Perhaps in the added context of Nimoy having retired from acting, probably.


Yeah, sorry about that - my bad. I seem to always end up going down that road of thought when it comes to sci-fi shows, because those always seem to be in the most danger. No one worries about CSI being cancelled.


I'm not sure what to make of William Bell going forward. On one hand, Nimoy said he was retiring from acting - and yet, they were able to get him back (at least, his voice) because they had a good story to tell and he was willing to be a part of it. So I think if they absolutely needed him for something, and it was well-written, they'd probably be able to lure him back. But I think there's a really good chance we saw the last of him. It was great to have some additional moments between Bell and Walter. In last year's season finale, they spend much of the time bickering with each other (priceless stuff), but Walter didn't really get the resolution he needed. With this mini-arc having concluded, it seems that Walter was finally able to get some closure and regain confidence in himself. Despite the LSD trip, the Walter we saw in this most recent episode was as human and whole as we might have ever seen him in the present timeline.


The only thing I wonder about Bell is when it comes to potential flashbacks they might do in the future; it seems like there could be room for his character in that context, whether it's a voice-over offscreen or just the continued mention of him. I also have a feeling that Olivia not trusting Nina might come back as a larger plot point in the future. In the first season, a lot of the unexplained "pattern" events seemed to have Bell behind them - maybe not for the sake of doing bad things, but as attempts to duplicate technology from "over there" on our side. I'm not sure if we'll ever get it, but I'd love to see the writers go more in depth about what Bell was up to all those years he spent over there, how he managed to travel back and forth, and whether he (intentionally or not) has also shared part of the responsibility for all of the trouble that's been going on on both sides. Bell seems like one of those guys who might have been willing to cross a lot of lines because he thought the greater good justified it - I'd like to know more about that. But, if we never get that, so be it. My ultimate fantasy episode would be another one of those flashback episodes, focused solely on Bell's journey to the other side and his association with Walternate. But maybe that's something better left to the imagination anyway.
 

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