By GustavoLeao / 06:36, 6 September 2008 / Feature Films

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MovieWeb posted a new interview with Star Trek movie director J.J. Abrams, in which he talks about his new TV Show Fringe. Here are few excerpts.

When you talked a little bit earlier about the serialized nature of the show, how it won't be as much serialized as Lost and Alias, do you envision more like the The X-Files where maybe ten out of 20 episodes in a season have to do with one particular back story and the others have nothing to do with it, or more like Lost where there's a number of different mythologies, but they're introduced every episode and don't seem to go anywhere, but you plan to revisit it at some point? Which do you see it more as?

J.J. Abrams: I've never seen the The X-Files [laughs]. ....I'm such a fan of not just The X-Files, but The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite shows of all time. I love the original Nightstalker was great. What I love about shows, The X-Files did so well is they could do creepy stuff The Twilight Zone style, and like you said, it was actually even more than half the season, but they would do a number of shows that had nothing to do with the overall storytelling, the overall mythology and then they would jump in and do one. That is definitely closer to the model. I would even say closer to that-it's closer to ER almost where you have these ongoing relationships, these ongoing storylines and yet week to week when the door bursts open you're faced with the insane urgent situation of the week.

A show I loved when it was on was The Practice. That's another show that would do that well, which is they would deal with the interpersonal relationship stuff. The funny thing about, I am so interested in those relationships. When I look back at doing Felicity, and I'm sure Josh felt this way on Dawson's Creek as well, that the problem with those shows is that there's nothing to interrupt the relationship story. So while there are things here and there that you come up with, there was no franchise that would distract the main characters from their emotional storyline.

So I think a show like ER is a good example of a show where if these characters were not doctors and they were just hanging out, you go through their emotional stories in a few episodes. But because of what's happening everyday, every week on those shows, there's stuff they have to deal with, there're fires to put out. So anyway, The X-Files is definitely a good model. ER for some reason is one that feels more in line with the rhythm of what we're doing, but the X-Files is a great example.

J.J., when you look at the current television landscape and you think about what shows like Lost and Heroes and Battlestar Galactica have done and what Fringe could potentially do, do you consider this to be almost the golden age of sci-fi?

J.J. Abrams: I would like to think that we're-it's funny because Lost was always a sci-fi show that was kind of secretly a sci-fi show, and something like Battlestar Galactica is obviously much more overtly science fiction. The weird thing about Fringe is that although you can say it's science fiction, a lot of what we're talking about is stuff that is at least in the realm of possibility, even though we're definitely pushing it. So some of the stuff that we're talking about now is not as much sci-fi as much as it is just sci, like when Star Trek came out and they had their communicators, that was a cool dream and now we all in our pockets have communicators and it's just real. So when we're working on an episode and we read as we did a week ago, that invisibility is coming, they think we've cracked invisibility. And you're like, "Okay." Like the stuff that you just would never in a million years think is actually possible is happening every day.

So I think we may be living in the golden age of sci-fi for the TV, but I think it's partially because we're living in an incredibly advanced, and almost uncontrollably so, period of scientific achievement. It's pushing what we all thought was our ... it's that comfortable almost quaint version of what sci-fi is to a very different place, and that's where Fringe lives.

The full interview is here.