Fringe

It’s difficult for me to believe that someone, somewhere isn’t watching out for me when something like Fringe exists. A show about Anna Torv investigating paranormal and, on occasion, even-less-normal phenomena feels a bit like I’m getting no-scoped by the Universe, and it serves as a premier mid-30s carnival ride inside the theme park of sexual and contextual awakenings that Agent Scully and the X-Files started building in me way back in my tweens. At the time, Agent Scully could have backed over my body with a truck and all I would have done is given her a thumbs up, and I’m not confident that any of that has changed.

I’ve watched the first 3 seasons of Fringe once already, back when I lived in Raleigh, NC after college and spent more money on clove cigarettes and whiskey than I did on groceries and laundry detergent or soap of any kind combined. At the time, the only way to Watch Shows Without Going To Jail (I was an anxious kid) was to wait for them to air each week on their respective networks like a dweeb (me) or to buy them on iTunes some unknown number of months later (also me). Or at least, those were the only ways I really knew about and so I made a mixture of the two that leaned heavily on Cable. Starting around 2011 or so, though, it became very easy for Cable to drift out of your life, and once it did in mine, Fringe unfortunately floated away with it.

I finally remembered that it existed a week or so ago when I stumbled across it on HBO Max. For a streaming service that seems to be collecting L’s like Super Stars at the moment, this was a welcome improvement and I got giddy or at least giddy-adjacent over it. As an aside, one of the many benefits of drinking way too much in your 20s is that later on you can revisit your favorite shows from that era as if you were watching them for the first time. And revisiting this show, I am.

If you enjoy fringe science rabbit holes and still find yourself convinced a teeny bit that Bigfoot might be real or that there really is a version of you out there who enjoys cleaning your room, then Fringe is going to be vaguely pornographic. Just imagine that you’re into comic books and your car hops the curb and crashes through the wall of Comic-Con. I can’t recommend it enough, and it’s an incredible friend to have on long flights or weekends when you decide to stay in, which for me is every weekend thankfully. In the picture below, I am Frog and Fringe is Toad, and if you end up watching the show I hope you enjoy the places you’ll go.