It will come to nobody's surprise that I am a big nerd. I have spent nearly all of my adult life training to be a scientist, which meant whiling away countless hours in lab. I even wrote a rather depressing Petrarchan sonnet about life as a graduate student, which I'm rather proud of. (That I enjoyed writing the sonnet more than calibrating my spectrometer is probably why I was not cut out for science.)

Now, as a nerd, one of my biggest pet peeves is how infrequently TV shows get science right. TV always likes to show theoretical physicists boiling green liquid in a flask over a Bunsen burner when, in actuality, they would be sitting, twiddling their thumbs, while their computers crunch away. But I was actually really impressed with the authenticity of the Fringe laboratory set.

Fringe, which premieres tonight on FOX at 8pm, is the new project from the mind of Lost creator J.J. Abrams, and centers on an unlikely trio who work together to investigate strange occurrences that can only be explained by “fringe science.” The trio is made up of FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), Walter Bishop (John Noble), a scientist who specialized in fringe science before being locked up in a mental institution in the ‘70s, and Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), Walter's estranged son who is just as much of an intellectual giant as his father.

In tonight's pilot episode, Agent Dunham springs Walter Bishop from the mental institution in order to help her save the life of a fellow FBI agent. Walter insists that to save his life, he must get back to his old lab at Harvard, where he was a professor back in the ‘70s. The lab was supposedly left untouched for decades, and the set designers and prop people really exceeded my expectations in creating a really authentic looking set.

There are dusty bottles of solvent chemicals everywhere and genuine equipment that a real lab would have, like an ancient oscilloscope and mass spectrometer. There was an open lab notebook with notes about magnetic resonance, which I'm going to take as a personal shoutout to myself because that's what I used to study. There are other oddities, which are somewhat less realistic but necessary for plot and story, like a space to hold livestock, but one thing they got completely right was all the clutter. I know from experience that labs are messy, messy places.

Jasika Nicole, who plays Olivia Dunham's assistant at the FBI, met my fellow BuddyTV writer Gina Scarpa and me at the Silver Cup studios to give us a tour of the lab.





Jasika Nicole's character, Astrid Farnsworth, assists Olivia and Walter with research in the lab. Part of her responsibility is to help acquaint Walter with new-fangled 21st century computers and such.

Some of the most interesting scenes in the series premiere of Fringe occur in the lab. When you watch the premiere tonight, be sure to take some time to notice the set pieces. If the attention to detail in the laboratory is any indication of the quality of the show as a whole, then I think it's going to be an excellent show.



-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer