I encounter pronouncements made in shameless ignorance of history quite a lot when reading work by or about postmodernists. For the moment I draw your attention to some comments made by a man and his collaborator, both of whom are custodians of some of the most significant cultural properties of the twentieth century. As part of a piece I am writing on the depiction of paranormal investigators in television fiction I had to read a few things on Fringe (2008-2013). These quotes come from an interview of series co-creators JJ Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman around the time Fringe first went to air. Here are the offending quotes:
Orci: "Lately you can either have a procedural or you can have something extremely serialized and very culty. ... And to us the idea of seeing if you can do both simultaneously is a new kind of storytelling ... The idea of literally crashing Law & Order with Lost basically is very exciting for us." [1]
Abrams: "Every week there will be a case that will challenge [the team] and put them at risk that they'll have to deal with. In many ways it's a puzzle, and there is a classic cop procedural element to it. On the other hand, what they're dealing with, and who is responsible for what they're dealing with, is connected to a larger story. And when the episodes arise with the larger mythology, you will be brought up to speed if you haven't seen it before." [1]
What is the problem? The problem is that The X-Files (1993-2002) did exactly the things which Orci and Abrams are claiming are original a decade and a half before their show. The X-Files is hardly a manor show and has been noted by significant media scholars to have combined episodic and serial narrative in a way that founded a new model of storytelling. Furthermore, it has been likened to Law & Order in a very similar way for the adoption and alteration of the procedural format which it relied upon. Elsewhere Abrams has mentioned drawing on The X-Files in the conception of Fringe [2]. Did I mention Fringe centres on a branch of the FBI? Admittedly The X-Files drew on earlier works itself but it used these creatively. Fringe is symptomatic of the absence of creativity in the vast bulk of recent television. The quotes above are symptomatic of the treatment of earlier works as non-existent or second to the supposed grandeur of newer material. More on that soon.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20090319031033/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw19440.html
[2] http://www.tvguide.com/News/Fringe-Series-Finale-Oral-History-Abrams-Jackson-Torv-Noble-1059131.aspx
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