Fringe Gets Second Season from FOX

Fringe is a weekly paranormal thriller starring Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson and John Noble as an FBI team that investigates mysterious and terrifying events that are related to an upcoming war between parallel universes.
The announcement is not a huge surprise, because Fringe has been one of just a small number of new shows that premiered last fall to become ratings hits.

J.J. Abrams is the co-creator and executive producer of Fringe. Abrams' past work includes the TV series Lost and Alias. He is also the director of the new Star Trek film opening this weekend.

Leonard Nimoy will be appearing in the season finale as Dr. William Bell, a mysterious figure who may be behind many of the strange events on Fringe. Nimoy is most famous for playing the character Spock on Star Trek, and he is reprising the role in Abrams' current movie.

Fringe revolves around the investigations of FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Torv) and her Fringe science team. The team consists of Dr. Walter Bishop (Noble), who once worked with Bell in the area of fringe science, as well as his son Peter (Jackson) and agents Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) and Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole). The Fringe division is overseen by Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick).

Over the course of the season the team has been exploring a strange series of events referred to as "the Pattern" by the team. These investigations have included aspects of fringe science such as teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, reanimation, and the creation of hybrid monsters.

Olivia, Peter, and Walter form a first response team to theses strange events, which are somehow connected to the corporation Massive Dynamics (headed by the previously unseen Bell) and a bioterrorist group known as ZFT.

The overall arc of the show includes many clues about how Dr. Bishop was involved in the origin of these events before he was confined to a mental institution, and the fact that Agent Dunham has a deeper connection to the mystery than previously disclosed.

Fringe premiered on September 9, and was given a full first season by FOX in October. It airs with limited commercials, about half the number of a regular drama series, part of FOX's "Remote Free TV" promotion this season. It will complete its 20-show firs run on the season finale May 12, and has been given 22 episodes next season.

Fringe has been nominated for a 2008 Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series. DC Comics has released a limited series of prequel comics written by Zack Whedon that deal with Bell and Bishop's early lab experiments.