JH Wyman On The End Of Fringe And His New Sci-Fi Show

Fringe ’s executive producer JH Wyman is burning his creative candle from both ends as he’s simultaneously crafting the final two scripts of the series, prepping to shoot the series finale in early December, and prepping the new pilot he’s doing with JJ Abrams and Bryan Burke that will shoot in 2013 for Bad Robot & WB TV.

As part of a longer exclusive chat with SFX (more news on where that will appear soon), Wyman laughs when he tells us, “For those that know me, they know that I’m an insomniac. I love it and live for that.”

The showrunner says as his days at Fringe wane, “It’s not hard but more bittersweet. I’m going to leave this season saying I wouldn’t change a frame and that’s what I want. It’s hard emotionally, a lot harder than I thought it would be. But I’m really good at understanding things as I’m going through them. I said to the writers, ‘You guys, this is the end. We have to cherish every single moment and every single word that we do. It’s so important because this kind of thing rarely happens. We have to experience this and be conscious because you want to look back and know it was breathtaking.’ We’re writing the last two episodes now and I feel we are writing perfectly good scenes over because maybe we don’t want to finish the scripts because when one is finished…now it’s a feeling of relief and dread.”

“But I’ll bring these guys to my next show,” Wyman enthuses.

The new show (which doesn’t have a formal announced title yet) is a buddy cop show set in the near future where human cops are partnered with advanced, human-like androids.

“The new show is very exciting: big and bombastic,” Wyman shares. “It celebrates and investigates some really interesting ideas about humanity versus technology. It’s a cool landscape and everything I learned from Fringe as a storyteller is going to be poured into that, and everything JJ has learned will go into it so I can pull from his amazing expertise. It’s going to be this great big, loud thing we hope will be successful. It gets me excited when I think about it. I’ve already gone down the road to break the pilot, and I’m doing that simultaneously to Fringe . It’s funny because when ideas come, they come fast and furious. I’m anxious to get going on it but at the same time I’m conflicted because it’s like I’m putting one show to bed and giving birth to another.”

Fringe ’s final two-hour finale airs in the States on 18 January 2013.

Tara Bennett

• Celebrity Sci-Fi Fave Raves
• Fringe : Anna Torv Interview
• Fringe season five reviews