Where, Out There, the Truth is Not

Mania uncorks a bottle of "do-you-like-it?" on Fox's Fringe. They'd have you believe Fox execs are jumping for joy over the series debut.

JJ Abrams' The X-Files redux featured a pilot with actual pilots — a passenger jet full of skeletons and a familiar FBI-partners-chase-the-supernatural structure. 

What's confounding about writer Stephen Lackey's article on the show is that it is (a) headlined "Everybody's on the FRINGE," with a sub-headline maintaining "All Eyes Were on Fox for the FRINGE Premiere," and (b) his lead reads "Did you watch the series premiere of Fringe? Apparently everyone else did according to Nielsen. Preliminary numbers for the 90 minute premiere averaged 9 million viewers and a 3.2 rating/share in the adults 18 to 49 demographic."

Well, Stephen, nice try. Here's what the numbers really mean: Fringe had a modest opening, leaving Fox in fourth place overall behind NBC, CBS, and ABC, according to tvbythenumbers.com

The TV Decoder blog at the The New York Times tells us Fringe did indeed lead 18-49 year-old viewers for the the night, but that its 9 million watchers put it just in front of ABC reality competition Wipeout. 

For a $10 million episode, that's not going to win Abrams a seat of honor at the next Fox board meeting. And while Lackey notes that Fringe is the biggest premiere on Fox "in a couple of years," (he presumably means Standoff in 2006) he fails to not that Standoff — at 13.7 million viewers on its opening night — was subsequently canceled for low numbers. 

So what's going on here? Sloppily constructed opinion? A little booster action from Mania for advertising favor? 

Hard to say. But what's not hard is to predict that Fringe has a tough haul ahead of it, and all eyes were certainly not there, last Tuesday.