After creating Alias and Lost on the small-screen while directing Mission Impossible III and producing Cloverfield on the big screen in between, writer/director J.J. Abrams has quickly become one of Hollywood's A-list go-to guys. Next up for Abrams is his creepy and paranormal, Twilight Zone meets X-Files two-hour series pilot for Fox, with Mi3, Transformers, and Star Trek co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. After Fringe takes flight on Fox, fans will finally get to see the Abrams, Kurtzman and Orci reboot of the Star Trek franchise early in 2009.

At last week's TCA press tour in Los Angeles, J.J. Abrams and Fringe co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci sat down together at the Fox panel to talk what fans can expect from Fringe, how the series will be different from Alias and Lost, and the latest on Star Trek and how they feel about the legacy of the franchise.

If it’s possible to say, "Okay, Lost is over here, Alias is here," where is Fringe in that?

J.J. ABRAMS: Fringe feels a part of the same universe as those shows, although it’s obviously its own thing and very different. So I feel like it’s someone who’s a fan of those show will likely find something that they like in Fringe, but they’re not specifically thematically connected or through character.

Where did the idea come from?

ALEX KURTZMAN: We were all sitting in a room together, we were obviously spending a lot of time together already doing Star Trek and we just started, "Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could do a scene where this happened and that kind of thing?" And suddenly we started taking notes and three weeks later we were writing it. It was a process of just sitting down and saying, "Alright, let’s make this real and think about the kind of show we want to tell and what would we want to see as fans." Ultimately, I think that’s the biggest thing we ask ourselves when we go into these things.

Can you give us a taste of what the pitch meeting was?

ABRAMS: I’ll tell you what happened was, we didn’t pitch it anywhere. We just sort of incubated it and talked about it and then wrote it and then went to Fox...

ROBERTO ORCI: Take it or leave it.

ABRAMS: [laughs] Well, Bob is an angry guy and Alex and I are really calm and happy people. So we gave the script to Fox and said, "Please make the show." Bob said, "Take it or leave it."

What can we expect, what are you excited about with this particular Star Trek?

ABRAMS: Right now we have a cut of the movie that has about 12% of the visual effects near done. But the movie is working and that’s the thing that is exciting to me. What’s amazing about the movie is the people are awesome and the characters are alive and they’re great and you love them. And Alex and Bob wrote an amazing script and our amazing actors made it more amazing. It was really like the fun of watching Zachary Quinto take a role like Spock, which is an incredibly sort of deceptively complicated part. And when you see the whole performance, there were things he was doing I didn’t even see or realize he was doing when we were making the movie. And to have Chris Pine come in and embrace this role of Kirk in a way that is so complete and emotional and funny and cocky yet vulnerable, it’s a wonderful thing. So that, to me, is where the best news is without the stuff you think - you need that to tell the story. It works and it really is a testament to the people in the movie and the script.

Why are you drawn to dark subject matter?

ABRAMS: It is funny. You know, looking at Trek, which has - there is some real weird and dark stuff that happens in it. But the truth is that Star Trek is so optimistic. There’s an optimism to Star Trek that is to me one of the things that was most appealing about the idea even of doing the movie, which is - while there is darkness that must be in contrast, and while there is real obstacle and an incredible villain and it’s terrifying and weird and creepy and scary and gross and all of the kind of things that you’d expect from this crazy sort of adventure, it’s also got a huge heart and a wonderful kind of family at the core of it. So while there are weird things that happen in Lost, Alias, and certainly in Fringe, something like Star Trek is ultimately, as I believe is the case with Fringe as well, a hopeful story.

There is no question that there is incredibly weird stuff that happens and people get tortured and hurt and the villains are evil and mean, but it’s part of defining who the good guys are. I think at the end of the day there are a lot of movies out there that are incredibly grim and very cynical and I don’t think that certainly Alias or Lost - and I can tell you with Fringe - these are stories that are ultimately very much about the people, totally humanistic emotional stories and good prevails. I’m always turned off by stuff that is too cynical and dark.

What is it about this show that made you guys want to come back to television?

KURTZMAN: I think in the case of Fringe, we really started to fall in love with these characters and felt like in some ways movies were too limiting for them. We wanted to take time to explore them over the course of many seasons. You know, we’re just beginning to scratch the surface about who these people are in the pilot and I think you could obviously extrapolate a lot from there. But I think we felt in this particular sort of trio of characters that a movie wouldn’t service it well enough, that we wanted to go to TV and really explore.

ORCI: I also like the immediacy of it. It’s like current events. You can literally have something and turn it around as a concept and see it on TV and get reactions to it in six weeks. That’s just not a luxury you get in movies. You get instant feedback in television.

Was it a little surreal when you were on the set [of Star Trek] for the first time?

ORCI: Insane.

KURTZMAN: Yeah, it’s beyond - it’s like you’re in a dream.

ORCI: Out of body.

ABRAMS: It was weird.

Lost is famous for adding more mysteries, more unsolved questions and not going back to solve the other ones it takes awhile for it. Is Fringe going to be constructed that way too with another mystery on top of another one?

ABRAMS: Yes, and no. I mean, I think that the show - it’s very important to the three of us that Fringe be a show that people can watch either religiously or casually. It’s something that Alias and Lost I don’t think necessarily have in their back pocket. Those are shows that you really need to watch every episode to kind of track. Fringe is a show that if you watch every episode you’ll be rewarded with details and specific movements of character and story. But you don’t have to. This show is going to have a much more accessible way in. And I think the stuff that’s going to be scary and crazy and creepy and weird, there’ll be a beginning, middle, and end. So there’s a procedural element to the show that I’m actually thrilled to play with, because I’ve never done a show that’s a procedural based show. So it was important for the three of us that the show not be exclusionary, that if you do a series where by episode six if you didn’t catch the first five you’re screwed. Our goal was to mitigate that, which I think the other two shows - which I am honored to be a part of - kind of made their names being these sort of oblique kind of Byzantine experiences.