It's no secret that writer/producer/director J.J. Abrams is one of this generation's hottest filmmakers. Although Abrams' rise to the top of Hollywood didn't come overnight, his career picked up major steam when Alias became a hit on TV before going on to bigger heights with Lost and then to blockbuster heights on the big screen as director of Mission Impossible II, producer of Cloverfield, and director of the upcoming Star Trek reboot.

In the midst of all of the success, J.J. Abrams also found time to create the upcoming and amazingly cool looking alt-sci-fi series Fringe, which makes its debut on Fox this Tuesday, September 9 at 8pm. For those fans out there who have been in mourning since The X-Files went off the air, Fringe looks like it will raise the bar even higher and give you everything and more that you've been missing for the past decade.

With Fringe about to hit the airwaves, we checked into a conference call with J.J. Abrams to goods on the series straight from the man himself - from casting Joshua Jackson and how he feels about corporate conspiracies to comparing Fringe to Lost and Alias and whether he feels we're now living in the Golden Age of sci-fi.

Be sure to check out our earlier TCA scoop with Abrams and Fringe producing/writing partners Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci at Fox's official Fringe website.

J.J. Abrams on how far they can push the show before it becomes unbelievable:

The truth is, when we did the pilot of Lost we had the monster appear at the end of the first act. And we did that very consciously, because we wanted to say to the audience, ‘We’re jumping the shark now.’ Like we’re doing crazy shit from the beginning, we’re doing it, we’re not going to wait. So on Fringe we very consciously did what is, in many ways, a preposterous, out there, far fetched, scientific story point in order to say to the audience, ‘This is what you’re going to be getting on the show.’ Now it may be more extreme, in some cases less so in others. Some shows, I think, as we’re writing scripts, we’ll tell with science very much as it exists.

"But I think for the most part the fun about it for me was in movies and TV show - especially in the genre of either horror or sci-fi - is pushing the envelope and going further than you might otherwise. I think the show will definitely be pushing the envelope, but I don’t think it’s going to be about that, I don’t think we’re going to be trying to top ourselves every week because then we’ll just be in a race against ourselves and there’s no way to win that one. I feel the key is to tell stories as compelling, as emotional, as funny and certainly as weird and out there as possible, but not to try and have it be exploiting that aspect of the show. I would rather be delving into who these people are and what makes them tick, than doing something just for shock value."

Abrams on what he saw in Joshua Jackson to play Peter Bishop:

"I’ve known Josh a little bit for a long time. Back in the days of Dawson’s Creek, I was doing Felicity, so we were sort of in that same universe. And I’ve always been a fan and love his sense of humor and the gravity I thought he could bring to something, even as soap operatic as the stuff we were doing on The WB. I felt the same thing about Kerry Russell. You find there are actors, they are really good, they elevate the material, they make it better. And as director, writer, producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is. And I always thought that Josh had that ability and I’m thrilled that we finally get a chance to work together."

On the personal relationship between Peter and Olivia:

"There is no doubt going to be a slow burn relationship that develops between the two of them. I don’t think it will happen exactly as you might think, but there obviously will be a dynamic there that we will play up. And like Josh said, it needs to be earned and it needs to be done right and there’s a lot going on in their lives on the show. There are more urgent issues, but there’s definitely going to be, over time, a relationship between the Peter and Olivia character."

On making a point about corporations:

"The show doesn’t quite hit on the sort of corporate conspiracy aspect as the pilot might suggest. But there definitely is an ambiguous role played by Blair Brown and she works for a company. It’s much more important, the relationship between her boss, who we have yet to meet, and Walter, John Noble's character. Their back story, how they ended up where they are, these are things that are much more about the characters than about a sort of clichéd cynical look at corporate culture. Having said that, I don’t trust corporate culture at all."

Abrams on comparing Fringe to Lost and Alias and what his expectations of the show are:

"My expectations are sort of irrelevant, because I never really know what to expect and you can never guess or assume what anyone is going to think. I can say that it’s one of those shows, if I had nothing to do with it and saw it coming out, I’d want to kill myself. I’d be so miserable because it is so the show that I’d want to watch. That doesn’t mean that anyone else will. That doesn’t mean it’s good or bad, it just means it is so the kind of show that I am excited to see. In terms of the other series', I don’t know if I can compare them. Fringe is a very different show. But I will say that one of the experiments we‘re doing on Fringe is writing the show so that it is not as overtly serialized as certainly Alias and Lost are... Well, were.

"How that translates, I don’t know. What it means, I’m not sure. But because I’m so drawn to overarching, long term stories, there will still be the mythology, the evolution of character, the revelations of their story, what the pattern means and what they’re doing and how they connect to that. So there’s all of this stuff that’s happening. But we’re doing it in a way that is much less sort of week-to-week installments on back story, which then requires you to reset things every time you do an episode that is a mythology episode, which makes it, I hope, something you can watch without feeling like you’re not in the club if you miss an episode."

J.J. Abrams on whether this is the golden age of sci-fi:

"I would like to think that we’re - It’s funny, because Lost was always a sci-fi show that was secretly a sci-fi show and something like Battlestar Galactica is obviously much more overtly science fiction. The weird thing about Fringe is that although you could say it’s science fiction. A lot of what we’re talking about is stuff that is at least in the realm of possibilities even though we’re definitely pushing it. So some of the stuff we’re talking about now is not as much sci-fi as much as it is just 'sci'.

"Like when Star Trek came out, they had their communicators. That was a cool dream and now we all, in our pockets, have communicators and it’s just real. So if we’re working on an episode and we read, as we did a week ago, that invisibility is coming [laughs] - they think we’ve cracked invisibility - and you’re like, ‘Okay.’ Like the stuff you would never think in a million years is actually possible is happening every day. So I think we may be living in the golden age of sci-fi to the TV [world]. But I think it’s partially because we’re living in an incredibly advanced, and almost uncontrollably so, period of scientific achievements and it’s pushing what we all sort of thought was our kind of - That comfortable quaint version of what sci-fi is to a very different place, to where Fringe lives."