After seeing all the 'net fan chatter about Fringe, which never was even on my radar in it's initial broadcast run, I downloaded all 9 seasons, and started watching. Ana Torv is worth the price of admission all by her lonesone, what an absolutely stunning and talented specimen of the human race, but the rest I'm finding is a bit hard to chew, granted I've only made it 7 episodes into the first season, but find myself unmotivated to go back for more. Does it get markedly better?
Season 1 is basically 'monster of the week'. Everything is disconnected, but it's a fun romp through sci-fi.
Season 2 starts the real plot. Things start to connect. They start to leave hints for future episodes, things tie back to previous episodes, and the characters get more complex. It's very well done.
IMO, yes. Near the end of season 1 it starts to become apparent that all those "random" monster-of-the-week occurrences aren't really random, and the plot becomes increasingly more serialized as time goes on.
A lot of things that happen in season one set up or are referenced in season two. While you probably could get away with skipping season one, you'll miss out on context.
Rewatching S1 after S2 is pretty amazing, though.
But you can definitely just not watch the last season. It's basically disjointed from everything.
Yeah there's only 5 seasons. I assume their source must've split the first 4 seasons in half for some reason. That would result in 9 seasons of 10-13 episodes.
There are only 5 seasons that I'm aware of. If you enjoy the idea of parallel dimensions and movement between them sparking a war, that's the basic premise for seasons 2-5. It can be a slog, but I'd argue if you liked Star Trek, LOST, or even Breaking Bad, there's a similar arc but each season can be a slog to get through.