It’s scarcely news that Hollywood has spent much of the last decade mining the comics pages for inspiration—and little enough surprise that they should, since comics narratives  have already proven they will work visually, and often come with a a built-in fanbase. Yet as the Watchmen film proved, the most formally brilliant works invariably lose the most in the translation to the screen, precisely because they so deftly exploited the possibilities of their native medium. Doctor Manhattan sees in four dimensions—moments decades apart juxtaposed in a single tableau, like frames on a comics page—and the reader is meant to experience Watchmen much the same way, freely moving forward and back to spot visual connections. The issue “Fearful Symmetries,” focused on the vigilante Rorschach, is itself as symmetrical as its protagonist’s inkblot face, with frame mirroring frame in both geometry and subject matter front to back. Through the combination of word and image, Alan Moore told his story not just through traditional “cinematic” comics, but by including excerpts from characters’ memoirs or childhood drawings, academic papers, popular press, and psychiatrists’ notes, helping to flesh out the fictional world by showing it from a welter of different vantage points.  None of this can really be done well onscreen.

Watching the TV show Fringe over the past few months, however, it occurs to me that technology is changing that somewhat—that new expectations about how viewers engage with television programs are enabling creators to make use of more comics-like techniques. Fringe is packed with little Easter eggs that take for granted the viewer’s ability to pause the program in progress to examine it frame by frame, and indeed, to freely move forward and backward both within and between episodes. Indeed, every episode’s opening sequence includes the hidden message “Observers are here,” which flickers by too quickly to be detected by a human eye unaided by pause button. Fans play a sort of “Where’s Waldo” game each episode, hunting for the pale, hairless Observer himself—he, too, may appear for only a fraction of a second—and for the subtle shot that hints at the subject of the next episode, though it’s typically only possible to recognize it as such by going back after the later show has aired. Those who don’t feel like spending that much time with a remote, of course, can always log on to one of the various fan sites and see what the most dedicated and patient among them have come up with. And needless to say, official companion sites like Walter’s Lab Notes and Massive Dynamic elaborate and extend the onscreen story.

Basically until now, it’s been the case that TV shows and movies were made to be viewed, at least ideally, start to finish in realtime, with only the interruptions advertising demanded. VCR technology, and later DVR, were seen as conveniences for viewers who couldn’t view in the ideal way—sitting down at the appointed time, and absorbing the story passively for the allotted half-hour or hour. Taping a show for later viewing was the exception rather than the rule. Now, though, you’ve got lots of viewers who are already watching the show as a digital download or an auto-recorded stream on cable. In many cases, then, the default format the viewer is watching is subject not only to easy pausing and rewinding, but also perhaps zooming, inversion, Photoshop manipulation… I haven’t gone back to see what the fans made of it, but one episode involved the characters extracting the thoughts of an unearthly Observer child as a nonsensical audio track—but one that sounded an awful lot like it might indeed contain human speech, only reversed and distorted. What J.J. Abrams has realized is that these recording technologies aren’t just a convenience to allow more harried viewers to experience the same linear narrative; they’re also, in an indirect way, tools for the show creator because they change expectations about how viewers are capable of engaging with the program—in this case, less like traditional TV and more like the most formally innovative graphic novels.

It would be great to see more attention paid to this—and more thought given by creators to the possibilities of a form where it’s assumed viewers will range over the content at a pace and in an order they determine. A character might have a flashback shown in rapidfire jumpcuts that, seen slowly, cue viewers to scenes from previous episodes. Going back and juxtaposing the full scenes in sequence might, in turn, bring to the surface some unstated epiphany, or simply hint at a connecting theme that revealed what the character was thinking about. Not everyone, of course, wants to watch a show this way, and a savvy creator would find ways of introducing these elements unobtrusively—just as you could ignore all the formal cleverness and just read Watchmen as a straightforward comics adventure story. Still, I’m excited by the possibilities here, and hope other TV writers and filmmakers and Web video producers start exploring them.