The Weekend's Television: Fringe, Sun, Sky 1 Little Britain USA, Fri, BBC1

J J Abrams, creator of Lost, opens his new series Fringe with a little wink at his devotees. We're on an aircraft again, at cruising altitude and – if you're a fan of aircrash-initiated enigmas – things are looking very promising. The "Fasten Seat Belts" signs have just come on, beads of sweat are standing out on passengers' foreheads and an electrical storm is flashing like a mob of paparazzi just outside the window. But then the flight plan diverts, because rather than plunging on to a tropical island this aircraft flies on to make a safe landing at Boston, the only hitch being that by then everyone on board, flight crew included, have been reduced to a gluey bones by a flesh-eating contagion. "What kind of terrorism is this?" asked a queasy investigator in a hazmat suit, as he played his flashlight over the results.

It's Fringe as in lunatic, if you hadn't already gathered. The credit-sequence graphics include a kind of internet word cloud, featuring terms like "artificial intelligence", and "precognition" and "psychokinesis", and offering a tacit promise that X Files fans, for so long deprived of a weekly dose of over-excited credulity, may have something here that will fill the gap. The phrase in the cloud that will cover pretty much everything, though, is "dark matter". That's what Fringe is interested in – quasi-scientific gothic – and it pursues it through the proxy of an FBI agent called Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), first seen here having vigorous sex with a fellow agent in a cheap motel but, by the end of this first episode, enlisted to an inter-agency task force, which specialises in the inexplicable and the weird.

Olivia acquired a personal interest in the flesh-eating bug investigation after she and her lover checked out a secret neuro-toxin lab (including a startling cameo appearance by what appears to be a shaved weasel). Agent Scott is contaminated and begins to turn into a life-size version of the transparent-man anatomy model, and in order to save him Olivia has to spring a deranged bio-chemist from a mental asylum with the help of his estranged, but equally brilliant son. Walter Bishop, the mad genius, is the best thing about Fringe, indeed, possibly the only good thing about it, since his derangement allows for dark comedy in a drama that is mostly as solemnly self-important as a razor-blade ad. "They have this terrible thing in here," Bishop said to Dunham, in Vincent Price tones of sepulchral horror. "This... butterscotch pudding! It's... horrible." Later, taking a break from preparing a kind of paranormal conference call between Dunham and her comatose lover, he relaxed by watching SpongeBob Squarepants: "Surprisingly profound for a narrative about a sponge," he said approvingly.

Fringe, sadly, can't match Sponge- Bob's profundity, opting for a slightly hand-me-down paranoia about the pernicious nature of technological capitalism, with a company called Massive Dynamic playing the part of the corporate villain. Massive Dynamic has a New York headquarters that looks as if it's been designed by Daniel Libeskind on a very bad day, and is run by an Anna Wintour-type in Issey Miyake pleats. She muttered darkly about the Pattern, a mysterious outbreak of paranormal catastrophes that will presumably do for Fringe what the Dharma Initiative did for Lost. Sadly, there's a little too much of that kind of ersatz mystification and not quite enough of the deadpan style that you get a flash of in the very last lines of the opening episode. "How long has he been dead?" the Wintour type snapped as Agent Scott's body is trolleyed in. "Five hours," responded the flunky. "Question him," she replied flatly.

Matt Lucas and David Walliams certainly can't be accused of buttering up to American audiences in Little Britain USA, which begins with Tom Baker grandly informing HBO's viewers that "we let you win the War of Independence because you threatened to cry if we didn't." They're not going to be accused of overdoing it with new material either. There are some fresh characters here, including a redneck sheriff who gets an erection as he displays weapons to his deputies, and a former astronaut who can't get over the fact that he was the eighth man on the moon and not the first. But mostly they've simply transferred the British regulars Stateside, and not worried much about the plausibility of the move. Quite how Marjorie Dawes comes to be conducting an American weight-loss class isn't clear, though it has to be said that imagining American sensibilities coming in contact with her rasping lack of tact adds a novel twist to the basic gag. Rosie O'Donnell sportingly takes a cameo, which allows two pieties to be outraged at once: "Are you fat because you're a lesbian," she was asked by Marjorie, "Or are you a lesbian because you're fat?"

The show would be a lot easier to like if you had the sense that such calculated shocks were serving something other than mere shock itself.