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ABC's "Alias" features a butt-kicking espionage babe, awesome costumes and settings and possibly the most convoluted family drama in TV history. So why isn't it huge yet?
Jan 23, 2003 | Nobody really understands why "Alias" is not a ratings smash. Critics love it, fans are obsessed with it, ABC is behind it and star Jennifer Garner has had more magazine covers than she's had hot meals. So what, exactly, is the problem?
The only explanation -- and the brain trust's current thinking -- is that the plot is too confusing. And it is. It is staunchly, proudly and maddeningly impossible to follow. You can't just drop in and out of "Alias." You have to account for your whereabouts. "Alias" demands loyalty, devotion and the ability to keep even the most Byzantine convolutions straight. And once you get into it, you really want to. You want to do it for Sydney, the most beautiful, sensitive, ass-kicking, tortured and put-upon double agent in the history of fictional counterintelligence.
But 9.3 million viewers aren't enough, so as of Sunday, after the Super Bowl, a new, revamped "Alias" hits the airwaves. Weekly cliffhangers will disappear and new episodes will be more self-contained, requiring less knowledge of the previous week's episode. ("Alias" is such a teased-out serial that each week's episode is preceded by a detailed rundown of the previous week's episode.) Victor Garber, who plays Sidney's double-agent father, Jack, told reporters last week, "There are some big changes coming up in the next few weeks. The Super Bowl episode is like starting over. It's almost like a pilot episode."
In some ways, it makes sense for "Alias" to become more episodic. But at the same time, this new push for clarity threatens to undermine the murky emotional complexity that has set "Alias" apart from the cartoonish, tough-guy spy genre until now. Early on, the show was described as an action comic starring a hot babe. But it quickly became apparent that "Alias" was actually a family drama about a sensitive and committed hot babe -- with car chases and fabulous costume changes thrown in. What at first seemed like a casting gimmick has turned out to be a genre-bending coup: The Spy From the Dysfunctional Family.
For those who haven't followed it, the series began two years ago with grad student/spy Sydney Bristow finding out the hard way that the agency she works for is not, in fact, the CIA, but the nefarious SD-6, a black-market intelligence brokerage. (They killed her fiancé when she confessed the truth to him about her job.) She is also surprised to learn that her estranged father worked for SD-6 too, and is not, as she had always believed, an airplane parts salesman. Determined to avenge her fiancé's death, Sidney signs up as a counterspy for the CIA, and finds out her father works there, too.
A bit later, she learns that her mother (Lena Olin) was not a literature professor named Laura who died when she was young, but a KGB agent named Irina who betrayed her father and her country, and is alive and well and working for the K-Directorate, a Russian branch of SD-6. At the end of the first season, Sydney tracks down her mother, only to have Mom shoot her in the shoulder. In season 2, Irina offers her services to the CIA and begins working as a counterspy herself. This results in a salad of mixed emotions and second-guessing. As if that weren't enough, it brings her feuding parents back together, and places her squarely in the middle of their personal war.
The joke and the metaphor on "Alias" is, of course, that the Bristow family business has an uncanny way of mirroring their personal problems. "Alias" is a post-Cold War "Parent Trap" for the new millennium. "There are these three people that have such baggage and agendas and concerns," creator J.J. Abrams said in a recent interview. "And any dynamic between them -- all of them being opposed to the other, two of them siding against the third, one of them defending the other for the first time, all three of them against a current enemy -- any version of that is fascinating ... It's about the kid feeling loyal to one parent, guilty about the other, hopeful about one parent and copping to the other parent about that."
