The Safe House - Expositions

Some have launched, and suffer from bad timing no less than bad scriptwriting: NBC's "UC: Undercover" is shaping up, after three views, as a wanna-be mixture of "Mission: Impossible" and "Wiseguy," while the CBS series about the CIA, "The Agency," is either too close to home or too far away from the headlines. Either way, it's not compelling and probably won't last.

But "24," set to start next month on Fox, is an excellent series, and probably will arrive late enough to distance itself from immediate concerns of too-chilling parallels to current events. Even so, there are concerns, from the destruction of a passenger jet (the explosion of which, we're told, will be edited from the final cut) to the overall theme of a presidential candidate being targeted by an assassin.

One spy series has already gotten a good start, and established its characters, intrigue and story line without being too grim or too annoyingly irrelevant.

It's "Alias" -- and the ABC series, which airs Sunday night at 9, has separated itself quickly from the rest of the spy-TV pack.

Why? Several reasons.

The main reason is Jennifer Garner. This actress ("Time of Your Life") is asked to do a lot on this show. And she does it all -- superbly.

Her character, Sydney, who works for a rouge group of CIA agents known as SD-6, has to be chameleonic in her spy persona. From demeanor to dialect, she shifts gears credibly and strikingly.

Dealing with her spy colleagues, she's uniformly tough -- just as, when attempting to complete her senior year as a college student, she's regularly behind and vulnerable. By the time the pilot episode was over, Sydney's world was torn apart and changed irrevocably.

Her fiancé was killed because she revealed she was a spy. She learned the people for whom she was working actually were a renegade outfit, working against, rather than for, the federal government. She was captured and tortured by enemy spies, only to escape and turn herself in to the CIA and offer herself as a double agent, working to infiltrate and crack SD-6.

Then she discovered her father worked as a spy for the same renegade agency. And later, to her relief, that he, too, was a good spy working undercover, trying to bring down SD-6.

The characters in this complex web of duplicity are cast, written and performed fabulously, from Victor Garber as Sydney's dad and Ron Rifkin as the ruthless SD-6 leader to Michael Vartan's CIA contact and Kevin Weisman as the super-geeky but sweet weapons inventor at SD-6.

Maybe "Alias" works because, like Sydney, our lives have changed, and most things rethought and reevaluated, in irrevocable fashion. More likely, it works because it's such a good show -- moving forward with furious speed, yet always taking time to probe and deepen its characters and their relationships.

If you haven't caught the show yet, dive in. You'll be swept along instantly.

Thanks to vaughnetc.!

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