August 2002

Scans courtesy of Angela, Vartan Ho #222. :)

A Life of Surprises

by Mark Wyman

Transcript thanks to Jenny. :)

Welcome to TV zone’s spy school. Your mission instructions are simple. Find some average viewers to interrogate, Ask them to identify a thrilling spy series that achieved breakout series success after its US debut in the 2001-02 season. To assist the, mention that it would be a pulse-raising, cliff-hanger-based drama, involving an elite CIA agent based in Los Angeles. The agents family should be caught up in the ongoing narrative, which would after its first season be nominated for several prestigious emmy awards.

Many people, especially in the UK, would nominate the groundbreaking 24, the cause of major ripples amongst cult and mainstream audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. But US viewers would be equally likely to name a series that takes a different tack to redefining 21st century espionage – and that would be Alias, which is about to make the transition to terrestrial TV in the UK.

Consider the year end Nielson ratings for Alias (based on its primetime Sunday 9pm slot on ABC, where it played opposite the last season of The X Files) were no less healthy than 24’s. Alias has also gained 11 Emmy nominations as many as the predictable commendable Friends, and one more than 24 received. Amongst ongoing drama series - a second series of Alias is already in production – that clutch was only surpassed by The West Wing and Six Feet Under. At mid-season in January Alias won America’s People’s Choice Awards for “Favourite new dramatic series” Not bad for a rookie. Meanwhile in less than a year, Alias has transformed Alias’s star Jennifer Garner from an almost unknown into practically a household name. As agent Sydney Bristow, Garner has been made the cover star of Rolling Stone, Seventeen and Entertainment Weekly in the Us, plus Arena in the UK – not to mention being chosen in April as the #1 femme fatal in the US maxim magazine’s annual Hot 100 issue. With Kirsten Dunst and Beyonce Knowles as runners up, make no mistake. Jennifer Garner is suddenly what the showbiz world likes to define as “hot”

“Sydney Bristow is an international spy recruited out of college and trained for espionage and self-defence” says a one-line summary of alias on the internet movie database. (www.imdb.com) True enough. So is some frivolously camp series, less grounded in reality than Bugs or The avengers. With Garner employed merely as carefree eye-candy? Not a bit of it; almost every episode puts Sydney onto a new emotional roller-coaster. Whereas 24’s selling point is a “real time narrative”, Alias is about Sydney’s real life- her fiancé, her college friends, her mother’s legacy- and the conflicts that erupt as it enmeshes with her fantastical work. Sydney is usually given a glamorous alter ego with each new globetrotting spy mission. With the wardrobe and wigs to match, these missions often give an episode its biggest visual kick – though in the harshness of the series’ very first scene, or the ultra-grim Romanian asylum visited later in Colour-blind, they can be far removed from the glamorous world of spy fantasy. Other missions, however, are more in the syle - and style is the operative word here – of Charlie’s Angels, or a distaff James Bond. Yet Sydney’s most challenging and traumatic alias is to maintain her non-spy façade with her friends.

While many shocking and painful truths about Sydney’s world have fallen into place, revealing an ever-more complex puzzle. Garner has handled the physical and emotional demands of her role magnificently. Along the way, she’s already picked up a Golden Globe as Best Actress in a TV Series. Her rapidly rising profile, the commendations at awards, the critical praise- and, of course, Alias’s burgeoning fan network online – all echo the momentum that propelled Sarah Michelle Geller and a little show called Buffy The Vampire Slayer to the premier league of cult TV about 4 yrs ago. The spectacle of a gorgeous woman proficient in a multitude of kick ass combat skills might have something to do with it too. So will Channel 4’s UK scheduling build on the adopters who discovered alias on sky one, in the way the BBC2’s launch of Buffy in 1999 gave it mainstream UK success. Only time will tell.

The full and deliciously labyrinth premise of Alias, if you haven’t seen the series yet , should not be revealed in full here. Think of it being withheld on a need to know basis. But rest assured, it’s sufficiently high concept to require a voice-over from Sydney accompanying the opening titles from episode 2 onwards. (This is somewhat revised as of episode 6). The main titles, with their urgent, pumped-up theme- composed by series creator JJ Abrams- are sometimes delayed until a quarter of the episode has elapsed. Episode cliff-hangers tend to fall mid-mission and resolving them takes far more screen time than the ‘teaser’ structure familiar from Buffy or The X Files.

Unlike the title character at the start of Le Femme Nikita, Sydney is not a new recruit to her covert unit. She’s a graduate student moonlighting as a spy. Agency records show she is 27 when Alias starts, and a far as she’s aware for almost seven years she’s been combining college work with dangerous work for a CIA unit known as SD-6 They recruited her as a freshman while she was short of funds and feeling rootless, apparently because she fitted a profile. SD-6 is a top-secret, black-ops division, where her agent ID is 30408-12696. In agent training, she proved to be a natural, although seven years on she is not rootless – and contemplating a way out. Her mother’s death in a car accident almost 20 years earlier has estranged her from her father, a stern and taciturn man who imports airplane parts at Jennings Aerospace, so now she lives with her medic boyfriend Danny Hecht, who has given her life new meaning ( they’re getting engaged) Sydney’s best friends are Will Tippin, a journalist for the Los Angeles Register, and Francine Calfo, who is first to see Sydney’s engagement ring. As far as the contemporaries are concerned, Sydney works for Credit Dauphine, a banking group that frequently sends Sydney on business trips at short notice- so fulfilling her graduate studies coursework is an extra challenge. In reality, Sydney is sent all over the world by SD-6, on a mission in Taipei when we first meet her for example.

If these are the certainties of Sydney’s life, they are about to be overturned in almost every respect.

There will be bereavement for which Sydney must bear the responsibility: but the surprises her father Jack has in store for her are no less overwhelming. In a cleverly disingenuous interview for Entertainment Tonight in early September 2001, Garner indicated that Sydney’s relationship with Jack Bristow would prove pivotal. “It seems to me its going to be more about me and my father, It’s not like there’s an ‘A’ story, a ‘B’ story and a ‘C’ story. Everyone’s going to have a different story but they are all pointing towards the same goal” Which is rather like saying that something as complex as Murder One was only about one case.

Aside from Garner, the best of the immensely strong regular cast is indeed Victor Garber, His skill in conveying the suppressed emotions of the long-distant Jack (whose professional life suddenly comes to intersect awkwardly with his daughter’s) is astonishing. Jack seems cold and unfeeling, but over time you can read the inner turbulence on his face – and Garber is deservedly up for an emmy in his own right. Ron Rifkin as Sydney’s ruthless yet paternalistic SD-6 boss Arvin Sloane is also compelling in every scene.

Great characters and terrific acting have helped to raise Alias above the whole pack of drama series, but there’s no denying the show’s Fantasy genre roots. According to JJ Abrams, “My approach to this show was always, we’re doing a comic book come to life” Abrams like Buffy/Angel/Firefly creator Joss Whedon, is himself a comics fan- a devotee of Frank Miller’s graphic novels, for example- whose hectic production schedule was interrupted around Easter 2002 to pen a new script for the long-expected next superman film. Chances are that Alias’s success hasn’t done Abram’s genre career any harm, yet Sydney really came into existence via his previous network series, the fairly prosaic Felicity. Stuck for the genre-based storylines there, Abrams started joking that Felicity could develop as a high stakes drama- if only the college based title character worked for the CIA…

In January 2001, ABC duly commissioned a pilot for Alias, to be produced by touchstone- like ABC, part of the Disney group- which already had Abrams on a four-year development deal. For the lead, Abrams selected Garner, who had made a vivid impression in a guest role on Felicity (and a more lasting impression on one of Felicity’s male leads, Scott Foley, to whom she was by then married) The next regular announced in late February, was Michael Vartan, playing Sydney’s CIA ‘handler’ Michael Vaughn. At roughly Sydney’s age and- to judge by online reactions to the actor- looking no less attractive than Garner the dilemma for this pair would inevitably be whether their relationship could remain wholly professional

By March, ABC Entertainment TV’s co-chairman were talking up the show as “Le Femme Felicity”, or later “La Co-Ed Nikita”. In May the network opened its presentation for the full season with a clip from Alias, billing it as part of ”the next generation of signature ABC series”: a calculated risk- ABC having tumbled down from first place to third during the 2000-01 season. After a hectic week of network announcements, USA today called it “the week’s most exciting clip (even for those of us with little interest in conspiracy drama)”

In late July with the series premiere announced for September 30th, press attention was focused on the innovative deal with Nokia. Their phones are used liberally on screen: the first episode Truth Be Told end with Sydney taking a call on one that has just been given to her. “The deal meant that the hour long episode could kick off a series without any commercial breaks. Alias has also been pre-sold to many European networks. Press reaction continued to build favourably, Entertainment Weekly nominating Sydney as ‘one of TV’s hottest new faces’ on August 31st.

But if product placement was gaining column inches for the series prior to its launch month, events of a greater magnitude soon cast a long shadow. Not surprisingly the US networks fall season of 2001 began hesitantly after the horrific events of Sept 11th. Alias, whose central narrative depends on international terrorism, shadowy anti-American groupings and government agencies fully aware of such entities, could have been sidelined as too painful a dramatic terrain for viewers to endure. But the series premiered on schedule, JJ Abrams telling the online TV guide Insider, “I believe that stories of morality and stories about a hero are things that people could use right now. [Sydney] herself is a victim of violence. She’s very smart, strong-willed, ultimately vulnerable, [and] actively fighting against evil forces to make her life and her country a better place. In some ways,” added Abrams, “I think Alias is even more pertinent now than it was before- though that was never the intention when it began”

Abrams was also keen to stress that the narrative was “very much a comic book” in style. While he was candid enough in other pre-launch interviews to describe his Alias Premise as ‘ludicrous’, the series engages the audience because its characters- Sydney especially – are taking it for real, and going beyond the concept. Echoing one of Buffy’s strongest cards, the cast members feel like real people who just get caught up at times in fantastic situations.

Was the reaction to 24 and Alias both in the US and elsewhere- magnified because they portrayed a heavily fictionalised response to terrorism? The missions in Alias may resemble chess moves between different terrorist networks with deadly rivalries, but not often at a level that might associate with reality. After one season of each new breakout show, its perhaps still too early to be sure but both are now set fair to reshape the global TV drama landscape, and both are already spawning the collectible products associated with the modern Cult crossover hit. There are official or unofficial guidebooks due, and a high- profile DVD release for 24 in both the UK and US, for example. In the case of Alias, it was even announced in early August that Arcade comics has acquired the licence to publish, yes, a comic book spin-off featuring new Alias storylines, which JJ Abrams himself had agreed to write.

It’s not really fair to assess whether one series or the other is the greater achievement: clearly, both have had a tremendous first-year impact on both TV and online audiences, not to mention those with the power of the Emmy vote. When it comes down to it, though, doesn’t Sydney Bristow just look cooler that 24’s Jack Bauer

Character Profiles

Sydney Bristow

Born April 17th, 1974: recruited by SD-6 December 1994. An experienced field agent, athletic and with advanced skills in linguistics and combat (utilizing Krav Maga, the Israeli military’s self-defence system) Recruited by CIA September 2001, when she became aware of SD-6’s true nature as one of 12 renegade, criminal units within the alliance. Now a double agent, still on active duty for SD-6, but secretly working for the CIA on counter-missions to undermine SD-6.

Relationship with father Jack strained since apparent death of mother in care accident, 1981. Has hitherto venerated and wished to emulate her mother ‘Laura’, but may have learnt the truth about her mother’s career .

Known enemies: Anne Espinosa (K-directorate), Ineni Hassan (arms dealer) Unconfirmed contact with highly prized 15th century artefacts of papal architect Milo Rambaldi – needs further research.

Arvin Sloane

Director of SD-6. Born October 31st 1950, recruited by CIA January 1969. Specialist in linguistics (doctorate) finance and world history. Godfather to Sydney Bristow through long-standing friendship with her father. Achieved rapid promotion and White House access. Defected to the Alliance after unknown betrayal, helping to form SD-6. Oversaw training of Sydney Bristow after her recruitment. Has exhibited signs of sentiment towards goddaughter, but will follow procedure ruthlessly if she is suspected of disloyalty or a security breach.

Apparently has no qualms about eliminating any threats to the existence of SD-6 – may carry out assassinations himself. Currently using SD-6 resources in an attempt to amass Rambaldi artefacts. Spouse Emily has lymphoma: condition may be terminal. Known enemies: McKenas Cole, disenfranchised agent

Jack Bristow

Senior officer at SD-6 also a double agent for the CIA. Born March 16th 1950. Recruited by CIA 1967. Specialist in physics, Aeronautics, Game theory, Linguistics, Engineering, Cryptology. Widowed 1981. Joined SD-6 (undercover?) January 1982. Aloof from his daughter Sydney – unaware gar his role at Jennings Aerospace was industrial espionage – until he disclosed his true career in saving her from SD-6 death-squad.

The only other double agent known within SD-6, but by far the more experienced. Still trusted as a friend by Sloane, a long term colleague who was at his wedding. Be warned: Jack still will work ruthlessly behind the scenes to prevent his daughter, or CIS objectives Not all his objectives have been authorised. Unconfirmed suspicion of KGB collusion and tendency towards alcoholism.

Michael Vaughn

CIA agent. Born November 27th, 1968, France. Recruited December 1994. Vaughn’s father was also a CIA agent, killed in like of duty when Michael was a child. Possible connection with Bristows in this matter – investigate? A relatively junior agent within Los Angeles CIA, but rarely intimidated. Known to have developed deep affection for Sydney since being appointed as her handler. Was replaced by veteran agent until Sydney protested, which enhanced Vaughn’s status. Less successful in temporary assignment as Jack Bristow’s handler, the senior officer has been disdainful of Vaughn.

Attempts to decode Vaughn’s elaborate arrangements for meeting to discuss Sydney’s counter-missions have so far failed, though trashcans are believed to be deployed. Rarely seen operating as field agent, but assessments indicate resourcefulness will be high in such scenarios

Marcus Dixon

SD-6 agent. Born August 14th 1955. Recruited October 1981. Specialist in linguistics, cryptology, kung fu, financial analysis. Some left eye colour blindness. Sydney Bristow’s long standing mission partner responsible for technical planning, but still adept in combat. Substantial mutual trust between the two. A quiet, loyal family man, unaware that SD-6 is anti-american. (NB all but the highest SD-6 operatives still believe they are working for the CIA)

Spouse: Diane, since 1983. She believes he works as an investment analysis. Dixon knows her life may be forfeit otherwise. Sydney has lobbied her CIA handlers to brief Dixon on the true nature of SD-6: vetoed so far. Wounded by K-Directorate in confrontation over Rambaldi artefacts: suspicious of Sydney’s actions when rescuing him.

Marshall Flinkman

SD-6 technical guru. Born December 29th, 1964. Recruited May 1997. Doctorate in Robot Physics, from Cal Tech. Marshall is SD-6’s office based gadget creator and IT systems manager. Awareness of SD-6’s true objectives unclear. Socially somewhat dysfunctional yet craves company. Nervous in mission briefings, and often the source of light amusement for he colleagues. Marshall becomes excited when demonstrating a newly- developed gadget, especially if designed for Sydney’s use. Examples include several miniaturized camera’s (in Sydney’s lipstick, sunglasses, etc) biometric laser to create latex version of fingerprints. Earrings that emit an ultra-red pulse.

Agents aware of the fictional spy, James Bond may recognise parallels with the specialist known as ‘Q’ , but Marshall is truly a geek of his time.

Will Tippin

Born August 3rd 1973. Civilian, print journalist for a Los Angeles paper. Close friend of Sydney Bristow for several years – possible college conspiracy ? Lent Sydney his sister’s passport unwittingly providing an alias during her Taipei mission. Remains unaware of Sydney’s true career, doggedly pursuing investigation of death of Daniel Hecht as story for paper, without her knowledge (or approval?)

This puts both him and Sydney at risk from agents of SD-6 and other groupings. Has met junior agent Eloise Kurtz, acting as a decoy, this agent has also been eliminated investigating her death.

Tippin is now aware of SD-6 in extreme danger if he discovers its operations or Sydney’s role. Unrequited attraction to Sydney: has been dating younger intern at newspaper.

Francine Calfo

Born January 3rd 1975. Civilian , graduate student and best friend of Sydney Bristow. Known as Francie. Works as professional caterer/ party planner. Shares her apartment with Sydney since Danny Hechts death, also close friends with Will Tippin. Confidante of Sydney domestically, yet wholly unaware of Sydney’s work or existence of SD-6. Believes Sydney’s business trips are for her banking employers Credit Dauphine. Informally known as “The clueless Roomie” Took to spying on her boyfriend Charlie in amateurish way when suspecting him of infidelity (persuading Sydney to stake him out too) Charlie shown to be innocent. Francie and Charlie Subsequently engaged. Would be protected by Sydney in event of confrontation/ crisis: possible hostage or blackmail material. Presently under surveillance.

Excerpt from the website:

So you've joined a Secret Service to help your nation, but then discover all is not what it seems. And that's really just the start of your problems…

Welcome to TV Zone’s spy school. Your mission instructions are simple. Find some average viewers to interrogate. Ask them to identify a thrilling spy series that achieved breakout success after its US début in the 2001-02 season. To assist them, mention that it would be a pulse-raising, cliffhanger-based drama, involving an elite CIA agent based in Los Angeles. The agent’s family should be caught up in the ongoing narrative, which would after its first season be nominated for several prestigious Emmy awards.

Many people, especially in the UK, would then nominate the groundbreaking 24, the cause of major ripples amongst Cult and mainstream audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. But US viewers would be equally likely to name a series that takes a different tack to redefining 21st Century espionage – and that would be Alias.

Consider: the year-end Nielsen ratings for Alias (based on its primetime Sunday 9pm slot on ABC, where it played opposite the last season of The X-Files) were no less healthy than 24’s. Alias has also gained 11 Emmy nominations: as many as the predictably commended Friends, and one more than 24 received. Amongst ongoing drama series – a second series of Alias is already in production – that clutch was surpassed only by The West Wing and Six Feet Under. At mid-season in January, Alias won America’s People’s Choice Award for ‘Favourite Television New Dramatic Series’. Not bad going for a rookie. Meanwhile, in less than a year, Alias has transformed its star Jennifer Garner from an almost unknown into practically a household name.

So is this some frivolously camp series, less grounded in reality than Bugs or The Avengers, with Garner employed merely as carefree eye-candy? Not a bit of it: almost every episode puts Sydney onto a new emotional roller-coaster. Whereas 24’s selling-point is its ‘real-time’ narrative, Alias is about Sydney’s real life – her fiancé, her college friends, her mother’s legacy – and the conflicts that erupt as it enmeshes with her fantastical work. Sydney is usually given a glamorous alter ego with each new globetrotting spy mission. With the wardrobe and wigs to match, these missions often give an episode its biggest visual kick – though in the harshness of the series’ very first scene, or the ultra-grim Romanian asylum visited later in Color-Blind, they can be far removed from the glamorous world of spy Fantasy.

Other missions, however, are more in the style – and style is the operative word here – of Charlie’s Angels, or a distaff James Bond. Yet Sydney’s most challenging and traumatic alias is to maintain her non-spy façade amongst her friends.

© TV Zone 2002

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