October 1, 2001

Undercover Girl

By John Leonard

Spooks are in fashion this season as the networks unveil a raft of spy shows; Alias's seductive Jennifer Garner may be the most fashionable of all. What they are probably wondering in networkland is whether the World Trade Center and Pentagon terror-bombings will be good or bad for the three new CIA shows. Good: There is every indication of more money for more spies in the immediate future, and fewer scruples about their behavior. Bad: Where was the intelligence we already paid for when we really needed it? Besides, who will want to watch a lot of play-acting so soon after the mangled steel and the broken bodies? That said, the new CIA show I enjoy the most, ABC's Alias, now has the trickiest wire to walk.

This is because Alias, unlike The Agency on CBS or 24 on Fox, plays with itself. Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) thinks she's been working undercover for a secret division of the CIA ever since college. She periodically disappears from grad school to fly off in a red wig to locales like Hong Kong. But when her boyfriend winds up dead, she begins to wonder about her boss (Ron Rifkin) and her career choice (Crouching Tiger, Bald Eagle). She'll then discover that her very own exceedingly estranged father (Victor Garber) not only works for the same clandestine outfit she does but also works against it. So we are promptly plopped into deep-cover, double-identity, mole-in-a-hole counterspy games.

Moreover, for all its paranoid style, Freudian dynamic, and martial artsiness, there is as well a satirical insouciance about Alias, a sort of Girl From U.N.C.L.E. meets Run Lola Run, which was perhaps to be expected from J. J. Abrams, the executive producer who is also responsible for Felicity. And as Felicity depends on Keri Russell, so Alias depends on Jennifer Garner, a survivor of two failed series and Pearl Harbor. In a fantasy, it's necessary to have someone about whom to fantasize. And when Garner -- a loose-limbed, big-grin wonder, part Julia Roberts with the dynamite dimples, part Angelina Jolie before she lost her sense of humor at Angkor Wat -- backflips in shackles to crush the thorax of a Chinese communist sadist who has been messing with her perfect orthodontia, I am, like, awesomely smitten.

Alias
Sundays, starting September 30; 9 to 10 p.m.; ABC.

Thanks to vaughnetc.!

© New York Magazine 2001

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