The Safe House - Expositions

Double agent Sydney Bristow is about to embark on her toughest mission yet: Turning "Alias" into the smash hit ABC execs believe the show should be. Actually, that burden has largely fallen onto the shoulders of "Alias" exec producer J.J. Abrams, the man who created Sydney (portrayed by Jennifer Garner) and all the other characters who populate the shadowy spyworld of the Alphabet's Sunday skein.

While the show has been a cult sensation since its September 2001 bow, its ratings have yet to match the enormous critical acclaim and pop culture buzz that surrounds it.

Indeed, this season, "Alias" has actually lost some Nielsen ground opposite some of the toughest competish around -- everything from HBO's phenom "The Sopranos" to NBC's mighty "Law & Order" franchise.

No wonder, then, that ABC -- which desperately wants the series to become the drama smash it so sorely needs -- has been touting the Jan. 26 post-Super Bowl edition of "Alias" as "A New Beginning."

"In many ways, this episode is really a second pilot for the show," Abrams says. "What I think we've done is found a way to maintain the integrity of the storytelling but change the paradigm of the show so we can take it to the next level."

Specifically, Abrams is serving up a radical fix to what some critics, ABC execs and even some "Alias" scribes believe to be the show's one flaw: its Byzantine central premise.

Try to keep track: Up until now, Garner's Bristow has been a hot CIA spy chick who's working undercover at SD-6, a supposedly secret branch of the government that's really a front for an evil alliance of assorted international meanies.

Most of the employees of SD-6 think they're working for the CIA, but they're not. And the most evil member of SD-6 -- Arnold Rifkin's Sloane -- has to pretend he's working for the feds, thus limiting his ability to be as nasty as he wants to be.

"The show was about good guys working with the bad guys, many of whom thought they were good guys," Abrams (sorta) explains. "But the baddest of the bad guys had to pretend he was good. That premise made it not only impenetrable to many viewers but also frustrating to write.

"We had to figure out a way to change it."

With the Jan. 26 episode, Abrams does just that.

By the time the hour is over, Sydney will have exposed and defeated SD-6 and the evil Alliance, allowing the character to be a straight-ahead undercover spy gal. She'll also finally be free to pursue a long-smoldering, but not-yet consummated relationship with her CIA handler.

But here's the beauty part: Mega-meanie Sloane, no longer forced to keep up the appearance of good, will be badder than ever.

While "Alias" is getting less complex, Abrams vows it's not getting stupider.

"I love the show too much and respect it too much to dumb it down or simplify it to the point of being lowest common denominator television," he says. "If the network had said to me, you need to make the show simpler, I would have said to them, 'Get someone else and do 'VIP.' "

But Abrams says he needed to blow up "Alias" -- not to save it, but to make it better.

"We could remain as a cult hit and stay in that place," Abrams says. "Or we could make a creative decision to maintain the quality of the show yet alleviate the difficulty in storytelling. (The change) is going to allow us to tell so many stories we couldn't before."

Not surprisingly, ABC execs are behind Abrams' reshaping of "Alias."

"What's clear is that 'Alias' already has this extraordinarily loyal core audience," says ABC Entertainment prexy Susan Lyne. "But there's a huge proportion of the TV audience that's never seen it or has been convinced by their friends or stories (in the media) that the show's too complicated. I think this episode will hook people in a way that they'll feel they must come back."

And if they don't? Abrams says he's fine with his current audience -- and, perhaps more importantly for fans of the show, so is Lyne.

"It's frustrating that it doesn't have twice the audience it has, and I still believe it will have (a bigger) audience after the Super Bowl," she says.

"But we need shows on our network that people are passionate about," Lyne adds. "I don't have any doubt at all that 'Alias,' even at its current levels, will be back."

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