Alias 2x13, "Phase One"

A show that genuinely broke ground, then everyone forgot about it.

Hi and welcome back to another instalment of this feature where I take a look at an episode of a show I’ve never seen before. This time it’s the 2003 episode of spy drama Alias, “Phase One”. Previous instalments: The X-Files, Seinfeld, ER, Grey’s Anatomy.

It takes all of two minutes on Google to realise that Alias is one of the most influential television series of the last twenty years.

To start with, it was created by J.J. Abrams. Back in 2001, Abrams’ body of work consisted of soapy character drama Felicity and a string of screenplays for middling films. He was just “some writer” associated, if anything, with will-they-won’t-they romances and love triangles. The only thing he had directed was a Felicity two parter. He certainly wasn’t a sci-fi/action guy. Alias, the snappy spy action show that dipped its toes into science fiction, transformed his career forever. Without this show, there is no Lost, no Cloverfield, no 2009 Star Trek and no Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

It’s not merely his presence that made this show important. In terms of aggressive use of techniques in medias res openings and flash forwards, Alias really pushed the boat in terms of faster paced TV storytelling. Every action-focused show you’ve watched since probably owes something to Alias. And even movies. Tom Cruise was such a fan that he insisted Paramount hire Abrams to direct Mission Impossible III, where he took everything he learned doing this show and brought it to the big screen. Brad Bird was such a fan of the series’ music that he hired the composer, Michael Giacchino, to work on The Incredibles. Giacchino is now the most sought after man in film music and it can be traced directly back to Alias.

The show catapulted its lead Jennifer Garner to stardom. Her movie career fizzled out after she initially seemed on the cusp of becoming a huge deal, though her marriage and divorce to Ben Affleck and a bizarrely strong magazine prominence means she maintains a slightly odd role in modern celebrity culture. It all came from Alias.

And Garner isn’t even the biggest name actor to come out of the show. Not even close. That honour of course falls to Bradley Cooper, a less well known graduate of Abrams’ casting team’s stacked list of “finds”. Before Cooper was cast as a series regular on Alias, his best known credits were a single episode of Sex and the City and a 13th billed role in Wet Hot American Summer. Since then? Well, he only has seven Oscar nominations and a string of box office hits to call his own. Without this series, we’re probably talking about no Cooper in The Hangover, no American Sniper, no A Star Is Born.

Any one of these would be enough to be noteworthy. To have them all is an astonishing legacy for a show that changed pop culture forever.

So, for all this, shouldn’t Alias have more of a cultural footprint than it does?

Well, influence can be a double edged sword. “Innovative” art is often that which ages the worst. Watching “Phase One” in 2019, there is nothing that feels especially new or different about Alias, even if it does some interesting things that warrant praise.

The episode opens with what has to be described as a fairly lurid and objectifying shot of Sydney Bristow in lingerie. The scene wants to point towards the two men’s sexism in encouraging her to dress like this, but it feels like a blatant attempt to have it both ways: give the presumed straight male viewer the half-naked woman he wants to see, then criticise these gross guys, but without implying the viewer did anything wrong at all. We then move towards Sydney fighting these guys and showing what a Strong Female Character she is by doing some “ass kicking”. Obviously this is very much in fitting with the pop feminism of its era, but it still didn’t quite sit right with me, bringing to mind Kate Beaton’s famous “Strong Female Characters” comic.

Alias had something of a reputation for being too “complicated”, frequently infuriating ABC executives worried about putting off casual viewers (including one Bob Iger). As someone who has now seen exactly one episode of this series, I have some sympathies here. There was something called “The Alliance”, which was connected to SD-6, which is in conflict with the CIA? But honestly, who cares?

And I’m really not sure it matters. Perhaps Abrams’ greatest ability as a storyteller is to understand exactly what the audience should be feeling in any given moment, and focus on making them feel it above all else. The “Mystery Box” is simply a means of getting to this. At his worst, he makes you ask “wait, did that make any sense?” afterwards, but his work always feels exciting in the moment. He’s extraordinarily gifted at getting to the core emotion of a scene and, much to his detractors’ frustration, everything else is window dressing. It doesn’t matter what’s going on with The Alliance or SD-6 as long as we feel the suspence or the emotion we’re supposed to feel. To paraphrase Carly Rae Jepsen, J.J. Abrams wants to cut to the feeling.

In terms of executing on that, Abrams and his team feel mostly hitting the limits of what they had to work with. He wrote the episode himself, with soon-to-be-revered future Lost director-producer Jack Bender behind the camera. Maryann Brandon, who would follow Abrams on to Stars both Wars and Trek along with many other Hollywood movies, is editing. Cloverfield and Zombieland cinematographer Michael Bonvillain is photographing the episode. The aforementioned Giacchino is going all out with his big James Bond-esque score. And it’s bigger than the visuals. This is an A-list team of tomorrow bumping up against the constraints of a modestly budgeted television series. Looking at this stuff today, it honestly feels a bit hokey, but that’s fine. Alias was doing things that had barely been done, and allowed other shows and movies to then do them better.

At the same time, there is one big thing Alias got very right that almost every contemporary drama gets wrong: pacing. Be it the constraints of advertiser-funded television, be it Abrams’ to this day ability to make his stories move like a bullet train without feeling too hectic, but “Phase One” is packing incident into every moment. This is clearly an episode of a serialised drama, paying off arcs and offering new twists to move the story forward, but it never feels without shape. In the old model of TV, even the most serialised shows had to ensure the audience got their full hour’s worth every week. Alias is riffing off classic shows like Mission: Impossible while adding in more of an ongoing narrative, but still making an episode feel special itself. It’s a dying model, and I miss it.

And, based on one episode, that might sum up Alias’ position in TV history. It’s taking so many tropes that existed before, mixing them up, and creating something new and propulsive. Most of the people who worked on this show will take their bag of tricks with them onto bigger and better things. Most of what it does well will be eclipsed by other works. But, for a brief window, Abrams and co were doing things no one else was managing. They got their rewards for it eventually, even if this show was never a huge hit. It’s a rough cut, a first album for Bad Robot with areas to improve. But it’s an important moment in terms of the pop culture landscape becoming what it is today, both for who worked on it and what they actually produced.