Word: garners
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...Although it was neither a reality series nor a procedural cop show--the dominant formats of the past few years--Lost (Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.) was an instant top-10 hit. ABC last week moved Alias, a cult favorite whose ratings never matched the fame of its star Jennifer Garner, into the hour afterward; it won the time period with its biggest prime-time audience ever. It is only fitting that Abrams should get, essentially, his own night on the network, because he has practically invented his own genre: intelligent confections that combine preposterous adventures with emotional impact, well-rounded...
...afraid that audiences would lose interest in talky, character-driven shows about relationships. So Abrams lets viewers believe they're getting something else. Alias was sold as--and truthfully is--the story of a grad student who becomes a spy. But what really grabbed Abrams was that Sydney Bristow (Garner) has to work with her father Jack (Victor Garber), a chilly pragmatist with whom she has a rocky history. Garner recalls Abrams' pitch: "There would be some action, but it was really a family story," she says. "It sounded completely nuts, but I said, 'Sign...
...show much innovation. But in 1998 he premiered Felicity, a WB series about a soulful college girl that had more character depth than your typical teen soap and less self-seriousness. It also proved his eye for casting: he plucked Keri Russell from out of nowhere to play Felicity; Garner, then unknown, had a supporting role. (Lost likewise discovered Evangeline Lilly as the stunning, and stunningly tough, fugitive Kate...
Felicity's romantic drama did not seem like a springboard to an action series like Alias, whose typical plot has Garner going into a European nightclub dressed like a hooker and blowing something up. But Abrams is the sort of storyteller who seems to want to tell every kind of story and have every job. He even composes music for his shows (he plays several instruments, including guitar, keyboard and cello) and not only wrote Alias' throbbing techno theme but also designed the credits sequence. In his spare time, he's directing Mission: Impossible 3 as well as developing...
...colleagues and stars, Abrams is cheerful and eager--"a kid in a candy store," says Garner--but perfectionist. For Lost's pilot, he bought a passenger jet, over the objections of his crew, who wanted to use a smaller plane, and had it chopped up and shipped to the set in Hawaii. When this year's Alias season premiere failed to blow his socks off, he reshot the whole thing, in five days. The fans pay him back in cultlike intensity. Fans on the Internet spin extended Lost theories: that the castaways are dead and in limbo, that the polar...