Tuning Out: Why I Stopped Watching "Alias"

Let me start by saying that I was originally obsessed with Alias with a zeal that approached my current love of fellow J.J. Abrams series Lost. I loved that at the heart of this spy drama there was a story about a deeply dysfunctional family (distant dad, dead mother) all of whom happened to be in the deadly business of high stakes espionage. While there were crazy costumes, wacky wigs, and fierce fights each week, I kept coming back because I cared deeply for Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) and her colorful cast of co-workers. But then something happened...

Before we get to that, let's recap first. Alias launched in the fall of 2001, shortly after the events of 9/11 and around the same time that a similarly spy-themed show was launching over on competitor Fox (that would be 24, natch). I instantly found 24 to be too eerily realistic, too stressful in a world that had just seen a real life terrorist attack. Alias, on the other hand, had a certain gleeful campiness along with its risky rescue missions, near-fatal extractions, and daring double-crosses. It also had an overarching plot about a 14th century inventor named Milo Rambaldi that was like crack to most TV geeks' hearts... But again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

At its heart, Alias was about Sydney Bristow--graduate student by day, spy by night--who had the convenient cover story that she worked for a bank, or at least that's what her gullible friends Francie (Merrin Dungey) and Will (Bradley Cooper) believed. In fact, Sydney worked for a black ops division of the C.I.A. called SD-6. SD-6 was an organization headed up by the mysterious Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), a friend of Sydney's father who had a certain obsessive predilection for collecting the artifacts left behind by the aforementioned Rambaldi. After Syd's boyfriend Danny (Edward Atterton) proposes to her, Syd tells him about her secret life... and he promptly ends up dead--murdered by SD-6. So, Syd learns that she wasn't working for the CIA at all, but rather a terrorist organization that claimed to be part of the CIA. And that her dad Jack Bristow (Victor Garber) also works for SD-6 and is aware of the subterfuge all too well: he's a double-agent for the CIA. Syd is forced to approach the real CIA and is assigned to a handler named Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan), who convinces her to turn double-agent as well. Syd will continue to work for SD-6, sabotaging missions whenever possible and transmitting intelligence back to the real CIA via dead-drop. She can't even tell her trusted SD-6 partner Marcus Dixon (Carl Lumbly) what's going on, for fear of placing him in danger.

It was fun but also confusing as hell. Audiences didn't quite know what to make of Sydney's predictament (she works for a bank which isn't really a bank but a terrorist organization called SD-6 that claims to be part of the CIA, but really isn't, but she really works for the CIA) and in Season Two of the series, producers tried to clean things up a bit. SD-6 was taken down by the CIA and Arvin Sloane fled into hiding. Sydney dropped out of graduate school and was now only employed by the CIA and was dedicated to finding and capturing Arvin Sloane. Oh, and did I mention that her long-dead mother (Lena Olin) was actually alive and was a former KGB spy named Irina Derevko... the same KGB spy that killed the father of her CIA handler and would-be lover Vaughn... and who shot Sydney at the end of the first season? Talk about family drama.

Alias' second season really mined the family dynamic between Sydney, Jack, and Irina, delving into what made Jack the cold, unfeeling professional he is today and piecing together Sydney's childhood and early training (i.e. Project Christmas). Olin's Irina is dangerous, cunning, and manipulative and the early part of the second season has a Silence of the Lambs aspect to it as Sydney visits her imprisoned mother from the opposite side of a plexiglass cell wall. The Rambaldi plot was also pushed forward as the CIA and Sloane go head-to-head (along with various other factions) for control of the artifacts. The effect is dizzying and each of the characters is pushed to new depths of emotion--usually of the rageful revenge kind (i.e., Dixon, Sloane, Jack, etc.).

Where the show started to go wrong was to eliminate any trace of Sydney's personal life outside the rarefied walls of the CIA. Reporter Will comes dangerously close to exposing Sydney's identity in an ongoing subplot, which culminates with Sydney having to fill Will in on all of her activities; Will is ultimately made an analyst at the CIA and soon leaves the show. Poor Francie meanwhile undergoes a far worse fate. Arguably Syd's BFF, Francie soon becomes dull and tiresome, blathering on and on about this restaurant she wants to open as Sydney basically ignores her for the better part of a season. And the audience too grows tired of Francie as well, until she's brutally murdered in her own restaurant by a woman... who looks just like her. Goodnight, Francie; hello Freplicate (ahem, Francie Replicate). The woman in question is a villainous agent who underwent a radical appearance alteration to take Francie's place in Sydney's life. And at the end of the second season, Sydney realizes that the woman she's been living with for the past few months isn't her old pal Francie (it has to do with some coffee ice cream), Francie II attacks Sydney and the two have the monster of all catfights, resulting in Sydney shooting the Freplicate (she's not dead because, well, she can't die) and Sydney passing out.

However, when Sydney wakes up, she's no longer in her apartment but rather on a street in Hong Kong. A year has passed that she can't remember and she was thought to have been dead. Vaughn is now married to government official Lauren Reed (Melissa George), a blonde seductress who is not all she seems (this is Alias after all), but rather a member of the Covenant, a terrorist organization comprised of followers of Rambaldi (aha!). As the Rambaldi plot builds to a head, Sloane discovers that he has a child--a girl named Nadia--that he had conceived many years earlier with Irina, which would make her Sydney's sister. She's a major key to unraveling the entire Rambaldi mystery and Sloane locates Nadia (Mía Maestro), drugs and tortures her, and gets her to reveal a Rambaldi equation that is somehow locked inside her mind. But Sydney manages to burst in, ends up killing Lauren (who was eventually revealed to be Convenant, much to Vaughn's dismay), but Sloane escapes and Nadia goes with him. Before Lauren dies, she tells Sydney the location of a certain safety deposit box, where Sydney uncovers some information that makes her question everything about her father.

And that's where everything seems to go completely bloody wrong for Alias. I liked the idea of Nadia rather than what the show's producers and writers attempted to do with her. In Season Four, they had Sydney track down Nadia and invite her to join a reconstituted black ops unit that they are calling APO (Authorized Personnel Only... ick, I hate that name). Located in a Los Angeles subway station, APO is comprised of many former members of SD-6 and the CIA: Agent Weiss (Greg Grunberg), Vaughn, tech expert Marshall (Kevin Weisman), Jack, and... Sloane?!?

Some mumbo jumbo is introduced about how the government now trusts Sloane, yadda, yadda, yadda, and they are all there to keep an eye on him. But the best part is that they all work for him! I can understand having to work WITH him, but to work FOR Sloane, after everything he's done (killing Syd's fiance, killing Dixon's wife, killing thousands of innocent people, basically), Syd and the others would accept orders from this sociopath? For me, the show lost any sense of reality at that point.

Additionally, pushing Sydney and Nadia together felt incredibly forced; the two have no relationship whatsoever and then suddenly they're living together and it's all "sisters" this and sisters that and they're having long meaningful conversations about the men in their lives (Syd and Vaughn have finally gotten together at this point and the producers wrongfully--VERY wrongfully--shoved Nadia and Weiss together so that they're all a happy little foursome). Nadia's entire purpose on the show it seems is to repeatedly refer to Sloane as her "father" and put on ridiculous disguises alongside Sydney so that the ABC promo department could show them kicking ass together and use Rosemary Clooney's song "Sisters." Aw, isn't that... sickening?

But the main problem with Season Four was the way that the producers (at the network's insistence, I am sure) stripped down the mythology and structure of Alias to make it more "accessible" to casual or new viewers. Gone was the complicated swirling plots of the previous seasons, the tense cliffhanger episode endings, the dynamic interpersonal relationships that made the show unique and compelling. Missions were often stand-alone adventures that were quickly resolved within 44 minutes and lacked the creative spark and daring inventiveness of the three previous seasons.

The characters too suffered greatly in this season. Vaughn and Sydney's relationship became boring and devoid of any real chemistry. Meanwhile, Jack was virtually castrated, reduced to making "transpo" arrangements for the missions and then was exposed to some chemical that resulted in him having bizarre hallucinations and flashbacks. That secret that Syd uncovered at the end of Season Three that seemed so tantalizingly juicy? Perhaps something about Project Christmas or something awful Jack had done to her as a child? It turned out to be a needlessly complicated rigmarole about Jack ordering a hit on Irina, who supposedly had put out a hit on Sydney (she didn't). And that bit about Jack actually killing Irina? Turns out he didn't do that either; he killed someone who looked like Irina, while the real Irina was stuck in a spider hole in the jungle, where she is finally rescued by her daughters in order to save the world.

Oh, and that apocalypse? Seems it was brought about by a man I liked to call faux Sloane (Joel Grey), a Sloane lookalike, who had a cunning plan to use honey bees, an orchid, the water supply, and a large Rambaldi device that looked like a giant basketball in the sky that turned ordinary humans into zombie-like creatures. After four years of twists and turns and theories about Rambaldi and his master plan, that's the big endgame that this show has been leading up to? Zombies? You've got to be kidding me. Sadly, they weren't and my interest had faded about 22 episodes ago already.

Part of the problem may have had something to do with the fact that creator J.J. Abrams departed Alias to oversee his new show, a little drama about some survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. Something called Lost. Perhaps you've heard of it? Just as his departure crippled WB college drama Felicity, so too did his leaving Alias. And once Abrams did leave, he seemed to take with him the very essence of what made Alias interesting: that special blend of high-octane action, relationship drama, and sci-fi geekery. What we were left with was a run-of-the-mill spy drama that bore very little resemblance to the show we first saw way back in the fall of 2001.

Alias returns to ABC tonight with the final batch of episodes before it heads off to that program graveyard in the sky (and endless reruns in syndication, naturally). However, I'm not too sure that I can be along for the ride. After the disaster that was the fourth season, I stopped watching what had been my favorite drama on television cold-turkey. No peaking, no reading about it online, nothing. To me, the show died that moment Sydney walked into APO and began taking orders from the man who killed her beloved Danny. For me, that moment--more than Nadia, faux Sloane, or even zombies--killed my beloved show.

What's On Tonight

8 pm: The Amazing Race (CBS); Celebrity Cooking Showdown (NBC); One Tree Hill (WB); Alias (ABC; 8-10 pm); Bones (FOX); America's Next Top Model (UPN)

9 pm: Criminal Minds (CBS); Heist (NBC); The Bedford Diaries (WB); American Idol/Unan1mous (FOX); Veronica Mars (UPN)

10 pm: CSI: New York (CBS); Law & Order (NBC); Invasion (ABC)

What I'll Be Watching

8 pm: The Amazing Race.

On a new episode of The Amazing Race ("Here Comes the Bedouin!"), the teams travel to Oman, where they have to deal with some stubborn camels and it looks like the hippies are having a nervous breakdown of some kind. I can't believe that Barry and Fran remain in the race... but then again I am still mourning the loss of geeks Dave and Lori. (What other AR team ever had their very own theme music?)

8 pm: Alias.

I know, I know, I said I wouldn't watch this show anymore, but, well, there's no Lost on tonight (or next week unfortunately), so I might TiVo the two-hour "return" of Alias tonight (there's some sick part of me that just has to see how Alias implodes). Whether I can stomach it or not is up for debate in my household. On tonight's two-hour episode ("S.O.S."/"Maternal Instinct"), Jack enlists Weiss (guest star Greg Grunberg) and APO (ugh, I hate that name) to search for Sydney after receiving a distress call. Meanwhile, in the second hour, Jack and Syd are forced to work together with the deadly Irina Derevko (that would be the former Mrs. Bristow), but question her loyalties.

Tuning Out: Why I Stopped Watching "The OC"

Networks sometimes use the summer to launch new shows. Oftentimes these shows are complete and utter dreck--leftover episodes of now cancelled shows "burned off" in the primetime wasteland of the summer months--or new reality programs that soon spawn huge franchises(Survivor, Amazing Race, Beauty and the Geek, etc.). But every now and then, a network will throw a drama on during the summer in the hopes that, with little else on, an audience will find the show and nurture it and give it the strength to make it through the regular, primetime season.

One such show was The OC. Created by twenty-something wunderkind Josh Schwartz and launched in the summer of 2003, The OC seemed like it would merely be a retread of Beverly Hills 90210, just set slightly further down the California coastline.

When it premiered, however, even I was surprised by how much I liked the show, despite wanting to dislike it. Instead of embracing those familiar teen drama tropes, the show toyed with them in a sort of post-modern self-awareness. It was fun, it was well-written, it was flashy, it had hot girls in Marc Jacobs drinking and smoking and doing cocaine at house parties while a Chino-bred hoodlum, freshly adopted by his court-appointed attorney, started fights with the local water polo team captain as an unpopular yet charming geek cheered him on from the sidelines. It was unlike any other teen drama that had come before it.

One of the more rewarding aspects of the show was the complexity of its characters: Ryan (Benjamin McKenzie), the show's brooding resident bad boy, who burns down houses while romancing rich girl neighbors; geek chic Seth (Adam Brody), a comics-obsessed nerd who loved Death Cab for Cutie almost as he loved hanging out with best bud Ryan; rich girl Marissa (Mischa Barton), who seemed to have everything yet lived in a gilded prison of her parents' making; and spunky Summer (Rachel Bilson), Marissa's no-nonsense, rage-blackout-affected best friend.

And, unlike most teen drama, equal emphasis and screen time was given to the kids' parents. In the pilot episode alone, The OC gave us TV's best and most loving parents in Sandy (Peter Gallagher) and Kirsten "Kiki" Cohen (Kelly Rowan)... and TV's worst parents in Jimmy (Tate Donovan) and Julie "JuJu" Cooper (Melinda Clarke). And while we never saw any of these parents cleaning or cooking (in fact, the show had an ongoing joke about the dismal nature of Kirsten's culinary abilities), we got a sense of how these characters interacted and spent their time. The Cohens seemed as real as any family, fictional or otherwise.

The show's first season gave us a pitch-perfect mix of melodrama, whip-smart dialogue, love triangles, heartbreak, and teen angst, set to a hip soundtrack of hand-picked music and set before the sun-soaked California surf. It brought us the joys of Chrismukah (Seth's home-grown combination of Christmas and Hanukah holidays), a storyline in which deliciously evil Julie Cooper seduced her daughter's 17-year-old ex-boyfriend Luke (Chris Carmack), the heartbreaking scene at the airport where hipster Anna (Samaire Armstrong) broke up with Seth to the strains of Nada Surf's cover of "If You Leave" (not a dry eye in my house, I can assure you), and yes, the god-awful misstep of a storyline which had psychotic teenager Oliver stalking Marissa and then holding her at gunpoint in a luxe hotel room. (Note to self: why do people around Marissa keep ending up shot?)

And then something strange happened: the show got bad. Fast.

The second season had none of the promise and potential of the first and squandered its time introducing characters and then disposing of them faster than Kleenex. In once instance, the producers introduced a secret, long-lost-sister of Kirsten's--who happened to be Ryan's new girlfriend--forced a relationship between then two, and then promptly packed her off to another city... only to have her conspicuously absent a few episodes later at her own father's funeral. Seth and Summer's on-again-off-again romance, so wonderfully written in Season One, turned tedious in the sophomore season, especially with the introduction of Zach (Michael Cassidy), a well-bred jock who (shudder) loved comic books as much as Seth. (I swear that half the season was wasted on Zach and Seth arguing over the comic book they were supposed to be making together.) Marissa had a relationship with her Latino gardener, who seemed to wear the same clothes and drive the same cars as the Newport kids. Following Sandy's not-really-infidelity with his escaped loon ex-girlfriend from twenty years earlier, Kirsten nearly had a not-really-affair of her own with a co-worker and then suddenly became an alcoholic, a condition which worsened after the death of her father, who was married to Julie Cooper at the time of his death.

And somehow, Marissa ended up in close proximity to a gun once again and shot Ryan's ne'er-do-well brother Trey in self-defense.

I managed to stick with the show through the second season, desperately hoping that they'd be able to capture the magic of the first year. But nothing the characters did rang true anymore. Their dialogue became hopelessly stilted and self-aware, the characters' situations hopelessly contrived (the Seth/Summer Spider-Man kiss homage, for example). Where once before the storylines, while melodramatic at times, were grounded in reality (granted, a more toned and beautiful reality, but reality nonetheless), throughout the second season and well into the third, the storylines became mired in soapy hystrionics and unrealistic shock-value sensationalism (Johnny, we hardly knew ye).

But I realized at the beginning of the show's third season that I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't handle the heavy-handed metatheatrical use of "The Valley," The OC's show-within-a-show. Nor could I handle seeing these characters I had once loved behaving so terribly out of character with one another. Gone was the magic and the camaraderie and the boldness of the early days of the show. In its place was something pre-packaged and plastic.

Sadly, I realized that the show had become just what it had originally set out to skewer: it was now just another teen drama.

Tuning Out: Why I Stopped Watching "Desperate Housewives"

Every now and then I find myself wondering why I continue to watch a particular show, given the lack of satisfaction I get from watching it. Think of it as: When Good Shows Go Bad. For a number of reasons, I find my willing suspension of disbelief nearly impossible and I begin to take fault with tinny dialogue or the believability of characters' actions, and entire storylines begin to become incomprehensible to me.

Such is the case with Desperate Housewives, a show I once tuned in to watch with relish every Sunday evening. Picture it: Autumn 2004, a time filled with the promise of new and exciting shows like Lost, Veronica Mars, and Desperate Housewives, two of which had energized the stagnant ABC and got people talking around watercoolers or coffee pots or wherever people gather nowadays in offices.

At first, Desperate Housewives was a delicious hodgepotch of elements: soapy female-driven domestic drama on one hand, but also a given to pratfalls, arson, same-sex shenanigans, and murder. Hell, the show even gave us a suicide in the pilot's open moments and had the victim, Mary Alice (Brenda Strong, though she was played by Twin Peaks' resident corpse Sheryl Lee in the original pilot), continue to narrate the show from beyond the grave with her now trademark overripe household witticisms.

(Some have even deigned to categorize the show as a comedy and festooned it with all sorts of awards on that account. Personally, I find the matter baffling as the only times I have ever laughed at the show was during Mary Alice's unintentionally tongue-in-cheek narration. But the less said of the show as comedy, the better.)

What was compelled the first season's plots was the mystery surrounding why Mary Alice, perfect wife and mother, offed herself as her four best friends--Gabrielle, Bree, Susan, and Lynette... and sometimes their slutty neighbor Edie--attempted to make sense of the tragedy and figure out who was trying to blackmail Mary Alice and why anyone with teeth that pearly white would risk eternal damnation to get away permanently from Wisteria Lane. Along the way, Teri Hatcher's Susan and Mike continued their on-again, off-again romance (even managing once to sit through dinner when Mike was shot), Lynette struggled with a pack of terrible tots, Bree kept up her icy Martha Stewart-esque reign of perfection, and Gabrielle fooled around with the teenage gardener John behind her husband Carlos' back.

And then something happened. We found out why Mary Alice killed herself: it had something complicated to do with murdering the birth mother of their "adopted" (read: kidnapped) son Zach, who happened to be Mike's son, who shoved down the stairs one Felicia Tillman, the sister of the blackmailer Martha Huber, who ended up being murdered by Mary Alice's husband Paul. Like I said, it was complicated but seemed to make sense--at least in the world of Wisteria Lane--at the time.

With the resolution of that major plotline, much of the oomph seemed to go out of the girls' sails. Mary Alice still continues to narrate the show for some morbid reason, though I would imagine that with the matter of her suicide solved, the poor woman could finally rest in peace and stop haunting the street.

And instead of involved, compelling plots, the writers have instead had Gabrielle face off against a seductive street-smart nun (yes, you read that correctly), had Bree date the pharmacist that murdered her husband and then watch as he slowly died after swallowing too many pills, and introduced a new family on the block: the Applewhites.

Mater familias Betty Applewhite (played by the divine Alfre Woodard) harbors a deadly secret of her own--she keeps a man, presumably her son Caleb (though I will admit I stopped watching before this was made abundantly clear), locked in the basement of their house because he had killed a young girl and Betty feels responsible and therefore must play jailor to her ice cream-loving yet homicidal son.

Meanwhile, the relationship between mismatched lovebirds Susan and Mike, that was so much fun the first year, quickly turned tedious. As soon as the show had Susan, running down Wisteria Lane (in a wedding dress no less) crying to Mike and attempting to apologize to her lover for sending his errant and sociopathic son Zach on a wild goose chase, I knew that their courtship had plateaued and I felt like the one sent on a wild goose chase.

So, for these reasons--and many, many more--I must bid farewell to those women of Wisteria Lane. As Mary Alice might say, "Every week on Wisteria Lane brings with it a new set of lies. That the show can improve, or that Susan will stop sobbing over Mike and tripping over backwards. We persuade ourselves that yes, Bree really would fix Rex's tie as he lies there in the coffin, or that Carlos would never actually catch Gabrielle and John making out. Yes, each week after the show has aired, we lie to ourselves in a desperate, desperate hope that come next week... it will all be better."

Fortunately, I know better now.