Welcome to His Unreality

There needed to??be??a??monster. That, in a nutshell, was what J.J. Abrams and his co-creator, Damon Lindelof, decided soon after Lloyd Braun, then ABC’s entertainment chairman, gave them this assignment: Write a show about plane-crash castaways on a desert island. The parallel to a certain CBS series was obvious. If Survivor was Gilligan’s Island with real people, Lost would be Survivor with fake people. But Abrams, who had raised the spy serial to new heights of cliff-hanging absurdity with Alias, knew that the series would need something extra, something weird, to sustain the audience’s interest and his own.

So Abrams and his partner gave the island a deadly (unseen) monster. Fine. A lot of writers might have done that. But with Abrams, there was also a polar bear in the jungle. There was a mad Frenchwoman marooned on the island for 16 years. There was a scary Canadian guy named Ethan living among the crash survivors, although he was not on the plane’s manifest. “We were saying from the beginning, ‘This is the level of reality we’re dealing with,'” says Abrams. “If you’re not up for that, you won’t like where the show goes.”

Turns out, people were up for that. 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 characters and crisp, funny writing. Call it unreality TV.

Abrams, 38, credits his taste for serious popcorn, in part, to school days spent sick at home watching The Twilight Zone. “That show was what I aspired to do,” says Abrams, who, Spielberg-style, started making his own Super-8 movies at age 8. “It was an allegory–instead of telling stories about communists, it told stories about aliens. I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on, but I felt the gravity of it.”

Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling used the eerie-tale genre to get around broadcast strictures, and in a way so does Abrams. Networks have long been 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 me up.'”

Abrams began his career writing for the movies (as Jeffrey Abrams), and his early work–middlingly received movies like Regarding Henry and a credit on the asteroid thriller Armageddon–didn’t 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 a drama about bounty hunters and a sitcom starring Saturday Night Live alumna Cheri Oteri.

Colleagues describe him as a kind of computer-era Renaissance man–or simply a computer. “We call it downloading,” says Lindelof. “We could be talking about a story line for Lost, and he’s walking out of an Alias editing room or on the phone about Mission: Impossible. He comes in and downloads for 45 minutes uninterrupted, and then it becomes a dialogue.” Says Alias co-executive producer Sarah Caplan: “I’ve been with him when he is cutting and editing on one screen while writing music. He multitasks in his brain.”

Abrams’ ever juggling style is reflected in the enjoyable narrative ADD of his series. Their themes–deception and mystery–mean that Abrams can, and does, remake them on a dime. Good people turn out evil and vice versa. Characters are killed … or are they? Even Felicity had two series finales–the second showing what would have happened if Felicity had made different choices in college. Abrams has reinvented Alias several times, this season by dialing back an overcomplex story line involving a Nostradamus-like prophecy.

Why do fans tolerate being screwed with like this? Because Abrams knows that it is character, not plot, that makes stories plausible. If you ground the emotions, people will buy the twists. When Sydney dangles off a speeding train and escapes, yes, it’s “unbelievable,” he says. “But hopefully viewers will think, ‘Oh, my God, that is how I would react if I was hanging outside a train.'”

Key to that is hiring actors who can do both action and emotion (like the wonderfully understated Garber). For Lost’s vast cast, Abrams built characters around the actors. “If he saw something in that person,” says Matthew Fox, who stars as Jack, the control-freak doctor, “he adjusted the role and even created roles for people,” like Jorge Garcia, who plays affable slacker Hurley.

On set, say 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 bear et al. are manifestations of the characters’ subconscious, that the show is a religious allegory.

Farfetched? Maybe not. Like a religious text, Lost is open to endless interpretation. In one episode, Kate and con man Sawyer (Josh Holloway) fight over a locked briefcase that she says holds something of hers. Sawyer offers to give it to her if she will say what’s inside. “I don’t care what it is,” he says. “What’s burning me up is why it means so much to you.” The line is a perfect summary of Alias’ and Lost’s maddening appeal. Their characters hold secrets behind impenetrable locks. We know that the mysteries will never be solved–or will be replaced with more tantalizing ones. Yet all that matters to us is why those mysteries matter to the characters, and with how much panache and heart Abrams and crew convey their passion. “It’s like hiking in a fog,” Abrams says. “The closer you get, the more you see, but the more you realize the way to get there is so unexpected.”

And so we ride along, like travelers following a map with a spooky promise at its tattered edge: HERE BE MONSTERS. –Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles