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.'"