Great Expectations

By JAMES COLLINS

What's in a name? If the name is Felicity, then a television show is in it--and not just any show, but the most highly anticipated new series of the season. J.J. Abrams, a screenwriter whose credits include Regarding Henry and Armageddon, was sitting on a beach in Bali on his honeymoon a couple of years ago, and mentioned to his wife that he wanted to write about someone called Felicity. He had also been thinking about a girl he admired from afar in high school and was mulling over a coming-of-age tale. The name pulled these musings together, and all at once Abrams had a character, a story and even a tone--bright, delicate, pleasing. Felicity.

In an otherwise fairly dismal season for new shows, the WB's Felicity, which debuts at 9 p.m. E.T. on Sept. 29, is the one that stands out and has been preceded by the most hype. It's a drama about a college freshman, played with glowing naturalness by Keri Russell, who has impulsively chucked aside the plans her parents made for her in order to follow a boy she hardly knows to New York City. Anybody who has ever fallen in love with a stranger and wondered what might have happened if the infatuation had been acted on will find Felicity's premise tinglingly evocative. That, combined with polished execution and an enormously appealing cast, may make the hype prophetic rather than a curse.

It will be an especially remarkable feat if the show turns out to be a success, since the two people who put it together each week are new to television. The experience of Abrams and his fellow executive producer, Matt Reeves, is almost entirely in film. While Reeves, who recently co-wrote and directed The Pallbearer, has directed episodes of network dramas, neither he nor Abrams has ever worked regularly on a show before, much less run one. Ultimately, their backgrounds have helped Felicity, giving it a movielike look and pace, but the challenge has been forbidding.

Even a good idea, of course, must make one or two stops on its way from Bali to prime time. A few months after his honeymoon, Abrams was eating dinner with Reeves, an old friend. Both 32 and both from Los Angeles, they had met when they were 13 and already making student films. During the meal, Abrams told Reeves of his idea about a girl who disastrously moves across the country to go to college. At first the two thought the story would work as a movie. "But every version seemed stupid," says Abrams. "We realized the thing that felt inspiring was this character, the voice of this person who was taking a huge risk and experiencing what it is to make a mistake for the first time and take the consequences." With a TV show, they could explore this person's life without having to reach a resolution in two hours.

Borrowing a pen from the maitre d', they began scribbling on napkins. In a few weeks Abrams had written a pilot, and he and Reeves had developed about five years' worth of story lines. They brought Felicity to Imagine Entertainment, the production company headed by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, and Imagine took it to the WB, which, with series such as Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has become the home of the teenage hit. Suddenly Abrams and Reeves were TV producers.

Or they almost were. One problem remained: the two had agreed at the outset that if they couldn't find the right person to play Felicity, they would call the project off. They auditioned nearly 100 actors in New York City and Los Angeles without any luck, until along came Russell, who had previously appeared most prominently in Malibu Shores, an Aaron Spelling drama that ran on NBC during the 1996 season. Russell says she was nervous at the audition, seeing more than a dozen actors go in before her, and she remembers calling her agent to complain, "I'm not going to be great after waiting for two hours."

But she was great. She was called back for a few more auditions, and after a final one for the network, she arrived home to find a message from her agent telling her she had the part. "She was so beautiful and such an angel," Abrams remembers. "I thought there was no way she could be Felicity. But then she started reading, and she was funny as hell. She could be pretty and funny but also vulnerable."

With Felicity found, Felicity was launched. Officially, Abrams and Reeves divide the labor, with Abrams overseeing the writing and Reeves supervising the editing, the directing of the individual episodes and other aspects of the production. But their collaboration is near total. They are the kind of partners who finish each other's sentences, and they make joint decisions on everything from the Felicity website to the type of glass that should go in a window. It's plenty of work. "The difference with film," says Abrams, "is that as a writer you're a cog in a giant machine. In TV you're a cog in a giant machine, but it is your machine."

To Abrams and Reeves, though, the real struggle is not merely learning a new medium but creating a TV show with "filmic sensibility," as Abrams calls it. "Apart from getting the show off the ground," says Reeves, "the challenge is to find a way to make it look like a movie." That means different lighting and a different rhythm, one that allows moments between lines to blossom. In the process Abrams and Reeves must resist the temptation to do multiple takes, which time and the budget simply won't allow.

The WB has almost made a specialty of bringing in young filmmakers to create TV shows. Buffy is produced by Joss Whedon, who made his name as a screenwriter, and the man behind Dawson's Creek is Kevin Williamson, of the Scream movies. "We see film backgrounds as an opportunity, not a problem," says Garth Ancier, the network's entertainment president. "[Filmmakers] bring fresh voices to television." The network requires that a TV veteran work on shows being produced by novices from the movies. For Felicity, Ed Redlich was hired away from The Practice, and whether it's a question of the amount of film to shoot or the pace at which the plots should unfold, his advice is heeded.

Abrams and Reeves succeed in making their show lightly cinematic, creating a plusher experience for the viewer than is usual on TV. What really makes Felicity enjoyable, though, is that despite its requisite melodrama, it is emotionally plausible and endearing. In this it is very different from its demographic stablemates Dawson's Creek and Fox's Ally McBeal, which are dishonest to their core and as a result impossibly irritating to watch. Felicity, instead, manages to be pretty good, gooey, yearning, adolescent fun. Not bad for a first try.

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles