Matthew and I have purchased the first season of Alias on DVD. Alias, in case you’ve been living under a Powerbook, is an extremely successful spy-thriller television show, starring Jennifer Garner. It pretty much made her career, so if you thought she was the least sucky part of Daredevil, you owe her debut show a look-see.

Everyone and their old maid aunt (no, wait, actually, everyone and their old pie-making Grandma, according to wonko) seems to love the show, which, in my snobby counterculture way, I assumed meant it couldn’t really be all that good. So Matt and I checked out the first disc from Netflix and were immediately hooked. It’s fast-paced, fairly cleverly written, and has enough tension to suspend a bridge. While their grasp of computers is laughable, they luckily don’t display their ignorance too often, usually sticking to standard espionage and infiltration stuff, which they do very well. They also duck back and forth from the main character’s life of intrigue and adventure to her mundane life with friends enough that the show maintains a varied and interesting texture.

The one thing to beware of, here, however, is this: they end almost every single episode on a cliff-hanger. Then they resolve the cliff-hanger before the credits of the next show (which leads to some fairly late credit sequences, let me tell ya.) This may be an effective way of getting your audience to tune in next week, but it’s downright evil on a DVD set, especially with the pretty little ‘Play All’ button on each disc menu…