More Alias...

Even super-agent Sydney Bristow couldn’t triumph over the inevitable. After five years, two timeslot switches and one major bout of fan backlash, ABC’s “Alias” is ending its run this May.

ABC confirmed the decision late Wednesday, leading into the four-day Thanksgiving break. The show, which will go on hiatus next month during series star Jennifer Garner’s maternity leave, will return at midseason for its final 13 episodes.

Though the timing of the decision, months before the season ends, is a surprise, the substance of it is not. Garner has a burgeoning movie career and a baby on the way, and producer J.J. Abrams has two other shows on ABC, including upcoming midseason drama “What About Brian.” Everybody's busy in a sense.

ABC simply confirmed rumors that have been floating around the internet since the show’s fifth-season premiere. It was made easier for network by the fact that with the move to Thursday night “Alias” was generating its worst-ever ratings.

“Alias” has always been a show long on potential with little to show for it. It was ABC’s only critical hit during the lean years between “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” and “Desperate Housewives,” and although it never received big ratings, it had a dedicated cult following.

That helped the show get renewed four times, despite rarely winning its timeslot during its first three seasons and in 2003 becoming the least-watched post-Super Bowl program ever. The show struggled for three years in the Sunday 9 p.m. timeslot before being moved last season to make way for “Housewives.”

In moving “Alias,” ABC rewarded Abrams, also the man behind “Lost,” with the lush post-“Lost” Wednesday 9 p.m. timeslot. There the show performed well but lost an increasing share of “Lost’s” audience as the season went on, finishing with a so-so 4.2 18-49 average.

With “Housewives,” “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy” doubling those numbers, and several of its shows now basking in critical acclaim, ABC had fewer reasons to continue with the imaginative “Alias.”

This fall, ABC moved "Alias" to Thursday nights. Thursday is a normally premium night, except at ABC. No Thursday 8 p.m. show has survived since “Mork and Mindy” in the early 1980s. Thus far this season, “Alias” has averaged a 2.3 in 18-49s, behind even the WB’s “Smallville” in the same timeslot.

Yet in many ways it was a smart gamble for ABC, in effect a do or die proposition, a chance for "Alias" to show it could make it on its own without "Lost" to prop it up. If it could not persuade fans to follow it once again, and ratings sank, ABC could kill it once and for all, its conscious clear of any remorse. And that's what happened.

But this season “Alias” also has suffered a fan backlash over the exit of series co-star Michael Vartan, Garner’s on-screen flame and former real-life paramour.

Vartan’s secret agent Vaughn was an extremely popular character, and many fans speculated on message boards that Garner had asked for Vartan to be written off to avoid tension between him and her new husband, Ben Affleck.

Sites even sprang up asking ABC to reconsider the long-rumored death, which happened on the season’s first episode.

“Don't bring Alias back from hiatus until MV [Michael Vartan] is signed back on,” writes one recent poster on Television Without Pity’s boards. “Please...I beg of you...stop this torture.”

Vartan will return as a guest-star later this season and presumably will appear in the series finale during May sweeps.

[Source: Media Life]