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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.