Alienated teens

As if those issues weren't dramatic enough, the show is set in a post-Apocalyptic future in which even the most basic functions of society have broken down.

"She becomes a kind of symbol," Mr. Cameron says, "of every teenager or young adult that reaches a certain age where there isn't somebody telling them what to do and what's right and wrong,anymore.... And [the answers have] really got to come from within. They've got to find their own moral compass."

Although the show is jam-packed with high-tech action, Cameron says that's just window dressing. "It's not just about, 'Is she going to run up against somebody whose butt she can kick?' "

Co-executive producer and writer Rene Echevarria was a longtime writer on the "Star Trek" TV franchise, shows that placed science fiction in the mainstream popular culture. Despite the high-tech overlay, he says, "Dark Angel" "is about a girl trying to make her way in the world and figure out who she is and what she's about" - all universal themes.

The lead character in ABC's new drama "Alias" is not an alien. But her secret life as a double agent for the CIA while still in college - and her extraordinary ability to master new languages and martial-arts - move her into the super-human realm.

"There was something about this young woman who is very strong and of very few words, but she was incredibly vulnerable," says "Alias" creator and executive producer J.J. Abrams, who is also responsible for a teen coming-of-age drama on The WB, "Felicity." In the show, young Sidney Bristow becomes a double agent after the secret agency who recruits her murders her fiancé.

"I was really interested in the idea of a story of a young woman who not only has this loss, but has basically a nonrelationship with her father," Abrams says. "And the idea that, little by little, this young woman and this man begin to connect."

"Smallville" takes one of the first and the most well-known superheroes, Superman, and looks not behind, but before the cape. The program asks the question: "How does someone become a superhero, and how does that model fit in today's world?"

"That's really what the show is about," says actor Tom Welling, who plays the key role of Clark Kent, a secret superhero, "him finding out who he is and what he is here for. He's got these abilities that he doesn't necessarily understand, and it alienates him in a lot of ways from just wanting to be a normal high school kid."

While the shows can be seen as symbols for the coming-of-age experience, recent events also have moved some themes equally into the realm of realism.

"Clearly, adolescence is a battlefield," Thompson says. "But what used to be a metaphor is not so much anymore." He notes the wave of school shootings and escalation of drugs found in schools.

These shows, he adds, help by casting teen lives in a dramatic light and by providing another "language" through which they discuss issues. "They are the perfect American story because they combine a time where we both psychologically and physically molt, then emerge in the bodies of beautiful, young people," he says.

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