Alias was an American "Spy-fi" television series created by J. J. Abrams. It was originally broadcast on ABC from September 30, 2001 to May 22, 2006, spanning five seasons. Jennifer Garner starred as Sydney Bristow, a CIA agent, who was usually seen wearing a colorful new disguise while undercover in some part of the world. A major plotline of the series was the search for and recovery of artifacts created by Milo Rambaldi, a fictional Leonardo da Vinci-like inventor and Nostradamus-like prophet from the Renaissance period. This plot and some technologies used in the series pushed Alias into the genre of science fiction.