A Look Back At V Forty Years Later, Part 1: How I Found The Cult Series And Why It Was More Groundbreaking Then You'd Think

 

 

When I was a teenager in the 1990s one of the greatest gifts of cable TV  - something that streaming has yet to fully realize  - was how it made available reruns of some of the greatest series in history. And not just the obvious classics of the 1970s and 1980s, such as MASH or L.A. Law or The Twilight Zone but so many series that had all too brief runs on television but cable gave new life too.

Many specialty networks were superb at this: Lifetime introduced me to China Beach and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, I would never have learned of Wiseguy’s potential without Court TV and before it became the home of every reality show known to man Bravo was where I fell in love with – and recorded every episode – of Twin Peaks. But as you might expect the best source for cult series was the Sci-Fi channel (as it was called during the decade).

During that period I was introduced to so many of the best cult series in history. These included such syndicated gems as Tales from the Darkside and Forever Knight;  the  brilliant Max Headroom and the intriguing She-Wolf of London, and several late 1990s gems including Dark Skies and Now and Again, two series which even more than twenty years after their cancellations have a fanbase that mourns their departure. But the one I’d like to discuss is a true unicorn: not only the kind of sci-fi cult series that actually was ahead of its time when it debuted but unlike all but a precious few series from that era actually got a remake in the 21^st century.

When I was sixteen years old the Sci-Fi Channel began to rerun first the groundbreaking miniseries V, followed by its sequel and finally the sole season of the show. I was just beginning to cut my teeth as a TV critic and I knew nothing about any of this. So its possible that my opinions of both the two miniseries and the series that followed are, like those of so many teenagers who were in love with cult series in the past, based more on nostalgia than actual quality.  And I haven’t seen either in twenty years so I could be wrong on that score. But what I do know, on reflection, is that there were immensely revolutionary things, particularly in the Johnson series not just by the standards of 1980s science fiction but any television that was airing during that decade. In a sense what V was doing was so outside the scope of what the network viewer was used (and indeed might not be used to until well into the next century) that there might have been more reasons that the simple problems of bad ratings for the show’s cancellation. So in this article I intend to briefly discuss V, the two mini-series Johnson created, the one-season show that aired and what I thought of the remake that debuted on ABC in 2009.

Note: The limited series is streaming on Amazon and the original series are streaming on Amazon.

Over two nights in May of 1983, the mini-series V aired on television. It deals with the arrival of a group of alien spaceships which appear all over the globe simultaneously. Eventually the two leaders – John, played by Richard Herd and Diana, played by Jane Badler – appeared and tell the world their mission in peaceful. Initially this is accepted by the masses, but Abraham, a Holocaust survivor (played by the veteran character actor Leonard Cimino) doubts their intentions from the start.

Scientists raise doubts but they quickly reverse them. However, a keen-eyed cameraman nots disturbing differences between doubt and acceptance: they’ve all started signing documents with their left-hand when they were previously right-handed. Juliet (Faye Grant) is similarly disturbed but the most openly doubtful layman is cameraman Mike Donovan (Marc Singer).

As the visitors begin to quickly infiltrate every aspect of our society, they begin to recruit humans as their security forces. Several of them, including a young man named Daniel take it to so well it reveals them being bullies. Eventually Mike learns that they are hiding many things – including that despite their humanoid appearance, their not human at all.

A resistance begins to be formed, taking on scientists and ever street toughs. One is the criminal brother of a scientist who is killed. Eventually we learn that there is a faction within the aliens who knows that their intentions are not honorable (they are known as the Fifth Column) and they begin to ally. Abraham realizes the danger quicker than most and is killed but before he is taken away, he shows a young tough who is spray-painting anti-Visitor graffiti the right one. He sprays a bright red V. “You understand?” he tells the young child. “For victory.” He quickly becomes a martyr for the resistance.

It's clear looking at the two part series that Johnson, who wrote it, may have been trying to get a pilot from the start: unlike most mini-series at the time, there is not even an attempt to bring events in V to anything resembling a conclusion. The series essentially ends on notes that the resistance is beginning – and the most troubling that the daughter of one of the scientists, who had an affair with a visitor might be pregnant. In any case the ratings were high, so a sequel limited series was greenlit and in May 1984, V: The Final Battle.

It takes place four months after their arrival and the resistance is still trying to find its way. By now most of society has fully accepted that the Visitors intentions are fully good and the few who doubt are suppressed violently. The resistance is joined by Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside) a former CIA black ops man who tells the resistance on their first meeting what a horrible job their doing. He tries to supersede authority from Juliet, who chafes at the idea and there are struggles over an attempt at a nightly attack. The biggest concern however is Robin’s pregnancy which has terrified her to the point that she has tried to terminate it – and finds that she can’t. In a scene that was incredibly controversial then and would be impossible to film on network TV now, the scientists decide to perform an abortion. But to their horror they find the alien is aware enough to protect its existence and that there is no way to kill it without killing the mother.

Members of the Fifth Column are now legion within the Visitors. (One of the most prominent is a young man named Willie who is there more for comic relief initially. Willie is played by a very young Robert Englund in a role that most people who know him as Freddy Krueger would be stunned by his innocence and humanity.)

The three episodes follow a battle that goes on from within and without, both against the alien ships and the human collaborators. I won’t reveal how it plays out but eventually the resistance finds a way to strike against the Visitors so daringly that they end up outsmarting themselves and their attempts to destroy the planet in rebellion work against them.

The end of the mini-series does seem like a kind of conclusion. But by this point the two series had been so successful that CBS greenlit a network series and Johnson wrote a new one.

V: The Series takes place a year after what is called Liberation Day. Because of the bacteria that is now in the Earth’s atmosphere, the aliens are either prisoners or those that are loyal are taking a drug that gives them protection from it. The chief manufacturer of this drug is a pharmaceutical king named Nathan Bates (Lane Smith) Bates has a complicated relationship with his sun Kyle.

Early in the first episode it becomes clear that the Visitors have resumed an attack and some are now resistant to the virus. However it is not permanent: in warm climates they are constantly in victory but in the cold they are defeated. A new war is about to begin – but this time the entire planet is aware of what they are facing.

What’s particularly remarkable in hindsight is just how ambitious Johnson was in V. In an era where characters just weren’t killed off in regular series Johnson was willing to be relentlessly, even merciless cutthroat. In the first two episodes he kills two characters who survived both mini-series and were loved by the fans at that point and he continues to do so throughout the nineteen episode run of the show. Two regulars introduced in the pilot don’t make it to the end of the series (Elias, who was around since the start is killed near the end of the season) and many other characters who have been around throughout the show end up leaving at different times. (Ironside’s character disappears in the middle of the season.) This simply wasn’t done in network television in the mid eighties and not even David Chase was willing to be this cutthroat with his regular characters until the second season of The Sopranos. This must have been off-putting to the extreme for people that shows like Dallas and Dynasty were the cutting edge of entertainment.

And for a sci-fi series Johnson was willing to take the show to new lengths. The real-life news anchor Howard K. Smith appeared in the openings of many of the episodes where he gave reports of the resistances to the viewing public, playing himself. There were no attempts at parody, nothing resembling an in-joke: Smith reported the stories of massacres across the globe and heroes from the warfront as if he were Edward R. Murrow giving reports from the Blitz (which I imagine many thought he was.) It would be nearly thirty years before another show of any type made this a recurring feature and in the case of House of Cards, that series embraced Washington.

And in one of the more daring storylines halfway through the season it became clear that many of the Visitors could impersonate humans. During both mini-series all the Visitors with a perceptible audio distortion to their voices, no doubt to symbolize their alien nature. By the time of The Last Battle that had become slightly less perceptive and by the time of the series it was completely gone. Johnson never explained this -maybe the Visitors after their time on Earth had developed an accent or perhaps they’d been trying so all the time for this very purpose. Whatever the reason, by the middle of the season the resistance had been infiltrated by a Visitor pretending to be human. This foreshadows what we will see on shows such as The X-Files and the remake of Battlestar Galactica in decades to come. Variations of this had been tried before – most notably on the late 1960s sci-fi series The Invaders  - but it worked very well here. (It turned out this was a continuity error but it still worked.)

V worked remarkably well for an adaptation of a limited series. The overall impression was good and the stories were remarkably well-plotted out. But because the ratings no doubt were not high enough V was cancelled at the end of the 1984-1985 season. Johnson was planning a second season (he admitted as much) so the series ended on a cliff-hanger.

Overall, this was a decently acted, well written and very well done show, particularly in an era when sci-fi was considered a dead-letter on network television. The cast was mostly made of B-movie actors (Singer and Grant in particular) as well as some very gifted character actors (Ironside, Smith and Wright have never lacked for work over the last forty years, either in live-action or animation.) And the show did leave an impression. When TV Guide did a ranking of the 25 greatest sci-fi legends Diana ranked number 5. Now I’ll grant you that was 2004 and Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Fring among others hadn’t even debuted yet, but still that does speak to the fact that it meant something and not just to genre fans. Johnson did continue the series in novels over the 1990s and there was sometimes talk of a new version but it never came to anything.

And indeed for much of the 1990s, it would have been a pipe dream. Then as now network television only wanted to reboot former hit shows rather than ones than were one-season wonders. Not even new networks like the UPN or WB were willing to touch failed franchises: UPN put on two new Star Trek franchises and had The Twilight Zone return with Forest Whitaker as a narrator but none of them were willing to reboot, say, The Time Tunnel. I seriously doubt anyone would have even considered doing it had Sci-Fi not rebooted Battlestar Galactica to great critical acclaim and relatively good ratings starting in 2004. And I seriously doubt that it’s a coincidence that within months of the final episode of Galactica airing in 2009 that  a new version of V was greenlit by ABC.

In the conclusion of this article I will deal with the reimaging of V that debuted in the fall of 2009, what it got wrong and what it got right and why even it’s failed vision remains something for other reboots to aspire too.