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I was reminded of something earlier today, and I can’t believe that this somehow slipped past the radar screen…

Last week, May 1st, was the fortieth anniversary of the premiere of the NBC television miniseries V.

That doesn’t seem possible.  It’s like it was only yesterday that creator Kenneth Johnson unleashed his nightmarish vision of fascism on a global scale.  The Visitors came to major cities across the planet, in fifty ships each three miles in diameter.  They looked like us.  They came from a dying planet and they needed humanity’s help.  They came in peace.

And it was all a damnable lie.  Their intent was to rape the Earth, seizing every precious natural resource.  And the fate of mankind?  Something truly horrifying.  Four decades later and the scene of all those humans in cold storage still sends a shiver up my spine.

It was a grand endeavor.  What ...

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AMC’s much-promoted revamp of The Prisoner concluded last night. After watching both hours twice-over now I am going to say that that, acknowledging that while mine is going to be in the minority of opinions, that I very much enjoyed it and thought it was time well spent. And I will likely be getting the DVD of the series when it becomes available. But I will say that AMC way over-hyped The Prisoner. And so much so that I have to wonder how much confidence they had in their own product. Doing “coming up” bumpers before each commercial break did nothing to instill one’s faith in this show as a viewer. Without those, I think The Prisoner could have been much more enjoyable. Another reason why I’m looking forward to a DVD set of this.

Meanwhile, ABC aired the third episode of the relaunched V. I watched it ...

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I’m still enjoying this re-imagined V (slam here for my review of the pilot episode). ABC is doing a fine job of updating the concepts of the original. However, I’m more than a little compelled to say that this show needs to ratchet up the intensity. Tonight’s episode “There is No Normal Anymore” picked up right after the end of last week’s premiere, and then hit a plodding stride.

Maybe this is still just “setup” for a bigger payoff later. I hope so, because V has tons of potential. But unless there’s some master arc plan in the works that we aren’t aware of the show is taking its own sweet time more than Babylon 5 did, or Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. It worked very well on those series and it can work just as well now, but V‘s showrunners need to pick up the pace ...

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Giant alien spacecraft arrive over dozens of major cities around the world and their leader – a sexy brunette in a revealing skirt and high heels – broadcasts a greeting in perfect English and all these other languages in 100,800,000 progressive high-def television, says her name is “Anna” and that humanity is the first sentient life they have ever encountered… and nobody on Earth is bothering to ask HOW the hell any of this is possible?!

Well, other than that…

(I’ll interject that all of those previous plotholes were quickly forgotten just before the final commercial break, when Elizabeth Mitchell’s character peeled back the skin and I screamed out “OH HELL YES!!”)

I watched the premiere episode of V tonight on ABC and thought it was wildly and surprisingly good. I loved the original V miniseries from 1983, thought the following year’s V: The Final Battle stank on ...

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Courtesy of James Hibberd’s The Live Feed. Watch Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet from Lost) gazing up at the sky along with the rest of humanity…

And then there’s this clip, which I find to be much more promising/menacing…

The first clip seemed kinda… bland. Maybe it’s just ‘cuz I’m still a fan of old-school V (the original 1983 miniseries anyway). But the second one has sold me on this re-imagining’s potential. That is a drop of distilled essence of what made the first miniseries so powerful and unbelievably scary: creeping fascism on a global scale.

ABC has already committed V to series based on its pilot. It should start running later on in the 2009-2010 season....

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The long, long, long-attempted effort to relaunch V – yeah, the 1980s sci-fi franchise about the humanoid lizards come to steal our water, rape our wimmunfolk and eat us for lunch (literally) – is finally getting off the ground at ABC. The network has commissioned a pilot episode, presumably that will premiere this coming fall.

If handled right, this could be a terrific show that might pick up the same fans who are currently hooked on Lost (which will see its final season next year). Unfortunately, V creator Kenneth Johnson is not aboard for this go-round… and I’ve long thought that if he had been given complete control over his original concept, that NBC could have had one of the greatest television series of the Eighties. Alas! Too many suits ruined that…

And speaking of NBC television shows from two decades ago, June 11, 2010 is the ...

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That’s what Ain’t It Cool News is reporting today. The guys at Latino Film Review seem to have gotten their hands on the proposal script, and it reads like a combo of the two miniseries (minus that “Starchild” crap, well let’s hope it’s not in it anyway).

Even if this specific project never gets made, I don’t care. I’m just glad to hear that there is some movement afoot to bring V back to the screen.

Hopefully as a re-imagined and updated story, but maintaining the same basic premise. With Kenneth Johnson given complete control over it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if NBC had let him run V the way he intended, it would have become something truly monumental. V, the original 1983 miniseries, is still considered one of the most memorable achievements of that decade’s television.

And there’s been no better ...

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Look at what’s being published on January 8th, 2008!

From the creator of V himself Kenneth Johnson, and weighing-in at 448 pages, it’s V: The Second Generation.

So in case you are one of the “younger” generation (i.e. my friends younger than 20) and are wondering what V is: almost a quarter-century later it still ranks among the scariest and most disturbing things ever put on American television. And had it been better managed, it had the potential to be one of the greatest sci-fi franchises of all time.

In the spring of 1983, NBC broadcast the two-part original miniseries V. They came from a distant star: a fleet of fifty gigantic “motherships” – five miles in diameter – one for each of the largest cities on Earth. These “Visitors” – who looked human in every way – came begging for Earth’s help, claiming that their home ...

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