In 2024, television continues to enjoy new freedoms and popularity. Network TV, once the king of the small screen, has been pushed aside for streaming services, giving viewers an endless supply of choices. This also means choosing numerous streaming channels to watch certain shows (a topic for another time). Science fiction has also enjoyed this renaissance as much as any genre, but it wasn’t always that way. The decades are a literal graveyard of failed attempts, outright horrific shows, and projects that never grabbed an audience. One of those shows is V, and its birth in the ’80s led to a strange and bizarre path that was both fascinating and frustrating to watch.
With a mix of curiosity and indifference paving the way, V hit the small screen in May 1983 with a two-part mini-series for NBC. Created by Kenneth Johnson, who was no stranger to TV with The Incredible Hulk, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman, it sets up the story in a fun and interesting way: citizens of Earth wake up one day to find 50 enormous flying saucers parked in the sky above major cities stretching all over the world. The aliens, or “Visitors,” announce they are here in peace and invite news cameraman Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) aboard one of the ships. People on Earth shockingly discover the aliens look human, but scientists, including biologist Julie Parrish (Faye Grant), are skeptical that this is really a mission of peace. This conflict sets the stage for what is to come.Â
It is an understatement to say the show was plagued by ’80s special effects; however, the story and its parallels to Earth’s past are compelling yet easy to follow. The story is based on Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, following a man’s rise to power and his dictatorship in America. While promising to make America great again (a familiar theme in current American politics), out comes the personal army and concentration camps to control the population and bend them to his will.
To his credit, Johnson boldly took this theme and ran with it, and as V unfolds, the humans discover the aliens are not human but actually lizard-like creatures with a more nefarious agenda. The humans fight back, creating a resistance force, and before you can say World War II, we have something that looks eerily like Nazis, Jews, concentration camps, chaos, and death. The Visitors, clad in their SS-like uniforms, complete with the swastika-like emblem, helped the show wrap itself up in the “us versus the Nazis” package. It is a powerful image forever taught to new generations as a lesson on how quickly things can go wrong and how everything is not always what it seems.Â
Incredibly, the mini-series actually ended on a cliffhanger, something that today is still debated by the viewing public with newer shows, with some enjoying the questions hanging out there and others wanting it all tied up in a neat little bow. Thankfully, it was a big success, so in May 1984, NBC gave us the three-part mini-series V: The Final Battle. The show expanded on the same themes, with the Visitors using a “conversion” process to make humans slaves, suicide plots, truth serums, and many other staples from older sci-fi shows and spy movies.
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There is no question that the two mini-series were campy and hilarious, eye-rolling yet entertaining. They combined everything to make it the kind of science fiction that, while pure fiction, had a story based on ideals, morals, and life lessons that people could understand. It wasn’t rocket science and maybe more light-hearted sci-fi at its core, but never underestimate the viewer’s joy of seeing a good beat up on evil, no matter what the setting or scenario, and in that, V did a solid job. Maybe they should have taken a step back and thought about just ending things there, but as usually happens with most successful things, they wanted to capitalize on its success, and unfortunately, a TV series was born.
In October 1984, V: The Series hit the small screen, and 19 episodes later, it was gone. Everything you could imagine going wrong with a series was part of the playbook here. Poor storylines, horrific dialogue and acting, crappy shooting schedule, budgets so low they used the most stock footage in the history of TV…it had it all. All the initial charm in the first two mini-series was now gone; instead, it was replaced with melodrama, which would see this show fit nicely into the CW Networks schedule. (Cheap, campy superhero TV at its finest.)
There are so many head-scratching moments you’d think you had lice: Michael Ironside’s charmingly badass character Ham Tyler takes off at one point in the series and is never seen again; we didn’t know what happened to Mike Donovan’s son; Robert Englund’s initially charming character Willie being reduced to a dumb-downed afterthought. Characters and storylines came and went, and any relevance the show once had came crashing down into a big, ugly pile of really bad TV.
Incredibly, though, while any relevance in terms of the story is long gone or never there, there is something charming about the series in that campy sci-fi way. It is like the writers and decision-makers realized this was a hot mess and decided to play that card like a gambler with some aces up their collective sleeves. There were catfights, a guest appearance by Sybil Danning, smoldering looks accompanied by the always menacing hands on the hips look, and bad fight scenes. It was almost hypnotizing. It got so bad that NBC canceled the show after 19 episodes of what was to be a 20-episode run, the final bitter pill of this disappointment being the show had no real conclusion in terms of story, although one could argue it had no real story, to begin with.
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However, in 2009, we got a remake, simply titled V, and to be fair, it hooked some viewers early. Timing is everything, and while it was a remake, there was nothing like it on TV then. Although the first season added nothing new to those who had seen the original, it captured the minds of new fans and had good ratings to warrant a second season. Sadly, it quickly fell into the trap of melodrama, poor acting and storylines and, after 22 episodes, was canceled on May 11, 2011.Â
Overall, though, the updated TV series did some things well and was an obvious influence on TV shows and movies that would follow. The posters depicting the Visitors in human form, hugging kids with tag lines inferring friendship, which later had giant Vs painted on them, were brilliant. While the show had its own obvious influences like The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds, it expanded those ideas, which then could be found later on such TV shows like Taken and The 4400 and movies such as Independence Day and They Live. It was frustrating to see the two mini-series, campy as they were, leave so many unique ideas behind when the TV series came along.Â
It’s interesting to think about how a reboot would be greeted by audiences today. We are in an era where everything old is new again, and original ideas are pushed aside in favor of recycling old shows and movies from the past. V was also on network TV, so imagine the possibilities of a streaming service grabbing it. If it stays on the shelf, so to speak, I will choose to think less about the TV series and remember the mini-series instead—a big, ballsy ’80s sci-fi adventure chock-full of hokey special effects but some neat ideas and really, a lot of fun.
