Forty years ago, a fleet of 50 massive saucer-shaped ships arrived on Earth from deep in outer space, carrying within them legions of red-clad alien Visitors. Claiming to come from a dying planet, they initially promised friendship and advanced technology in exchange for desperately needed supplies. But their presence would turn out to be the basis for a compelling parable about fascism, collaboration, and resistance.
The project was V, a miniseries created by writer-director Kenneth Johnson, which aired for two nights on NBC beginning on May 1, 1983. Armed with a massive-for-television $13 million budget, the production had all the polish of a rip-roaring adventure epic with laser blasts and dogfights aplenty (arriving mere weeks before Return of the Jedi hit theaters, no doubt helping to rope in the Star Wars crowd), along with some impressively gruesome makeup effects which showed off the reptilian features underneath the Visitors’ human-like masks.
Four decades later, V (it stands for “Victory”) is both a beloved artifact of a specific era and a timeless commentary on human nature. Indeed, talk to anyone who saw the show during its initial airing (or at an impressionable age) and they’ll doubtless relate their creeping dread at seeing the alien masks come off, watching Jane Badler’s alien commander Diana swallow a guinea pig whole, or learning the real reasons the aliens had come to our planet (they want our water, and also have a hankering for the tangy taste of human flesh).
But for Johnson, who began the series with the epigraph “To the heroism of the resistance fighters –– past, present, and future –– this work is respectfully dedicated,” there was always a much deeper thematic focus lurking beneath the spectacle, one which still resonates today.
V: The Miniseries - A Tale of Invaders, Rebels, and Collaborators
“I had read Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here,” Johnson explains during a telephone interview. “And it was about a rise of fascism happening in America the way that it was happening in Italy and Germany at that time in the thirties. And I thought, ‘Wow, that's really an interesting concept.’”
Having created TV’s The Incredible Hulk and The Bionic Woman, Johnson was by then a veteran of thoughtful, introspective science fiction which always had a bit of action sprinkled in. He was also ready to leave the genre behind, and his initial intention for V was to do something more grounded. “It didn't have any aliens or spacecraft or anything in it like that to begin with at all,” he says. Nonetheless, when pitching the project to NBC and Warner Bros., Johnson soon realized that turning his Nazi analogues into space aliens might very well mean the difference between a swift pass and a greenlight.
As it turns out, using sci-fi trappings as a metaphor for the story he wanted to tell — up to and including a swastika-esque alien logo — made the concept even more broadly accessible. “It's a picture about occupation,” says Johnson. “It's a picture about not being able to trust the person you're sleeping with or your child because of the dangers and suspense and tensions that an occupation creates."
V had an expansive cast to go with its super-sized budget, but most prominent among the characters is news cameraman Mike Donovan (Marc Singer). While Donovan’s large, shoulder-mounted camera is probably one of the most dated aspects of the entire production, his determination to bring the unvarnished truth to the public is especially timely in our current age of “alternative facts” and the like proliferating on social media.
All these years later, the sequence when Donovan captures footage of the Visitors’ true faces after sneaking aboard the Los Angeles mothership has lost none of its tension (it’s certainly helped along by Joe Harnell’s unnerving musical score. Just as nerve-wracking is the sequence immediately afterwards, where the aliens commandeer the television broadcasts before his video can be shared. The notion of a lone videotape carrying the key to humanity feels hopelessly analog in this day and age, but the central message still hits hard.
'It's a picture about not being able to trust the person you're sleeping with or your child because of the dangers and suspense and tensions that an occupation creates.' -Kenneth Johnson
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Johnson’s decision to frame the story around a journalist was an easy one. “It was so obvious when I was writing the original V that, how do you do this if you are an alien force coming in?” he says. “Then I realized, of course, it's communication. It all has to do with communication because as soon as you screw up communication … then you can take control.”
In addition to Donovan, another focus is young medical student Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant). After the Visitors foment distrust of scientists (the ones most likely to suss out their true nature and intentions), Juliet reluctantly becomes the leader of a ragtag band of resistance fighters comprised of disaffected scientists, police officers, and others who are beginning to see what the Visitors are actually doing.
According to Johnson, “The character of Julie is named for my daughter, but based on a woman named Andrée de Jongh who was a Belgian nurse and young, like 19 or 20 years old… And she became one of the leaders of the resistance [during World War II]. She was even captured a couple of times by the Nazis. The first time they actually let her go because they said, ‘She's just a girl. She couldn't be helping out very much.’”
Others in the mix include Blair Tefkin as Robin, a teenager impregnated by one of the Visitors as part of a genetics experiment, David Packer as her neighbor Daniel, a disaffected teen who finds purpose by joining the Visitor Youth (analogous to the Hitler Youth), and a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund playing sympathetic alien Willie.
“I wanted to create a show that everybody in the audience would be able to say, ‘Oh, I think I'm that guy,’ or ‘I think I'm her,’” recalls Johnson. “I was also eager to show that there was a spectrum among the Visitors as well, hence the Robert Englund character… who clearly were not in tune with Diana and her approach.”
Did the miniseries threaten to tip over into melodrama at times? Possibly, but with Nazis replaced by space aliens and “scientists” serving as a substitute for their victims, the metaphor Johnson came up with for his story of encroaching fascism was serious enough to warrant introspection but subtle enough to garner widespread buy-in from audiences who might not otherwise be interested. In fact, 40% of the entire television audience –– a truly massive number virtually unheard of today –– tuned in on both nights, making V one of the most successful miniseries of all time, and instantly turning the project into a cultural touchstone.
“It was pointed out to me too recently, and I hadn't really realized it, that V is the highest-rated work of science fiction in the history of television,” says Johnson. “Certainly Star Trek and things like that had longer runs … but nobody comes close to V in terms of the initial impact and the initial ratings, which is pretty cool.”
V: The ‘Bittersweet and Frustrating’ Sequels
Johnson always hoped to continue the story in serialized form, and both NBC and home studio Warner Bros. were excited to keep the V train going following the miniseries’ stellar success. This would manifest with V: The Final Battle, a six-hour sequel which aired the following year. But while that too would prove successful in the ratings, it was a project that proved bittersweet and frustrating for the man who originated the concept.
“I sat down in the summer of '83 with [TV writers] Craig Buck and Peggy Goldman and Diane Frolov,” he says. “And the four of us crafted a script that was, in many ways, I think better than my original four-hour had been, or at least took it into different places than I had been able to. And it was a really, really, really cool script. But Warners was concerned that I wouldn't do it, this is a quote, ‘As quick and cheap and dirty’ as they wanted it.”
Realizing the studio was actively undercutting the sequel for the sake of saving a few dollars, Johnson chose to walk away, with his screenplay pseudonymously credited to “Lillian Weezer,” and the eventual production helmed by Richard T. Heffron. The result was something bigger, but also dumber. It had more breathing room but less to say (though the birth of Robin’s human-alien hybrid baby remains memorably cheesy), and it culminated in a mystical deus ex machina ending that sure felt like anathema to everything Johnson had been attempting with the earlier installment.
“I know there were still a lot of fans who enjoyed it,” says Johnson, “and certainly it did well in the ratings –– not as well as ours did –– but as far as the critics were concerned, oh my goodness. It just got lambasted. It was sad to see and very hard to do.”
Even without the V creator’s very notable literary touch, V: The Final Battle gave the storyline some degree of closure, culminating in the deployment of a “red dust” biological weapon deadly to the Visitors that led to their eventual defeat. The sequel also introduced a fan favorite new character in the form of Michael Ironside’s tough-as-nails mercenary Ham Tyler as a mismatched partner of sorts for Marc Singer’s Donovan. The adage about quitting while one is ahead comes to mind, but consecutive successes just made Warners and NBC hungry for more.
Thus, just five months after The Final Battle aired, V: The Series began a primetime run on NBC in fall of 1984 –– and promptly face-planted. Singer and Grant returned, as did Badler, Ironside, Englund and a few others, but the weekly show had neither the budget nor singular creative focus of the miniseries (the Nazi metaphor having long since been left by the wayside along with the Visitors’ distinctive echoing vocal flourish –– no longer deemed financially viable).
As a result, time was spent on Dynasty-esque catfighting between Diana and her new rival Lydia (June Chadwick) aboard the mothership, while resistance fighters zipped around on various redresses of the Warner Bros. backlot. With special effects cannibalized and re-cannibalized from the two minis, the weekly show felt notably smaller in scale and ambition and sputtered to a halt after 20 episodes –– a few shy of a full season. Most ignominiously of all, the final episode left things on a cliffhanger that is likely to stay forever unresolved. On the show’s quick cancellation, Johnson pulls no punches: “It was totally Warners’ fault that it became what it became.”
After arriving with such intrigue and anticipation just two years earlier and becoming a genuine phenomenon, V faded away almost as quickly. Even so, it made enough of a mark to spawn an entire line of licensed tie-in books, an 18-issue DC comic, action figures, and video games, not to mention a whole lot of fond memories for those who grew up with it.
'It was totally Warners’ fault that it became what it became.' -Kenneth Johnson
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There was also a short-lived reboot which aired on ABC for 20 episodes over two seasons from 2009 to 2011. Developed by Scott Peters (The 4400), this series had no connection to the previous incarnation and, again, no involvement from Johnson (who had published his own sequel to the original, V: The Second Generation, in novel form in 2008).
By contrast, the 2009 version, starring Lost’s Elizabeth Mitchell as resistance leader Erica Evans, traded in the Sinclair Lewis/encroaching fascism angle for something a bit more vague and a lot more wishy-washy, portraying the Visitors, or rather “V’s” (led by Morena Baccarin’s Anna), as something akin to New Age hippies. Even with late-run guest appearances from Marc Singer and Jane Badler, the ratings faded and the show quietly went away.
Of course, none of this can take away from the singular impact of the original V, which is as relevant today as when it first aired. “It's a timeless story. It's as simple as that,” says Johnson, assessing why V still resonates and will likely continue to do so. “It really is Spartacus and the revolt of the slaves. It's about anytime an uber power comes rolling in and stomps with their jackboots on the throats of the people, there will be some people who will collaborate… And then there are the people that say, ‘No, this power's being abused and we’ve got to fight back. And even if we die doing it, we've got to fight back.’”
