MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART THREE OF THREE)

And now we arrive at the end of the road.

As you may remember, I have been taking an unusual journey down Memory Lane of late -- a journey by installments. It began with a reminiscence of the mini-series "V" (1983); it continued with a further reminiscence of the follow up mini-series "V: The Final Battle" (1984); and now it concludes with a knock on the door of the last cottage on this particular cul-de-sac of the Lane: "V: The Series" (1984-1985), an abortive attempt to turn the universe originally created by Kenneth Johnson into an episodic TV show.

I've no wish to burn a lot of oxygen recapping my previous blogs -- they are readily available on this site -- so I'll keep it brief: The original "V" was a television mini-series that debuted in 1983 to smash ratings. The story revolved around the arrival to Earth of seemingly benevolent, seemingly human aliens ("Visitors") who claimed that their homeworld was in dire need of certain raw materials, and in return for those materials they would supply humanity with all sorts of medical and scientific breakthroughs, and then depart in peace. Naturally, the Visitors weren't telling the truth: they weren't human, their agenda was decidedly nastier than they let on, and they had no intention of leaving...ever. "V" was an allegory about fascism: how it seduces people with false promises, warps the minds of its followers, and, once in power, crushes any resistance without mercy while it pursues its violent and selfish ends. It was also an allegory about resistance to fascism: specifically the way it unites people from all races, creeds and walks of life, but only at the price of turning them into embittered, hardened warriors who have to make all sorts of moral compromises and live in an atmosphere of terror and suspicion. "V" was enormously entertaining and very well done, and led to a follow-up seres, "V: The Final Battle" (1984), in which the Visitors and the Resistance ultimately went head-to-head in a climactic confrontation which left the Earthlings back in control of their own planet -- and the Visitors fleeing into space, evidently defeated. "The Final Battle" was more exiting than the original, with ceaseless action and tremendous brutality, but not quite as elegantly produced or written due to the absence of its creator Kenneth Johnson, who was trying to do more then merely entertain: still, it was satisfying and fun as hell to watch. It is still enjoyable after all these years, and in fact more timely in 2024 than it was forty years ago.

"V: The Series" was an attempt to capitalize on the huge ratings and fan enthusiasm for the two mini-series. It reunited nearly all of the surviving cast and carried the story forward quite literally from the moment "V: The Final Battle" ended. As a fan of the movies, I was slavering with enthusiasm when the series debuted...and like most people, ended up being bitterly disappointed with the result at the time. Even as a boy, I thought it was a cheesy, campy, ill-concieved and clumsily-executed mess that didn't seem to know where it was going, what it was doing, or even why it existed. To quote the review of the St. Louis Times-Dispatch: "How a TV series with so much promise – based on two successful, highly rated science fiction miniseries on NBC in the early 1980s – produced such a silly, loathsome mess is beyond comprehension. NBC tried to make a weekly series out of [the mini-series that created the show] so terribly it must surely rank as one of the worst TV sci-fi experiments ever. The cast becomes dangerously unstable. Michael Ironside quits in the middle of the show's run with no apparent reason. Others are killed without meaning. The special effects are cheapened and the use of stock footage – previously filmed scenes used again and again – is maddening. (At one point, they actually used stock footage from the previous week's episode.)... What was once a pretty decent science fiction saga with good drama, humor and suspense ends up becoming Dynasty with lizard makeup and laser guns."

All of this is true, and "V: The Series" was canceled in 1985. But now, having rewatched the 19 episodes of this first and only season of the TV show (and actually read the unproduced twentieth episode, meant as its season finale) I now view this move with some regrets. My first regret is that the story wasn't told better -- something which was entirely unnecessary even though it was rushed to series without the proper creative and logistical groundwork. My second is that it wasn't concluded: it ends on a cliffhanger. Why do I regret it? That's a complex question. "V: The Series" is bad, indeed at times it is awful, but it is not as bad as I remembered, it is more than occasionally entertaining, and there are quite a few things it does surprisingly well. There are important lessons to be learned from how it came about and why it met its demise, but first, since we've entered this abandoned and musty cottage, let's poke around and look at the furniture -- its premise:

Following the events of "TFB," the Visitors have finally been run off, and Earth is now supposedly unihabitable to them thanks to the creation of the "red dust" -- a bacteria harmless to humans but lethal to lizards -- which was the maguffin by which "The Final Battle" was won. Life has more or less returned to normal, and a year later, with the old Resistance members having gone back to their lives or sought out new ones, the Visitor leader, Diana (Jane Badler) is now on trial for crimes against humanity. It seems like justice is finally going to be done on this loathsome creature, but suddenly she is rescued from the noose by an amoral businessman named Nathan Bates (Lane Smith), who wants Diana to explain captured Visitor technology to his scientists in exchange for her life. Diana agrees, then promptly escapes and makes contact with a new Visitor fleet which has just arrived. The persistent Diana swiftly attempts to reconquer Earth, but is hampered by both the "red dust" virus, which is lethal now only in cold weather areas of Earth,
and by infighting with her co-commander, the sultry Lydia (June Chadwick). She must also contend with the powerful Bates, who controls the surviving supplies of red dust and thus has her at a constant disadvantage, one she works hard to undermine.

Naturally, the re-appearance of the hated Visitors re-unites most of the surviving resistance: Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), Willie (Robert Englund), Martin (Frank Ashmore), Elias Taylor (Michael Wright), Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), Elizabeth Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), the "Starchild," Elizabeth Maxwell (Jen Cooke), and Robert Maxwell (Michael Durnell), who struggle collectively to defeat the Visitors once more, but are also confronted by a new player -- The Bates Corporation, which takes control of Los Angeles and declares it an "open city" where neither the Resistance nor the Visitors are in control. Bates company, Science Frontiers, is rather an intriguing comment on the almost unexplored area of post-governmental capitalism: pure corporate power without law.

As you can see, the cast alone -- and it's actually much larger than what I listed here -- would have been difficult to wrangle even if the show had possessed first-rate writers and a clear technique for revolving storylines. It did not, and killing off various characters here and there didn't really alleviate the pressure. The "Open City" storyline, which for my Monopoly money was the best thing about the show by half, being an original idea and introducing a third party to the a-deux Resistance-Visitor dynamic, must have failed to ignite audiences, which in the minds of the network meant "drastic changes ahead." Thus, about 8 episodes in, the cast was suddenly cut nearly in half by a mass firing which Robert Englund called "The Coup." The Coup also changed the direction of the show, abandoning the "open city" angle and returning "V" to more of a Visitors-vs-Resistance thing with a sudden and extremely heavy emphasis on soap-opera conflict between characters; also a very cartoonish, silly, cringe-worthy exploration of Visitor culture which fell to the level of farce. This didn't work -- the decision to get rid of the show's most popular character, Michael Ironside's Ham Tyler, must rank as one of the dumber decisions ever made by studio suits -- and when the show was finally canceled, eleven episodes later, it was in the process of setting up yet another and even more drastic identity shift. As I said above, I have read the script for the unproduced season finale, and I can say that Ironside was to make a surprise return, whereupon the whole premise was to change to a kind of Mad Max style "roadshow" in which the surviving heroes would wander a dystopian landscape, each week encountering, one supposes, antagonists of either human or Visitor origin. I don't remember what fictional character once said in lament, "We've come so far from home," but this was very far indeed from Johnson's original, allegorical vision about fascism, and it may be for the best we never got to see it.

I must reiterate that at its worst, "V" sucked badly even by the wobbly standards of the mid-80s. Supposedly it was the most expensive show on TV at the time, but God knows where the money went because the production values, special effects and so forth are often absolutely terrible. On top of this, the continuity is poor, the editing makes use of stock footage way too often, and in general the show has a cheap, low-budget feel, in addition to some very bad writing and way too many damned characters. One of the most annoying tendencies of the series was to have the "Starchild," Elizabeth, a half-reptile, half-human hybrid, serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card who could save any situation with her conveniently vague super-powers that, like KITT in “Knight Rider,” were altered to suit the needs of each week's script. But probably nothing summed up the directionless nature of the show as the fate of Elias, a charismatic character who had featured prominently from the very start of the entire "V" universe. What should have been a heroic, or at least a shocking, death was treated with all the dignity of a dinnertime burp. Elias is casually disintegrated in a scene that is not even shot in close-up: he's actually barely a blip on the screen when he glows out of existence, and the scene has no setup, no resonance. Interestingly enough, in the unproduced final script, the Julie character met the same casual, unlamented fate -- an even greater sin, since she was literally the co-lead of the entire series. This kind of slovenly approach to critical moments made watching "VTS" a challenge even for tweens. It was occasionally fun to watch even in its latter days, but I could never get away from the feeling that a mighty opportunity had been lost.

Such was "V: The Series," a much-panned disappointment which died a sluggish, painful, and anonymous death, abandoned not only by its audience but, in spirit, by its cast, who were rightfully embittered at its mismanagement. And that leaves us to the part where I say, "So where does that leave us? What was this show's legacy, or does it even have one? Can we learn anything from looking back over four decades at this virtually stillborn failure of a TV series?"

There is basically a single answer to all of these questions. Unlike its progenitors, "V" as a TV series in itself has no legacy: it is merely a cautionary tale. But as a cautionary tale it has great value. "V" is a prime example of several cardinal sins:

1. It abandoned its original concept to the fullest degree.
2. It has no clear reason to exist within its own universe.*
3. It vandalizes its own characters.

Let us tackle the last point first. The way characters like Julie and Elias were treated is the absolute halmark of hack writing, a failure to handle characters with consistency or integrity. If one is a successful storyteller, you may know him by this sign: you can predict what his characters will say or do in any given situation with a high degree of accuracy, because they are "real" people with "real" characteristics. Human beings act as variations on a theme, and we call that theme "personality." Fans instantly detect when a character is acting out of character, and a writer's duty in this regard is to know what said characters would, and would not, do or say. Elias is almost unrecognizable when the show debuts, so his death his meaningless; Julie, on the other hand, seems to literally forget she's half in love with Donovan. Nor does she assert the same level of aggressive control over the Resistance she did in the previous series. Writers and producers would do well to remember that fans notice shit like this, and do not like it.

But really, I am diagnosing bruises on a headless corpse, because to speak to point 2, "V" failed much more fundamentally, in that it had no purpose other than to exploit the success of the two far superior mini-series. It was a simple cash grab, and a rushed one at that. "The Final Battle" ended in triumph. The pilot of "The Series" reverses that triumph and puts us collectively back to square one, minus the revelation that the Visitors are really aliens, and do not come in peace. "V: The Series" was clearly rushed to series without a proper Bible or a stack of finished scripts or even treatments for same, and even at its best looks like a hasty improvisation in search of a story. The folks who greenlighted this mess did so to make money, which is no sin, but they did it in such a half-assed, cynical way that they damned any chance of it succeeding almost from the gate. (Though the quality was much better, the same fate befell the original "Battlestar Galactica.") The one original aspect of the show, the intriguing "open city" premise, was scrapped after only eight or nine episodes: after that it was a vacuum of ideas.

The last point is simply that one can only wander so far afield from one's original premise before everyone forgets what the hell they are actually watching or why they are bothering with watching it. Kenny Johnson wanted to warn us, in a clever kind of way, about how fascism comes to power in a democratic society: that was his whole purpose in the original 83 miniseries. The follow-up series, in which he had little if any imput, was more on the level of simple entertainment, a movie about resistance against tyranny, but it stuck close enough to its guns that the difference was only noticeable and not fatal. "The Series" however had almost nothing more to say -- it neither continued the narrative of V1 nor expanded on V2. Its one attempt to do so -- the "open city" idea -- was successful in my eyes, but rapidly abandoned in favor of tawdry soap opera drama which was both distasteful and utterly ludicrous. And before I close this windy missive, I want to address this specially:

When I sit down to write anything, I always have an overriding purpose. My purpose may be to frighten, to titilate, to educate, to amuse, or merely to entertain, but regardless of my specific motive, I have one: there either is something definite I want to say about life or human nature, or a particular way I want to say something so as to achieve an emotional effect; I never write just to write and expect anyone else would want to pay for it...or even read it for free. Storytellers have one purpose which is paramount and overrides all the others, one which can not be abandoned even if all the others are: they must entertain. And the best way to entertain is to know why the hell you started telling the story in the first place. Anything else begins to sound like Grandpa Simpson.

“V” will always stand out to me as a kind of cautionary tale of why a television show, especially one based on TV movies or films, must have a very clear through-line, that is, a theme and a direction which it is following from episode one. It must grasp the mechanics of its own universe and also possess an understanding of how to employ its cast to the fullest effect. And when it hits upon something that works (the Open City) it must stick to that something in the hopes audiences will eventually catch up with it. “V” did none of this, and the best thing I can say about it is that there is, in pockets here and there, just enough of its original magic to be occasionally fun. But you have to poke around pretty thoroughly in those ashes.