In the early eighties, the television writer/producer/director Kenneth Johnson,
most famous at the time for The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, and The Incredible Hulk,
went to the then-president of NBC, Brandon Tartikoff, with a script called
Storm Warnings, which was a loose adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here,
dealing with the rise of fascism in America.
Tartikoff thought it would make for a good miniseries, but he wasn't sure if Americans
could really understand fascism in such a straightforward way. He suggested changing
the subject to an occupation by outside forces, like the Soviets or the Chinese,
but Johnson wasn't particularly keen. It was then that Jeff Sagansky, the Vice President of NBC,
suggested aliens. Johnson, a science-fiction veteran, was initially reluctant, annoyed by
what he saw as a pidgeonhole, but after letting the idea sit with him for awhile, he knew it was
the right way to approach the material. Thus, the most expensive miniseries to date was born.
Visitors have come to Planet Earth. They announce peaceful intentions and plead
for help, offering in exchange advanced technology and otherworldly knowledge.
While most of humanity welcomes these beings with open arms, a small minority are skeptical.
When a news cameraman named Mike Donovan sneaks aboard one of the alien vessels, he witnesses the
horrible truth, that these visitors are anything but benevolent. As events spiral out of control,
there is precious little time for a resistance to form, and precious little hope for its success.
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In the summer of 1982, Kenneth Johnson sat down to write the treatment for V,
taking inspiration not only from It Can't Happen Here but also War and Peace, which he had recently
read. He liked the idea of creating a large cast of disparate, seemingly unconnected characters who
come together slowly as the plot unfolds, and he knew it would make for good television. He
also did extensive research into various resistance movements throughout history,
determined to lend a sense of realism to his narrative. Once the treatment was completed,
rather than giving it to the NBC executives, Johnson insisted on reading it aloud to them
over the course of a few hours. They loved the presentation and immediately ordered a script.
It took Johnson only nineteen days to produce his first draft, which he wrote longhand on a yellow
legal pad. After a little back and forth, the NBC executives greenlit the production,
but gave him an absurdly short window of about three weeks before filming was scheduled to start.
As a result, casting had to move quickly while preproduction was in full swing.
The male lead, Mike Donovan, a cameraman, was written with Dan Rather's maxim "the
camera never blinks" in mind. With only three days left until filming began,
the role was given to Marc Singer, a television veteran who had just appeared in The Beastmaster.
While Singer makes for a decent action hero, he is overshadowed by the female lead, the resistance
leader Juliet Parrish. The character was modeled after the World War II resistance badass Andrée de
Jongh, a nurse who became a homegrown espionage expert in order to lead over a hundred people
out of Nazi-occupied Belgium. I could talk about Andrée de Jongh for an hour, but it's best to stay
on track. Her science-fiction doppelganger, Juliet Parrish, is played by Faye Grant,
a regular on The Greatest American Hero, and she is one of the major highlights of the miniseries.
The other major highlight is the iconic alien commander, Diana, played by Jane Badler. Raised
in a Jewish family, which no doubt gave the role some significance for her, Badler had previously
appeared in the soap operas One Life to Live and The Doctors. She is the personification
of what Johnson calls "the seduction of power," a beautiful and unattainable figurehead who can
easily see what you desire most--be it money, fame, or pleasure--but who is quite literally
hiding a second face, a cruel and remorseless alien who only seeks to use and dispose of you.
The rest of the cast is enormous, and there are several actors worth
mentioning. The legendary Richard Herd plays the Supreme Commander--
"We're pleased to meet you."
--Michael Wright puts in a stunning performance as Elias Taylor; Jason Bernard plays his father,
Caleb; the longtime actor and Normandy invasion veteran Leonardo Cimino plays the Holocaust
survivor Abraham Bernstein; Jenny Sullivan plays the Leni Riefenstahl-inspired reporter Kristine;
George Morfogen is Stanley; Michael Durrell is the scientist Robert Maxwell;
and of course Freddie Kruger himself, Robert Englund, plays the good-hearted visitor Willie.
The role of teenaged Robin Maxwell went to Poltergeist's Dominique Dunne,
but a few weeks into filming, she was strangled by her ex-boyfriend
and died a few days later. Production was paused for two weeks
and the unenviable task of replacing the actress went to Blair Tefkin.
Not counting the pause that followed Dominique Dunne's death, the entire shoot lasted 54 days,
with only five of those days done on stages. The rest of the miniseries was photographed on
location in and around L.A., in places like the Pacific Palisades, Bunker Hill, and Indian Dunes,
the Haynes Generating Station in Long Beach, the GTE dish antenna in Malibu,
a Budweiser plant in Van Nuys, and the derelict Belmont Tunnel.
The final budget came to thirteen million dollars, a record for television at the time that,
even without adjusting for inflation, would still be a hefty sum for a two episode series.
Despite this, time was incredibly short, so the models, sets, make-up, and other effects had to
be assembled quickly. Most of the motherships were mattes, some more convincing than others,
and the shuttlecrafts were given a modular design so that they could be
made into various sizes relatively easily. Optical effects were especially expensive,
with Johnson claiming that each shot of a laser pistol cost a thousand dollars.
As a result, practical special effects were used whenever possible.
To cut down on the lasers, the resistence fighters sport regular guns,
and most of the explosions--of which there are quite a few--are done in camera. Perhaps the
most iconic effect of Diana swallowing a guinea pig was done both with a quick shot of a fake
head and a follow-up shot with air bladders attached to the actress Jane Badler's throat.
While its easy with modern eyes to see the flaws in many of these effects--especially
the optical ones--they were unprecedented for television at the time, with the make-up
in particular gaining critical acclaim and earning the series a Primetime Emmy nomination.
The music is also particularly interesting. Taking inspiration from Beethoven's fifth
and seventh symphonies, Holst's The Planets, Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries,
and Bernard Herrmann's work on North by Northwest, composer and conductor Joe Harnell
utilized a sixty-piece orchestra to create a triumphant and occasionally cheesy score.
One fun and oft-repeated bit of trivia that I can't help but include here is that the
opening theme, riffing off Beethoven's Fifth, uses a familiar short-short-short-long rhythm
that happens to double as the International Morse Code designation for the letter "V."
V was supposed to be three hours long, which would equal four hours with commercials.
However, Johnson found it difficult to cut it down to that length, with the first episode running
fifteen minutes too long. Brandon Tartikoff offered to help find the necessary edits,
but after watching Johnson's cut, he agreed that it couldn't be trimmed any further,
deciding that it would be easier to go to the affiliates and ask for fifteen
additional minutes of airtime than to sacrifice fifteen minutes of the show.
In the lead-up to the miniseries' airdate, NBC launched something of a viral marketing campaign,
long before the term "viral marketing" was even a thing.
Some of the propaganda posters designed for the film were printed off and posted around L.A.,
with nothing on them to indicate that they were advertisements for a television show. Then, a week
later, kids were hired to go around spray-painting the iconic red "V" symbol on them all--
"You understand? For victory."
--followed another week later by the addition of a note at the bottom of every poster
mentioning the show and airdate.
This, along with NBC's heavy conventional marketing, lead to an
incredible buzz for V before its launch on the first two days of May in 1983.
It was a critical and commercial success, the highest rated NBC program in over two years. When
it aired in Europe in 1984, its ratings were even higher than the Olympics, and in South Africa,
it was promoted as a great example of black people and white people coexisting together in harmony.
Kenneth Johnson had deliberately left the ending open to a continuation, be that a
regular television show or, as he pitched to NBC, a continuing series of television movies.
After the success of the miniseries, NBC chose to produce a sequel miniseries of three episodes,
and Johnson was once again put in charge. However, after working on the story and learning of NBC's
bizarre decision to cut the budget in half, Johnson reluctantly departed the project,
knowing that he couldn't put his vision on screen under such constraints.
The second miniseries, V: The Final Battle, went on without him, and though it has a noticeable dip
in quality, it was still successful enough for NBC to order a full series that ran for one season.
Ultimately, V became something of a cultural landmark, an essential bit of science-fiction
on the small screen that would inspire dozens of future television shows and movies,
and would eventually spawn a reboot series that ran for two seasons starting in 2009. For what
its worth, I think the reboot starts strong but kind of loses its punch a couple of episodes in.
Most unforgiveable is the fact that the reboot uses "V" as an initial for "visitors"
rather than "victory." It also lacks the earnestness of the original
and is a disappointing, pale imitation of what Johnson created.
As for Johnson, who was not involved in the reboot, he has been trying to bring V back
in other ways for decades. He wrote his own sequel to the original miniseries, V:
The Second Generation, published in 2008, and has been lobbying to put out various feature
film versions of V ever since NBC first balked at the idea in the early eighties.
There has been recent movement on a proposed trilogy that would serve
as a remake of the original miniseries and an adaptation of V: The Second Generation,
and despite some ups and downs, Johnson remains hopeful that it will happen, hopefully soon.
I'm not going to lie to you, though; I'm not convinced it will work, even with Johnson steering
the mothership. On its own merits and without the benefit of nostalgia, V is undeniably kitchy,
a little too direct for modern audiences. It works as a product of its time, and I can't stress
enough how much it helped shape my worldview as a kid. However, it would be hard to show it to
somebody these days without having to acknowledge the unavoidable eighties-ness of it all.
That said, I still contend that V is one of the greatest alien invasion stories ever told
on screens large or small. It contains a lot of surprising depth to the filmmaking,
with the cinematography and editing deserving of special attention.
Sure, its lack of subtlety--as demonstrated by the mock swastikas, the Hitler Youth-style
brownshirts, the purge of a whole class of people driven by lies and propaganda, the laser pistols
fashioned after German Lugers, and the deliberate Triumph of the Will parallels--occasionally
comes across as more of an after-school special than a great film, but the importance
of its message hasn't aged like its visual effects or unintentionally campy aesthetic.
I'm not trying to be partisan here, but the central theme of fascism arising in America is
certainly no less relevant today than it was then. People on both extremes of the political spectrum,
in this country at least, if not in the rest of the world, seem to be in a rush to acquire
power, regardless of the cost. The seduction is always there, and the threat of authoritarianism,
be it in the recognizable form of organized fascism or in any other form,
is one we must always be vigilant against. Equally, the desire to use other groups of
people as scapegoats hasn't gone anywhere, and it does seem like the narrative of V--in which
only a precious few people resist the temptation to turn against one another--is more realistic
these days than the standard trope of humanity banding together as one against an alien force.
While I may have been more disturbed as a child by the lizard skin and guinea pig eating,
the truly uncomfortable thing about V, looking back on it as an adult,
is that the aliens aren't the real threat. The real threat is how easily we can be radicalized,
how predictable betrayal between neighbors and even family members is when power offers
us false promises of security, sanctuary, and prosperity. All you need is a good narrative and
a little bit of control over information, and you can make people hate each other.
In his audio commentary, Kenneth Johnson talks about growing up in a somewhat bigoted household
and then, in Junior High School, discovering tapes of the Nuremberg Trials. This opened his eyes to
the realities of bigotry and human hatred, of the perils of fascism and authoritarian rule.
It began a lifelong journey of study and advocacy that neither began nor ended with V,
but for which V is a startling and important artifact. That's why it
is such an essential work, and why V, the original miniseries, remains a sci-fi classic.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. What television shows had an important impact
on your worldview when you were a kid? Let me know in the comments, and while you're there,
don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't already. If you really do like these videos,
consider supporting me on Patreon to get access to bonus content,
vote on future topics, and more. You can also check out my website at emagill.com,
where you'll find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi classics in both film and literature. Until
next time, though, when we'll take a trip to the floor of the ocean, this is The Unapologetic Geek,
telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Man, shoot, they ain't so tough." "Huh?" "They ain't so tough!" "What, are you crazy?"