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Yet another 80s property recycled for today’s audience. So, with an interesting (if old) concept and noteworthy cast with some sci-fi cred, we take a look at whether the re-imagining of V delivered on the hype enough to invade your regular television viewing routine.

So, they’ve gone back to remake yet another 80s property. Unlike so many previous attempts by Hollywood, they picked a property that passes the remake smell test: is there some reason to expect that it could be done better today than it was done in the past. More often than not, any sci-fi project will benefit from the leaps and bounds that special effects have made over 20 years.

Sure enough, they’ve succeeded in putting together a much more seamless presentation of a world where aliens have landed. Not that the original series set the bar so high. Heck, with V, just being able to ditch the horrid 80s fashion sense of the original series guarantees a marked improvement in visual presentation.

Once you have that settled, you have to focus on the other aspects of the remake. To that end, they put together a promising cast of recognizable faces, many of whom have done previous work in the genre (click on cast members over on IMDB if you doubt it). Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost), Alan Tudyk (Firefly/Serenity, Dollhouse), Laura Vandervoort (Smallville) and Joel Gretsch (The 4400) all have what appear to be meaty roles in the show. Morris Chestnut and Scott Wolf may not have strong genre ties, but they arguably are the biggest stars that have signed on to the show. Behind the scenes, the show was being put together by showrunners who previously worked on Angel, Alias and the aforementioned The 4400.

With a quality cast and people on both sides of the camera with sci-fi roots, it would be difficult for them not to be able to capitalize on special effects improvements to put together a compelling remake.

But, so far, that is just what they managed to do with tonight’s muddied, confusing pilot episode.

The show presents itself as the product of a creative team that couldn’t quite decide how they wanted to open the series. It is as if there was one camp that wanted to do some world building before introducing the Visitors and another camp that wanted to jump right into the thick of things with humanity’s major close encounter, with the decision to be a mashing together of the two.

But, in the immortal words of Mr. Miyagi, “walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later…(SMACK)…get squish just like grape.”

In failing to choose which path to walk down, we’re left with the squishy by-product of a compromise that served neither party’s purpose.

The first 2/3 or 3/4 of the show comes across like a compilation of clips from earlier shows they never aired. There are just scraps of subplots haphazardly slapped together. It had all the flow, sadly, of an 80s music video dramatic montage.
They jump from character to character with brevity of focus that renders the time spent useless. Father Landry is given such little time to establish his skepticism that any subtlety is sacrificed (along with Gretsch making himself believable as a “man of the cloth”). Erica’s tunnel vision to her job, in spite of the arrival of aliens on her planet, rings so false that they needed to dedicate dialogue from Dale to lend voice to the objections the viewing audience was sure to have at her being so unflappable. Add to those complaints the failures to adequately establish how entrenched Ryan is in his normal life, just how strained the relationship between Erica and her son is or just how starved Chad is for fame and fortune…and you start to get an idea of just how many areas the show left you wanting.

Which is really part and parcel of the problem with this first episode: the viewer is subjected to a clunky mess generated by the need of the creative team to tell us everything through bad dialogue and underdeveloped scenes because the compromises in the approach robbed them of the time necessary to show us instead. The show could have picked the left side and spent all but the last few minutes fleshing out the main characters, saving the aliens’ arrival for the last minute or two before the credits, and been able to acquit itself nicely. It could have picked the left side and eschewed any character development for the time being, instead immersing the viewer in the sense of wonder and awe or panic and anxiety brought on by the arrival of the Visitors. Unfortunately, it clapped its hands together and squished out an hour of sci-fi that attempted to walk down the middle and wound up all the worse for wear because of it.

Still, the show has a promising cast, much better special effects and makeup, a time-tested concept and a new showrunner on the way…so it still has a glimmer of hope that it will improve over the course of the next few weeks and extend its visit with millions of viewers across the country. I’ll be right in front of the TV next week to see if it does just that.

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