I believe Christopher Bennett still has a bunch of reviews of the series on his blog....
ETA: Here you go!
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/tag/war-of-the-worlds/
Thanks for posting that -- saves me the trouble.
But it only covers the first season -- I couldn't bring myself to rewatch the second.
The one thing I liked about the series was the opening credits score from season one, preferably without Jared Martin's narration. It just "fit" the war machine sequences so well, sounding a bit like an homage to Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War", but still its own thing.
Yeah, the main title theme was a pretty cool Holst homage, but I liked the end title music even better. A different version of it was featured as in-story music in an episode about the aliens putting subliminal programming in music -- the composer they used was played by the show's actual composer, Billy Thorpe. Although I didn't care for any of Thorpe's incidental scoring of the show, which was mostly just ominous atmospherics and scare stings.
What killed the show for me was the second season. It was like somebody wanted to make a totally different show and just spliced it into the series so they could get it on the air. Killed off the best characters, changed the premise and went overboard with the dystopian world. They even added a new evil alien species who was supposed to be controlling the first ones
Actually, the Morthren were supposed to be another faction of the same species that was called Mor-Taxians in season 1, but using a different technology to disguise themselves as humans and having a different culture built around worship of a thing called "the Immortal."
So was the second season bad, or was it just the fact that it was such a drastic change from the first that turns people off?
One -- yes, it was just plain bad. The first half of the season was barely watchable -- so relentlessly grim and unpleasant and barely coherent. It got somewhat better in the latter half when Jim Trombetta took over as story editor, and actually managed to get one or two decent episodes in there (particularly one involving the birthday celebration of the leading lady's teen daughter, with some rather nice stuff about trying to build a positive experience within such a dark, despairing world). But the series finale was terrible, a total cop-out that forced a happy ending by nonsensically retconning everything about the aliens going back to the original movie.
Two -- the problem with the changes wasn't that they were drastic, it's that they were bad. The first season wasn't all that good, lord knows, but the second season tore apart and trampled over everything that was good about it. The best thing about the first season was the rapport among the four lead actors. It was always fun to watch them even when their material was bad (as it usually was), because they just had such great chemistry together. And then the second season killed off half of that ensemble and replaced them with the charisma void that is Adrian Paul. And they killed off the most popular character, Col. Ironhorse, in a way that was so
wrong and callously destructive that I cried in rage and frustration when it happened -- not in the good way, like it really moved me, but out of anger at how wrong it was as a way for a TV show to treat a character.
It's also pretty clear that a lot of the changes were motivated by something rather ugly. Both the nonwhite cast members were killed off and the white ones were kept. All the new cast members were white. The Native American cast member was killed off despite being the most popular character -- and new producer Frank Mancuso Jr. claimed he didn't realize Ironhorse was so popular. How can you take over a show and not look into audience response? He also claimed that he'd killed off Norton because the team had lost their home base and would be on the run, so a man in a wheelchair couldn't manage -- but that was a flat-out lie, because he promptly moved the team into a new home base where they stayed for the rest of the season. Also, Harrison Blackwood, who had been charmingly eccentric and weird in season 1, was reduced to a bland cipher whose only personality trait was growing a beard. Meanwhile, the weird-looking aliens who spoke in subtitled noises were replaced with aliens who looked like attractive white humans and spoke English. Not only did they expunge everyone nonwhite, they expunged everything that was "different" in any way. That's not just bad television, it's morally repugnant.
Thanks for the information about the novel, Darren.
From your description, it almost sounds as though that might have been the original premise "pitched", but at some point, it was reworked into the frugally budgeted "Invaders" rehash that finally appeared on TV.
On the other hand, the author might have reacted with, "You gotta' be kidding me!" to and "outline" that did resemble what aired, and instead heavily rewrote the material to better dovetail" with the 1953 movie.
Both of those sound plausible, so it might've been a little of both. The show had to go in one direction for the sake of budget (and also out of the bizarre need many TV shows have to pretend they're in "our world" even though we all know they aren't), but Dillard as a novelizer was certainly capable of filling in blanks when things didn't make sense to her. (In her
Star Trek V novelization, she added some business about Sybok upgrading the
Enterprise's shields to allow it to pass through the Great Barrier -- though she didn't explain how it got to the center of the galaxy in 20 minutes -- and in her ST VI novelization, she added backstory of Carol Marcus being injured in a recent Klingon attack to explain why Kirk was so uncharacteristically hateful toward the Klingons.)
I think that may be the case because I recall the characters stating in the first season that the Martian Invasion DID happen (IE they basically said the events depicted in the 1953 film version ACTUALLY HAPPENED in their world); but somehow 30+ years later, the entire world - except for the main characters - somehow forgot about it.
There was a handwave in episode 2 about how alien abductions are associated with memory loss, so that aliens must have some weird amnesia-inducing effect on the human mind. Although that was in combination with the pilot's "People just couldn't handle the reality so they chose to forget" explanation. It didn't make any sense, of course, but at least they tried to justify it.
