V was such wasted potential. The “open city” format was actually really good and would have been fine if they were a little more serialized and spent less time on the Elizabeth/Kyle romance, which was really icky when you remember Elizabeth is like only a year old, regardless of how she looks.
^^this
Casual audiences might not have kept track, but they'd wonder "Why is the pinup guy going after that naive lady?" If nothing else.
Even the writers were confused since they kept referring to her as an eight year old and it was only a year between her birth and “Liberation Day.”
I perceived that as the Viisitors still thinking she hadn't metamorphosed into the magnificent flower that Kyle wanted to pluck all night...
Having Nathan Bates preside over LA and keeping a fragile peace was also a good idea.
That idea was a stroke of brilliance, along with having the captured Visitor ship.
As one man making law, it would soon lapse into fascism anyway and it would have been interesting for him to realize he was playing right into Diana’s hands. Where it went wrong was dumbing it down further than TFB did and making it for kids.
^^this
TFB had some real conveniences thrown at it but the dumb-it-down-for-tykes did a lot more to take an intelligent sci-fi series where adults could dig into it for their reasons and with kids loving the spaceships and evil lizard people into more generic soap opera... with alien lizards going pew-pew.
By being a one hour episodic, Diana had to be defeated every week, which makes the Visitors - a technologically and scientifically advanced race – look like chumps.
Having Charles slink in helped, as well as shifting some action toward Visitor-themed mini-arcs, but she still became the chump. Having a few victories or narrow escapes not due to chumping it up... The weekly show did feel like it was wanting to recapture that sense of gloom from the miniseries but it didn't quite work.
By spending so much time on the motherships, you open yourself up to “why are they always in human bodysuits speaking English?”
Having just come to earth in 1983, their continuing English might have been part of the regiment but after being discovered there's no longer a viable excuse. Especially in scenes where we see their real faces but they're in the sauna talking about beach surfing or whatever, complete with 80s sunglasses on... ugh...
Kenny Johnson at least kept them mysterious in the original mini-series, but Blatt-Singer, Inc decided to just use the surface trappings in TFB and then the series. They just latched onto the face rips and mouse eating.
Yup. Johnson was quick to leave the show even before TFB was fully developed. It's flanderizatrion.
Meanwhile, the Resistance had their A-Team chases. A more interesting thread would have been watching Diana lose her grip over time, allowing Lydia to undermine her and in the confusion, the new Fifth Column gains a foothold. I would have loved to see true WW2 parallels, with assassination attempts on Diana leading to her death in their version of Hitler’s bunker as the Resistance wins back Earth.
Do you have a time machine set to 1984? You need to be on that writing team because
that is far better than what the show stumbled to. Which reminds me, I need another swig of box wine bought from the gas station...
That’s not to say there weren’t some very strong episodes. The series kicked off wonderfully and it was the perfect way to take the epic story and tailor it to a weekly adventure. Ham’s conversion and subsequent shooting of Bates was a nail biter and the two episodes following were the apex of the series. After that, they went off the deep end and the finale was just bonkers. Compare the first episode of the weekly to the last and the shift in tone is insane. It’s like watching the pilot and finale of The Prisoner back to back. You’re like “what the hell happened in such a short time?!”
Ham's conversion was 50/50 for me, but after that it's easy to see why he left.
Elias being killed was even more flat than Tasha Yar's death, which is doubly sad since he was a far stronger character given more depth but Michael Wright saw the character going down hill and legged it along with Ironside, Tefkin (who already had nothing to do except scream and have to redo a plot that, by then, she'd know right off the bat that her love interest isn't a human but a cold-blooded reptile), Durell (cliche suicide), etc...
The show pretty much died when half the cast left. Having Ashmore leave from the premiere was utterly stupid - not a bad sendoff but not the time to do it, and he has his own twin brother with accompanying human body suit (what the...). The attempt to shorhorn in Philip was surprisingly good (apart from the "identical zygote" nonsense where, for once, they were overthinking the script. Then again, human suit or not, he'd have to have a similar voice so it's not all that implausible, as far as the series goes...)
Great point about "The Prisoner". "V"'s finale was a genuine cliffhanger and not intended to act like that (Spoiler alert, Julie would leave the show in the next episode... guess how...) The magical leader and Elizabeth and the bogus peace summit and Kyle stowing aboard-- definitely was weak, not to mention the script for the concluding episode that was also weak.
Ugh. What could have been.
Marc Singer was amazing in the first mini series. He was less effective in TFB where he was clearly “acting.” He was better in the weekly, honestly, probably because he had little to do but be angry and have fights. Oh and the brawls on V were great. Jeff Yagher was really good at them.
Agreed. Maybe he was bored or unhappy with TFB's script. Good grief, when he and Julie go all soapy in the train - oh okay, soap opera-ey - he probably felt the new miniseries was jumping sharks.
Yagher did excel with the fights, as had Singer.
If only the shuttle escape and dogfight scenes had more new footage. But their sixty cases of AquaNet just came in.
When Ham was wirrten out – out of nowhere – it was a huge blow. As Donovan’s counterpoint, he was essential to the series.
^^this
Ham was clearly un-PC in the series, albeit less so in the weekly (keeping snide comments about only the Visitors -- which is not a bad thing because the audience got the point that this guy has his own issues, he still sold Ham with the right tone to make him work), and the perfect foil for Donovan. His being essential is a quintessential understatement. His dissatisfaction with the show is understandable, though.
Kyle Bates wasn’t a foil for Donovan, he was a partner. After the great purge, the series lost focus and like Earth Final Conflict, the Resistance felt like 4 or 5 people.
^^this
Having said all of that, it remains a favorite show and a blu ray restoration would be great. I really do miss “Tonight…on V” before the credits. The DVD prints are pretty terrible.
The DVD prints were
bad. At the time it was great to see them regardless, but if the master film prints are there, the restoration would add a lot of life. After the number of other 80s shows remastered for blu-ray (Knight Rider is flipping fantastic, the Japanese NTSC import also has most of the music scenes fully intact too), "V" simply has to be alongside Knight Rider, A-Team (which nails it with a great mix of unconventional personality archetypes that all balance out), and the others.
I'm ambivalent on that but it was an interesting idea - and not badly executed. They don't make up for the backlot sets, unfortunately. 
