After months of speculation and wondering, ABC’s “V” debuts tonight at 8 p.m. EST.
The series, which will air the first four episodes in November and then nine more next year, is a re-telling of the classic mini-series in which aliens come to Earth, at first appearing benevolent but hiding a darker agenda.
Actor Scott Wolf is one of the Earthlings who will find himself uniquely challenged by the Visitors. Wolf plays journalist Chad Decker who is given a unique choice–become a spokesperson for the Visitors and possibly have his career and life put on a fast track to fame and fortune or follow a code of journalist integrity.
“He’s a successful guy but he’s not attainted the level of success he believes he deserves and he’s looking for that opportunity,” Wolf tells UGO. “He finds it through Anna, the leader of the Visitors and she puts him in a position where I think she has chosen him because she sees him as somebody who is effective enough at what he does but is also vulnerable because of his own ambition. And I think she believes that she’ll be able to do and say whatever she wants to do through Chad. And round one does go to Anna, she puts him in a position where at the last moment he has a choice to make between giving up the opportunity of his lifetime or playing by her rules and compromising. ”
Wolf says that he the original mini-series was one of the defining shows of the 1980’s and one of those events that kids “begged their parents to be allowed to stay up and watch.”
When he found out he was going to be on the show, Wolf looked at clips on YouTube to get ready for the new version. And while both shows share the same starting point, Wolf says that the new version is different from the original becuase the series format allows for the story to unfold more in chapters.
“One of the things that I really wanted to make clear and I think it’s really important for people who are gonna watch our show to know, is that from the outset the intent was to program this show, broadcast this show in a unique way,” he said. ” It is a huge story. It’s literally about an event, aliens arriving on Earth, that affects every single person on the planet.
“So this is the kind of story that needs to be told at a great pace and with huge stories. I think all the people at the studio and the network knew that the best way to do it was in installments and tell the story in chapters,” he continued. ” So they’re being true to what they set out to do. I think it’s important for people to know that this isn’t a conventional series that is being broken apart, that the intention was to air it in chapters and blast people with an incredible story for a window and then give them a chance to catch their breath and come back at ’em again.”
“V” begins tonight on ABC.
Wow. No place to vent our frustrations about how lacking this new show was! I’ll do it here.
I actually sat through the V mini series on SyFy this weekend. Cheese and all, it was 10 TIMES better than this excuse for a show. Talk about wasting viewers time, and trying to re-capture an audience from 25 years ago!
The setup or setting is fine, special effects are great, but hello???? Is there going to be a story? A Plot? Characters? Those things are required! They jumped through the whole first 2 hours of the original in like 10 minutes. No Development, just plop these people down into a situation and hope the viewers catch on.
Don’t get me wrong, the actors are great, Morena Baccarin is incredible. She’s smart, gorgeous, and convincing. But the material she has to work with is awful. It looks to me like they tried to correct all the cheese from the original, and forgot to bring the plot and characters along with it. Tragic!!!!! I was looking forward to this, give it to Ron Moore, he’ll save it!
I have to agree. It didn’t outright suck but they didn’t even attempt to drag out our discovery of the V’s true intent. Granted most of us know where it’s going to end up and maybe that’s why they decided to just get it all out in the first episode but I would have enjoyed it being strung out just the same.
After being teased along with shows like Fringe and Flash Forward I felt like V was just shoving it down our throats as fast as we could swallow. A longer pilot would have helped.
I saw it and I was riveted. I haven’t seen the original (I was 4 when it was aired), so I can’t draw comparisons, but I found the story compelling. The characters (from first glance) were interesting or at least show hints of more than two dimensions, and they’ve pretty well set up the premise of the show. My only complaint is that the bit at the end was a little “info-dumpy”, but I like that they put all the cards on the viewers’ table and I can’t wait to see where it goes.