The Visitors Are Still Our Friends...

The ABC network is going to try to relaunch the old lizards-invade-the-Earth show of the 1980s, V.

The success of the Battlestar Galactica revamp on the Sci-Fi Channel has some TV execs drooling. This is only natural, since the subject at hand requires absolutely no real creativity on their part at all. Galactica took a cheesy, 20-year-old science fiction TV series and put some real talent into its writing, acting and production, and came up with a great show. So not only do they not have to think up a new show idea, since they can lift the premise from the old version of V, they don't even have to come up with the idea of the revamp itself, since it's been done before too. Brilliant!

By the way, this show has nothing to do with the doltish 2006 V for Vendetta movie or the cool 1980s comic book of the same name from Alan Moore. Except that Hugo Weaving may have been making lizard faces under that mask. It's hard to tell, and he was probably bored.

As I recall, the Visitors were alien lizards who pretended to be people in order to come and steal our water as well as start using us like we use cows. Or, judging by the picture accompanying the Yahoo! story, they were here to steal our hair mousse, because I imagine Jane Badler used an entire planet's supply in order to make that 'do stand up. Interestingly enough, although the Visitors were actually lizards, a number of them seemed to have definite - ahem - mammalian characteristics. Perhaps those were artificial, in which case the best place to put out a casting call for expressionless drones with bronchial-area implants might be Hugh Hefner's crib.

The show starred Faye Grant as a heroic (and beautiful) scientist/leader of the resistance movement who, along with the heroic (and pectoral) TV cameraman (!) Marc Singer, begins to try to fight off the Visitors and expose their true plans. The original miniseries drew on stories by Sinclair Lewis and Bertold Brecht (!!) and did well enough in the ratings to warrant a sequel.

On the plus side, the sequel introduced the character of Ham Tyler, played by Original Bada** Michael Ironside. On the minus side, it introduced Willie, a nerdy Visitor schmuck played by Robert Englund, who was better known as another character with skin issues. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that all the visitors went by regular human first names, like Diana, John and Pamela. I'm sure there was a reason, but I can't think of it.

Then, because TV producers never met an idea they couldn't run into the ground, through the other side of the planet and around the curvature of space-time until it returned to its starting point, there was an hour-long weekly TV series. Because science fiction on prime-time network TV had always done so well, you see. It lasted one season, and added as a character Elizabeth the Star Child, the offspring of a human mother and Visitor father. Although born during the second miniseries, which happened just months before the setting of the TV series, the Star Child aged rapidly, fortunately stopping when she became a 20-something hottie (she's actually two weeks younger than me -- Yikes!). The actress who played the Star Child married the guy who founded Celestial Seasonings Tea, and is apparantly a part of the Urantia Fellowship religion, a kind of Scientology without L. Ron Hubbard. Which sounds like a good idea, come to think of it.

The new show developer, Scott Peters, also produced The 4400 for the USA Network and the old Alien Nation syndicated show, which also dealt with aliens who lived among us and was taken from the movie with James Caan and Mandy Patinkin. Those aliens were nice and did not need hair mousse, as they were bald with squiggly lines on their heads, but they did try to fit in with us and, judging by the single female alien who lived in the main human character's apartment building (Hint! Foreshadowing!), were also mammals. Peters says he will exchange the Holocaust allusions of the original series to ones dealing with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which I'm sure will turn out well.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But I have one piece of advice for Mr. Peters if he wants to have any chance of success with his new V series: The first guy he hires better be Michael Ironside.