Once in a while, there’s a show I watch where I can’t be online when it’s on. I don’t want to miss anything; I want to concentrate.
Lost, unsurprisingly, is chief among those shows. Battlestar Galactica was another. Fringe almost is like that. I get very absorbed and forget I’m online for most of the show. 24 would be like that, except I live-blog it over at Blogs4Bauer, so that’s an entirely different animal. But don’t do other stuff online while I’m watching 24, at least.
V has filled the void left by Battlestar in that sense (though I suspect Caprica will also be an online-free zone for me).
It doesn’t hurt that two of the main characters are refugees of two of my favorite shows: Elizabeth Mitchell, Juliet from Lost, and Joel Gretsch, Tom Baldwin from The 4400. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve seen the original V miniseries from the ’80s more times than I can even count. Possibly as many times as Star Wars. True story. Oh, and I mean the original miniseries, not the sequel miniseries, in which one of the half-alien babies looked like a puppet I could have made. And I suck at art projects.
This is V for a post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. The original V was very much informed by World War II, the Holocaust and a totalitarian Soviet Union. This V has in mind the divisions so prevalent in our world today. In the U.S., between left and right (and make no mistake, the Vs represent neither side, specifically), and worldwide, between the U.S. and Everyone Else. And c’mon, anyway, this show is produced in the U.S. for a U.S. audience, so the action’s going to take place here. Just like Doctor Who takes place in England and Wales.
I like how the spaceships give a nod to the miniseries, too. They bear more than a passing resemblance to the originals, while looking way cooler.
