DVD REVIEW: V: SEASON ONE

Outstanding review, J!

This show kinda caught my attention when it was just about to come on, but I ended up not bothering with it. By the paragraph about its "gonzo" turn, I was already rethinking my decision to skip it. Sounds right up my street.

The captions (especially, the Un Chien Andalou and Ugnaught ones) are beyond great.

Thanks - in retrospect, I may have offered it a numerical point too many, but I stand by everything I wrote. Especially "VILF".

Way too soft on it. Show's a mess with some bright spots. Then there's the pandering to right wing paranoia that didn't get mentioned.

I'm a sucker so I'll see what season two holds. But frankly what it holds is Jane Badler showing up as Anna's mom, so...

I don't check out any other reviews of something until after I've written my review so that I don't inadvertantly skew one way or another so when I got so many rebuttals of my okay-to-good review of V (damn you, numeric ratings!), I thought my barometer was completely blown.

After checking out the general consensus of the quality/watchability of the show, I think I only went a tiny bit high, possibly out of being pleasantly surprised that this wasn't the utter crap I was expecting.

I've found that most people found it okay but not appointment television, which is where I was at with it. The folks I've found who think it's total shit tend to either be remembering the original with Goonie-glasses* (especially people complaining about the effects) or spoiled by headier stuff like Battlestar Galactica. That doesn't mean their opinion is wrong (or that it's the only condition that causes that assessment) but I really do think that a casual sci-fi fan could get into it. I loved Battlestar (at least until the completely random final-five reveal) but you have to admit that it took itself awfully seriously. I thought the same of V... until the pregnant lady gave a long, contemplative gaze at a dead mouse. Obviously they're aiming for as wide an audience as possible, so like it or not, there's going to be some dumbing-down.

I think another thing that turns the more cerebral watchers (okay, the nerds) against it is the episodic nature of it. They seem to have conspicuously been avoiding any super-deep mythology here, probably based on lessons learned on LOST. Visitor=bad, People=good is about all you need to jump in. As a result, it comes off as simplistic.

That all said, the right-wing paranoia stuff clearly made it past me, but I'm willing to be enlightened and/or discuss.

*thinking it was better than it was because it came out a long time ago

Boy nothing supports one's argument quite like double posting the same thing (oops... ).

No, the original is total cheese. The show doesn't have much to live up to in that regard, but there's a very conscious decision to not have much "fun" with it.

And I disagree about nostalgia coloring anyone's opinion of the effects. Some of these digital sets are just embarrassing for 2010.

The coffee-complected Other offering a message of Hope, complete with universal health care (which the reporter calls "universal health care"), while secretly plotting a paranoiac's nightmare in the form of a tracking virus hidden inside a flu vaccine, seemed a bit unsubtle to me.

What's most fun about the show, and largely unexplored, is that it seems to be based on shit people actually believe.

Remember when the hot V got a V cut into her face. Just like that one woman that volunteered for McCain's campaign did with a B, even if that turned out to be a hoax.

Of course, hot V's attack by humans was a hoax too. I'm not sure if the writers are trying to be relevant or just copying and pasting from things that happened during the last presidential election.

Holy cow that site is frightening, mostly from its design. I kept looking for my Netscape logo. It's about one bllinking starfield background and dancing banana away from transporting me to 1995.

I won't argue with your point about the healthcare story thread (though Baccarin and Obama have more of a haircut in common than a skin-tone), but I felt like the bleeding heart speech about not killing civilians and the setting up of Hobbes as an anti-hero (as opposed to a straight-up hero), and the concept of trying to understand the aliens instead of just killing them all lean a little leftie. Honestly, I think the political underpinnings of the show will probably turn out to be about as deep as a Che Guevara T-shirt. The "hostile-aliens-offer-salvation" theme has been around for a long time. I think the creators just grabbed the hot-button social issues at the time (health, energy) since war allegories have been so overly tread in the last few years.

Oh yeah, and I see that Neo mentioned the carved V (I almost captioned something along the lines of "it's backwards... must be a hoax"). Another good point, but not something I think the right-wingers would want to draw attention to.

This stuff may get clearer next year. It will be interesting to see what aspects of the show they choose to play up or jettison when it returns, especially considering they're on the bubble.

Should have done it, the idea that the V is backwards is hilarious.

Edit: The show does delve into right wing pandering, but I'm still kinda not convinced that it's intentional. I think the writers may just be using stuff that rose to the public consciousness politically speaking. Obamacare. Hope. Reptoids.

Frighteningly terrible show. I piss myself every time the V's talk about "HUMAN EMOTION!"

Sorry, first thing a drowsy google search turned up. But this dude speaks to audiences in the thousands the UK. And they believe it! Once I saw the new slant the V remake was taking (both politically and with its reptilian "they've been here for years" subplot), I was hoping for more of this crazy shit.

Quality aside, that seems like a troubling biological response.

Guess it's an SA term. Means piss myself laughing.

It gets a lot of use round these parts, too. But I can totally see how it reads that way.

Haha... I know - just being my usual idiot-self. I will admit that the human emotion stuff comes across so strongly that they may as well be pronouncing it, "Hyoo-monn.... Eeh-mow-shon". It just blended in with all the other bites of cheese to me, though.

Kinda unrelated... A few people I've spoken to said that they loved LOST but found V to be too ridiculous, to which I reply, "Huh? There was a smoke monster and an Indian guy playing an Iraqi. And unexplained ghosts. And a magical frozen donkey wheel that made the island bounce through time." Neither one is gonna win a Nobel Prize for science anytime soon.

I feel like my V review has made me seem like a complete softie 'round these parts - maybe the Suburban Psycho Horror Collection review will strike with enough bitter cynicism to balance it out and redeem me!

I don't blame you or the review for this, because I understand that it was a phenomenon, but using Lost as the touchstone or barometer or whatever against which to measure any mainstream genre show - is that gonna keep going for a few years?

I've never watched an episode of Lost, but from the outside, it was fervorfervorfervorfervorfervorWORSTHINGTHATEVER HAPPENED AND IT UNDID ALL THE GOOD STUFF!. Sitting on this end of Lost, was it really so game-changing that everything needs to be compared to it? Asking honestly.

I think people kinda got burned on Lost, at least in terms of trying to reach a truly satisfying conclusion. I think it's a game changer in terms of directing people's expectations and demands of a mythology-heavy show.

*insert unreservedly affectionate Armin Shimerman as Quark reference*

The difference is that, conclusion aside, the Lost writers understood the nuance necessary to sell the world they were showing. The writers of V definitely don't.

Short answer: No.

It was a sometimes bizarre, soapy show with some sci-fi elements (that I moderately enjoyed), hence my comparisons. I don't think it was all that much "smarter" than most shows - just more complicated. It's easy to be complicated when you aren't obligated to untie the knots you write yourself into.

I think the Lost/V comparison keeps popping up on my part mostly because they were VERY conspicuously paired by the network (Lost was the lead-in and sometimes you couldn't watch first-run Lost episodes without seeing the "V-clock"). V was practically force-fed down the throats of the Lost followers. So they naturally get turned into each other's point of comparison, to V's detriment.

Ah. Thanks for explaining. You weren't the only voice out there connecting the two, but it seemed to me that V was a straightforward alien conspiracy action-drama while Lost (again, from my place of ignorance) was some kind of enigmatic, "what does it MEAN?", The Prisoner for mainstreamers type shit.

Lost definitely had stronger writing (that gradually declined as it rolled onward) but I don't consider it terribly nuanced overall.