"Visiting Hours" TV's Most Famous Alien Invasion Saga Comes Home To DVD

By Edward Gross

It was a classic Hollywood pitch session.

Producer Kenneth Johnson, coming off the dual success of The Bionic Woman and The Incredible Hulk and looking for a break from the sci fi genre, had reportedly gone to NBC and Warner Bros. to pitch a series concept concerning the French Maquis, the World War II underground resistance movement that took on the Nazis. Unfortunately, the lack of interest during that meeting quickly became apparent, but Johnson, savvy enough to know what he'd need to sell such a concept, added, "The difference is that the Nazis are from outer space."

His day ended with a commitment for a four-hour miniseries. Although seemingly trapped within a genre he desperately wanted a reprieve from, Johnson nonetheless saw the possibility of exploring key sociological issues that television by and large had not been addressing. Most importantly, he had taken note of the fact that in recent years America had become a home base for growing fascist and vigilante movements, all of which dovetailed with his fascination with Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. "The novel concerned a fascist regime taking power in the U.S. and how people reacted to it," says Johnson whose credits also include creating the TV version of Alien Nation. "I tried to find a contemporary framework in which to tell the story and V seemed like the perfect one. It would have been unrealistic, ironically enough, to have the invading force be an Earth-based one. The Chinese and the Soviets were obviously the first thoughts that came to mind, but I thought it would be difficult to believe that they would have the staying power or the presence to be able to commandeer the whole country."

What Johnson wanted to do was explore what life would be like if America suddenly found itself in a police state, and how Americans would react to an occupying army of fascists. He compares his approach to how the French reacted to the onslaught of the Nazis in the early 1940s. "I thought there might be a way to parallel what the Nazis did in Denmark," he says. "They sort of rolled into the country and said, 'Hi, we're going to be your friends. We're here to protect you from the imperialistic English, you lucky people.' So I thought about spacecraft being like the Nazis coming into Denmark, and I realized that a totalitarian society like the aliens could come in here showing us one face, if you will, but underneath is another face that's quite different."

V begins with 50 motherships hovering over strategic locations around the globe. The crew of those vessels, identifying themselves as the Visitors, appear to be human and offer to cure our world's ills in exchange for vital minerals that they need to save their dying planet. The people of earth agree and the Visitors begin increasing their presence on earth, quickly yet subtly initiating a systematic takeover of the planet. Scientists, seen by the aliens as the one possible threat to them, are ostracized from the rest of society and blamed as the source for many of Earth's greatest problems. At the same time, Visitor Youth Corps start enlisting earthlings into their ranks, and humans actually begin to turn in their neighbors and family members who they suspect are partaking in anti-Visitor activities.

The similarities to Nazi Germany come fast and furious, from the sea of soldiers in identically colored uniforms (in this case, red) and the complete control of the media with propaganda posters hanging everywhere with thinly veiled swastika-like logos adorning everything, to non-scientists attempting to smuggle scientists and their families out of Visitor-controlled territories.

"The heart of the show is the human element," Johnson says. "What V is really about is how people change--the relationships of people and how they react. How would you react to an occupying army? It's about a family whose son becomes a member of the youth organization because of his friends. As time goes by, parents have to be careful about what they say in their own house because he's there and involved with them. Other people might say, 'How can I get something out of this?' Some of us become opportunists and collaborators, as were the Vichy French. Others of us say, 'It will pass. This doesn't happen in America, it can't happen here. I don't have anything to worry about. I'm not Jewish.' Then there is the group of people who say, 'No. This is wrong. We're going to fight it!' And they become the Resistance."

According to Johnson, the Parrish character is based on an 18-year-old French woman who ran an underground movement. "This woman lived in France," he explains, "and one day walked into a British outpost in Barbados, Spain, with a half a dozen British fighter pilots who'd been downed in France. She said, 'Here, I brought them to you,' and they said, 'How did you bring them here?' They asked her to bring out more and help smuggle them back to England. She became one of the leaders of the French Resistance."

Faye Grant, who played Dr. Juliet Parrish, was immediately drawn to the project upon reading Johnson's original treatment. "Back in 1982," recalls the actress, "Ken sent me the material because he wanted to get my opinions of the female characters. I called him and told him that it was the most extraordinary, innovative thing I'd ever read, especially for television. I loved its message. Ken has an incredible way--and you can see it in his track record--of mixing wonderfully commercial ideas with meaningful messages. He developed The Incredible Hulk series from the comic strip, but every episode had something to say. Everything Ken's done has."

For the character of Mike Donovan, Johnson wanted to create a leader who essentially would be the one person in the saga who wouldn't "blink," a cynic who always keeps an eye on the Visitors in an attempt to learn their true motivations. Donovan's real-life alter ego, Marc Singer, remains enthusiastic about the original V some 20 years later. "The first miniseries had an intellectual dignity to it," he explains. "The underpinnings to it were far beyond mere science fiction. I don't by any means intend to denigrate science fiction by saying 'mere,' but I mean instead of just being an action-adventure, the original miniseries was a veiled reference to The Diary of Anne Frank, in that a whole civilization, a whole society, was being subverted by virtual brown shirts. In this case they came from another planet, but what they offered were easy answers, and a dynamic, forceful movement for people to identify with.

"That's pretty powerful stuff," Singer continues, "and I'd love to say that I was hip enough, wise enough and sharp enough to understand the far-reaching implications of the show, but that wasn't the case. I saw it as a story about a man being overwhelmed by an enormous dark force that he felt alone in attempting to describe to his fellow man, and it was only when I saw the first screening of V after many months of work on it that I understood the full implications."

Actor David Packer, whose character of Daniel Bernstein most fully realized Johnson's intention of looking at how power changes people, identified to a large degree with his character. "Daniel was really interesting," he offers, "and it was perfect for me at the time because growing up in high school I wasn't a very popular kid, because I didn't play sports or anything like that. So it was really easy for me to get into that victimized frame of mind. The way I saw it, was here's this guy whose parents probably had high expectations for him that he never lived up to. Suddenly here's an opportunity to have all this power. I really got involved with the abuse of power theme, and in that way I could justify everything I did."

As could Johnson, who was initially criticized by NBC and Warner Bros. for going millions of dollars over budget and then heralded when the miniseries--following an impressive advertising campaign--aired on May 1, 1983, to an astounding audience of 65 million viewers. Despite network naysayers who swore that science fiction wouldn't work for a mainstream audience, America's critics and television audience absolutely loved what they saw.

Science fiction author Ann C. Crispin, best known for her Star Trek and V novels, considers the impact of the miniseries and offers, "Robert A. Heinlein did it better 35 years ago. V as science fiction is somewhat mediocre, but V as TV science fiction was well above the norm. It was a big-budget attempt to do serious science fiction. I think Mr. and Mrs. Average American, who had never seen science fiction before, said, 'Gee, the thought of aliens coming to earth. Who would have ever thought of that?' That was probably a large part of its success."

The success of V eventually spread beyond the borders of the United States, going so far as to have an impact in South Africa at the height of apartheid. "When V aired in South Africa," Johnson smiles with pride, "it was approved by the government because they thought it would be seen as white people and black people working together, but the blacks immediately saw it for what it was and started spray-painting 'V' all over the place. It's terrific to have that kind of impact and influence on people."

Like any other major success, the demand when out almost immediately for a sequel.

The Battle Over The Final Battle

"After the success of the first miniseries," says Johnson, "NBC was very hot to do something and I said to [then NBC President] Brandon Tartikoff, 'You cannot afford to do this show on an episodic basis. Let me tell you how we should do it. Give me two hours on Sunday night once a month or every six weeks, and I will give you a continuing two-hour saga that we would do for four or five times a year.' He said, 'Oh no, no, mumble, mumble.' I said, 'Brandon, I'm telling you, this is the way to make it work. We could put more money into it, Warners could get more marketing out of it, you'll have a good thing going for you and it'll fly.' They ended up asking me to do the six-hour sequel and I supervised its writing."

During the summer of 1983, Johnson and collaborators Craig Buck, Peggy Golman and Diane Frolov mapped out a scenario for the second miniseries, laying out hundreds of index cards so that they could track the story and numerous character arcs carefully. "It was probably the most demanding summer of my life," says Buck, who worked with Johnson, later joining him on such series as Hot Pursuit and Shadow Chasers. "Basically, the four of us sat in a room and took the characters that Kenny had created in the original four hours and tried to take them into what I thought was going to be six pretty amazing hours of television."

Things didn't go as planned, however, when NBC decided that they wanted the epic for the sweeps period of May 1984, but Warner Bros. wanted $5 million cut out of the budget. It became obvious to Johnson that his time with the project was quickly coming to an end. "My feeling was that Warner Bros. was worried I wouldn't do V as quick, cheap and dirty as they wanted it done, and they were right, so I left," he says. "They were astonished because I also had, at the time, a 12-hour blind series commitment with NBC through Warner Bros., which was going to bite the dust if I left. That was worth about $500,000, and they said, 'Nobody walks away from that.' My response was, 'Oh yeah? Read my lips, guys.'"

Buck was admittedly surprised at the turn of events and was particularly annoyed at the fact that the studio waited until the deal was made with network before the subject of budget came up. "We were in the process of getting ready to start making cuts," he notes, "but we were going to do it very delicately; we were going to change sets and pull back special effects and do some creative things. But they just got scared and decided to pull the plug, Kenny had gone significantly over-budget on the first miniseries and they didn't want that to happen again. Once they had the production go-ahead, they got rid of us unceremoniously and brought in a new team to do a cheaper version with someone who didn't care about the material as much." Hired as executive producers was the team of Daniel Blatt and Robert Singer, with Richard Heffron signed on as director. Heffron, whose only previous genre credit was the feature Futureworld, a low-budget sequel to the cult classic, Westworld, notes that NBC was actually quite pleased with the scripts provided by Johnson and his collaborators and was not "sympathetic" to Warner Bros.' desire to change them.

"Personally," says Heffron, "I didn't think they were the equal to the first miniseries. I thought they were somewhat confused. I wasn't adverse to changing them, but the time element was really difficult. We had like six weeks before the thing had to start shooting. I worked on a revised step outline with Dan Blatt for about three days and said, 'Listen, there's no way we're going to direct this, produce this and re-write this in the time we've got. I have a friend, Brian Taggert, who's a very good writer and very fast.' So we brought Brian in and we had a step outline for the first two hours and nothing more than that. He, Dan Blatt and I sat together for two frantic days trying to lay out the rest of this six-hour movie in a way that would allow us to get rid of $5 million."

This was primarily done by limiting the number of new visual effect shots by recycling various shots of space shuttles and motherships from the first miniseries or simply overlaying the elements onto new backgrounds. The same thing was done on the subsequent weekly V series, as one of that show's producers, David Braff, explains: "We never shot another foot of spaceship footage. Everything was cannibalized from the original miniseries. That's what the second miniseries did as well. They wrote for what existed."

The emerging V The Final Battle took a somewhat different direction from its predecessor in that it focused much more heavily on the Visitors themselves, exploring their various power struggles and the soap opera-like cattiness between raven-haired alien officer Diana (Jane Badler) and her superior, Pamela (Superman II's Sarah Douglas). For the most part, the human focus was on the seemingly never-ending struggles of the Resistance, now aided by mercenary Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), Diana's attempted mental "conversion" of Juliet Parrish and the birth of Robin Maxwell's (Blair Tefkin) Visitor-human hybrid, Elizabeth, who is seen as a hopeful sign that the two species can co-exist.

Ultimately, Elizabeth--dubbed "the Starchild" and given a variety of goofy superpowers--has a genetic element in her blood that leads to the creation of the so-called "red dust," which kills Visitors once it comes into contact with them.

Perhaps the most noticeable shift between miniseries was the diminishing of the Nazi allegory (particularly the 'scientists are evil' element), putting in its place a more action-oriented approach. According to executive producer Daniel Blatt, this was quite intentional.

"The Nazi allegory was Ken Johnson's take on the material," says Blatt. "My parents were Holocaust survivors, so God knows I come from that background. But I never really saw V that way. I really approached it in two ways. First, we had to have fun with the villains, because they were bigger than life and Jane Badler was just wonderful. I also chose to focus on the heroism of people who believe in something and will do what is necessary and make whatever sacrifice they have to. Rather than looking at it from the negative, I was trying to be positive. Marc Singer, Faye Grant and Michael Ironside--they were heroes, but they were not perfect people. They all had foibles and faults, but their overall goal was to work together to end the threat. That's what I chose to focus on."

Writer Brian Taggert admits that his approach was to really "enjoy" the material. "I wanted to camp it up," he explains, "because it really was Dynasty in outer space. We really became outrageous, because I said, 'Look, if you're going to send your lover 400 trillion miles into space to get rid of her, as the Visitor Leader did to Diana, that is camp. So let's have fun with it.' The producers agreed with me and that's the approach we took."

In the tradition of All About Eve, Taggert admits, "We had to have Margot Channing and Eve Harrington in outer space when Diana and Pamela go at each other. It was a wonderful bitch fight between Jane Badler and Sarah Douglas."

Both Ken Johnson and Craig Buck were amazed by what V had been turned into, the project moving in directions that its creators could never have imagined. "I don't think those people really understood what V was about," says Buck. "My feeling was that they tried to do six hours of television that could have as much action and special effects that they could cram in within their budget. That really meant designing a story around action sequences rather than designing action sequences around a story. What made the original miniseries work was the World War II analogy. That's what makes Star Trek and any other great science fiction work: people are able to identify with the characters, see themselves in their place and, in turn, understand themselves. That all got lost. They really went for the effects rather than story or character."

According to Johnson, there came a point during the production of the series miniseries that NBC got so frantic that they tried to have some of the original screenplay put back in, but by that point it had turned into such a "cut and paste job" that it never really came together. "My assistant told me they had lost the thread of what we were trying to do in terms of watching people being corrupted by collaboration with the enemy," Johnson says. "I was flipping through the channels one day and there was a scene in the sequel where the priest comes to Diana and gives her a Bible. Ultimately, she kills him. I happened to catch the middle of it, and there's this priest who would have won the Pat O'Brien award. We were going for a young, hip priest, and they went the opposite direction with a good, old Irish priest.

"Let me explain to you about the glory of God, Diana," continues Johnson in a thick Irish accent. "Right away I said, 'Oh, boy, I see where this went.' Then I watched Jane Badler twirl her mustache through the whole scene before she kills him. The way we had written it, Diana was really showing some vulnerability. She really had been moved and touched by this whole situation with the priest, and she was scared by it because she didn't want to feel those things. When she killed him, there was sweat on her brow and she wasn't doing an impersonation of a Republic serial bad guy. It originally had real depth and character, but all that was gone."

Ham Tyler, he adds, was originally in a wheelchair. Indeed, the first introduction to the character is when Donovan comes in, hauls back his fist and is about to punch this guy in a wheelchair. "Which is great," Johnson laughs, "because your hero would never slug a cripple. But as he's about to slug him, the guy in the chair does a little wheelie, knocks Donovan on his ass and says, 'That's your problem, Donovan. You're not a killer.' See, there was an immense amount of textural stuff that they just missed. They even dropped the whole 'scientists are evil' subplot, which is ridiculous because I was doing a version of the Jewish Holocaust. More than anything else, we would have kept V real."

Also disturbing to Johnson was the conclusion of the miniseries, and the transformation of the Starchild into a super being. "There was some mystical bulls--t where Elizabeth put her hands on the controls and an aura formed around her," he says. "My reaction was, 'What the hell is that? It doesn't have anything to do with anything!' Our ending had Diana and Elizabeth escaping in a fighter and going to another mothership. Martin sacrifices himself by taking the soon-to-be-detonated mothership into space, while Donovan and Julie escape in another fighter. They realize that they've been successful in forcing the Visitors off the planet, but that they're taking many Earth people with them. Donovan and Julie look at each other and silently decide to go after them. Donovan kicks the ship in gear and they go flying up after the second mothership. The sequel's last scene is they're heading for this mothership and its doors are closing. They just make it as the doors close and the camera pans up the craft's side and locks on a window. We push closer and closer and see Liz, the Starchild, and reflected in the windows are the stars. We're left wondering what will happen to Donovan and Julie as they try to stop Diana, and yet we're given the promise of Liz being the link between the two races, which is the final image we saw and which would have led us to future two-hour movies.

"It's all too bad," he sighs, "because fade out, fade in a year later, Brandon Tartikoff said to me, 'You know, Kenny, we should have done what you suggested.' V would have lasted five years that way, but hindsight is always 20-20."

Marc Singer, who also starred in The Beastmaster films and subsequent TV series, admits that he had concerns from the moment that it was announced Johnson would no longer be involved. "There's no question," he says, "that when the originator is no longer with the project, the project is going to have a different focus and philosophy guiding it. Personally, I prefer the original concept, the concept that shed light on how society can be subverted and how people are cast into turmoil by political events. V in its ultimate form, The Final Battle, was more of an adventure series and I feel that we did not focus as strongly as we had on the same intellectual underpinnings that we did originally."

David Packer, who reprised his role of Daniel Bernstein in The Final Battle, greatly enjoyed making the original miniseries but despised the production of the sequel. "Any of us who were in the first miniseries, who were in it for more than the money, felt that the second miniseries went in the wrong direction," he explains. "The second one was where you did it for the money, because there was no love in it at all. It was like working at Burger King or something. In the first one, Kenny's idea was to take the story of the Nazis and make it contemporary and see if it could drum up the same kind of human issues. The second one was more like, 'Let's see how long the audience will wait to see what the baby looks like.'"

The cast, according to Packer, felt that V should have been a real espionage show with people struggling to rise to power, lying and cheating to get there. "They went the other way with it," he says, "because, ultimately, I don't know if people really gave a s--t about Robin's baby. Maybe that's what the audience liked, but from our standpoint what we wanted to see were people trying to grasp power."

Whatever criticisms are made, however, the bottom line is that V The Final Battle was a major ratings success, receiving generally positive reviews and drawing in approximately 50 million viewers, providing vindication for everyone involved and leaving NBC with one indisputable belief: they needed to turn V into a weekly series--which would be no easy task given the sheer scope of what had come before. Additionally, the red dust that had driven the Visitors off of the planet had suddenly become an albatross. As Daniel Blatt and Robert Singer put their series writing staff together, the first item to be addressed was how to bring the Visitors back.

The TV Series

V: The Series begins with "Liberation Day," which opens with the conclusion of the miniseries. Donovan spots Diana's escaping shuttle and pursues her, resulting in her capture. A year later, she is scheduled to go on trial for crimes against humanity when she is apparently assassinated, Lee Harvey Oswald-style. Her body is secretly whisked away by, it turns out, Ham Tyler, who is working for Nathan Bates (Lane Smith), head of Science Frontier, the corporation that manufactured the red dust and has possession of Diana's mothership. Bates has very-much-alive Diana placed in a plastic bubble in a secluded cabin, confident she won't try to escape due to the red dust. Meanwhile, Donovan and Martin learn of what's happened and try to expose the truth until Martin attempts to kill Diana. He is the one who dies, however, and Diana is set free and able to contact her fleet, which is in hiding on the far side of the moon. The Visitors rescue her, now that it is apparent that the red dust is no longer having an effect on them.

In a conversation with Juliet Parrish, who has come to work for him, Bates explains that in warmer climates, the red dust grows inert after a time, making Los Angeles an open target. The dust can't be used again due to the genetic mutations in plant and animal life that have resulted from repeated exposure to it. In a move to create a power base for himself, Bates arranges a truce with Diana, declaring Los Angeles an open city in which humans and Visitors can co-exist. Otherwise, a series of explosions will unleash enough red dust into the atmosphere to destroy every Visitor on the planet.

"When we were developing the series," says producer David Braff, "we went back and looked at a lot of war movies. Obviously we picked up on the Nazi analogy and the occupation of Europe during World War II. Lisbon had been a free city and it was in everybody's interest to keep it that way. So that became an intriguing notion."

Writer Steven de Souza, who would go on to write the first two Die Hard films along with numerous other features, explains that the film Casablanca came to mind early in the gestation period. "Casablanca works well and has great drama," he says, "because the café that Rick has is a neutral area where the Nazi and the freedom fighters meet on equal ground. So you have very intense scenes between Victor Lazlo, leader of the French underground, and the Nazis. They threaten each other, yet no one pulls out a gun and shoots the other person. This was the political construction of Casablanca at the time, and that gives you drama. So I set up a nightclub in the series, analogous to that, to create that situation."

By the end of the second episode, "Dreadnought," the Resistance is back in full force, fighting for the fate of humanity in their battle with the Visitors and sacrificing the captured mothership to stop an alien weapon of destruction. In "Breakout" (the third episode filmed, but held back due to production snafus), an attempt was made to get back to V's roots and tap into the World War II analogy by having Donovan and Tyler captured by the Visitors and placed in a POW camp, where they meet Nathan Bates' son, Kyle (Jeff Yagher), who ultimately becomes a member of the Resistance. (An interesting science-fiction touch was the use of the sand-swimming "crivit," a shark-like creature that devours anyone entering its domain within the perimeter of the camp.) "The Deception" dealt with the attempts of the Resistance to spirit the now grown-up and still superpower-endowed Elizabeth away from Los Angeles and out of Diana's hand. To get vital information, Donovan is captured and, via holographic projectors and drugs, is duped by Diana (appearing as Julie) and Donovan's brainwashed son, Sean, into revealing strategic information.

"We were trying to find a way of dealing with the father and his search for his son," explains producer Garner Simmons of an episode that seemed like a science-fiction offshoot of Mission: Impossible. "Marc Singer was someone very strong that we wanted to take advantage of, and this provided a strong emotional tie in terms of, 'When they have your son, what are you willing to do to get him back?' I was also pleased to be able to incorporate holographic projectors, which was a new concept at the time. It worked out well, though, because what you want to do in science fiction is take the existing facts as you know them and press them as far as you can."

In "The Sanction," Diana sends her top assassin, Klaus "The Exterminator," out after Donovan, again using Sean as a tool to get Donovan to do exactly what she wants. The battle between the two men was fairly lackluster due to the fact that the violence was too much for the show's 8:00 time period. "Those were the days of the so-called 'family hour' and the network was very concerned that if we had things parents would not allow children to watch, how would they sell Wheaties?" muses Simmons. "That was an episode in which we really trimmed back the violence. The original script was much more violent, but we couldn't produce it that way for 8:00 television."

"The Dissident" showcases Diana's machinations as she attempts to use a force field developed by one of her scientists as a means to control everything that enters and leaves Los Angeles. Donovan and Tyler sneak aboard the mothership and abduct the scientist, a pacifist who nonetheless decides to help the Resistance when he meets Elizabeth and proclaims her to be the "Chosen One." Furious at Diana's failure, fellow officer Lydia (June Chadwick) departs the mothership in a shuttle in an attempt to reach the Visitor Leader, but the shuttle is shot down.

"Visitor's Choice" is a Dirty Dozen-like tale in which the Resistance must destroy a food processing plant that will increase the efficiency of harvesting humans. "Showdown in Rawlinsville" is another attempt to get back to basics, as the Resistance is conned by a woman who is from a town forced to mine cobalt for the Visitors. In actuality, this woman is merely trying to solidify a power base for herself. "A Reflection in Terror" is a Christmas show in which Ham Tyler's heart is touched by a little girl, while simultaneously Diana gets a sample of Elizabeth's blood and--in one of sci-fi television's greatest clichés--clones an exact double of her, though one even more vicious that leans towards her reptilian side.

Things take a decidedly darker turn in "The Conversion," in which Lydia (who has survived her "accident") returns with the Leader's Special Envoy, Charles (Duncan Regehr) who has been sent to ensure the Visitors' victory. When Kyle Bates and Ham are captured, Charles brainwashes Tyler to kill Donovan when a certain phrase is spoken in his presence, and then, in shades of The Manchurian Candidate, actually allows the Resistance to rescue Tyler and capture Lydia.

In "The Hero and The Betrayal," Charles and Diana utilize holographic imaging to pretend that the comatose Nathan Bates is still alive and well (though he dies by the episode's conclusion), and giving instructions for open warfare against the Resistance. The episodes are also significant in the sense that a wholesale dispatching of characters begins to take place. Elias is disintegrated by a Visitor weapon, and Robin Maxwell and Ham Tyler move to Chicago to help the Resistance there. In essence, this was an attempt to pare back the series in an effort to save money and make the stories more manageable.

"It was a very difficult personal decision to cut the rest," says Daniel Blatt, "but we had to let them go because we couldn't service that many characters, and it also became a little difficult for the actors, who were saying, 'I don't have enough to do.'"

Adds Garner Simmons, "That was a critical problem, doing a series in which you have 12 or 13 running characters, all of whom require some sort of screen time. My approach to it was to try and feature each of the major players and stories that would allow for A-, B- and C-level stories so that a prime story of a given week would involve usually one or two of the good guys and at least one of the bad guys tied into this story. Then you would deal with a second level that would be a subplot and a third level which would be a kind of runner that would surface two or three episodes later.

"It's very difficult to do that and my personal opinion is that it was a necessity. I wouldn't have created an ongoing series with that many characters, but I had spent the first three seasons on Falcon Crest and did the last part of a season of Yellow Rose, so I was used to dealing with large casts and accommodating those kinds of problems and finding ways to make them work. You have to give each of your characters their moment in the sun and then you have to pay attention to all of the other characters at the same time. But there was always something more to do.

"There was actually a point at which NBC said that they were willing to supply us with money to create a talking vehicle [character], to which I said, 'Absolutely not. I've got 13 characters to write for now, and to have to write them talking to a car would just be too much.' They were very upset about that, because it was really about merchandising. Stupidity is relative in television. Ultimately there was always a lot of pressure to deal with these characters. My feeling was that there were characters who could become expendable. While I was not around for the death of Nathan Bates, those kinds of things are worth doing. If you can kill off a character who is important in the minds of the audience, then anyone is potentially at risk. If everyone lives all of the time, you run the risk of becoming a formula television show."

At about the same time, Warner Bros. supposedly approached Kenneth Johnson about taking over the series, but he declined, citing "too much water under that bridge."

The regular creative staff continued to turn out episodes, and the alien suds really begin to fly in such episodes as "The Rescue," "The Champion" and "The Wildcats," in which Charles decides to take Diana as his wife, to be sent back to the alien homeworld to bear children.

Daniel Blatt offers, "By the middle of the season we realized that we couldn't handle all of those characters and that the alien society afforded us great opportunity to hold on to the science-fiction aspect of the show and examine a whole other society and what they believe in. The wedding of Charles and Diana was an example. It was weird, interesting and beautiful. I remember sitting in a meeting with the writers and saying, 'Guys, whatever we can imagine people might be able to do, we can try. There are no limits to what we can and cannot do.' Think about it. We didn't even have fax machines back then, which seems hard to believe. So that's what I was trying to do, subject to the budget. It was kind of sad that we didn't get the chance to take it further, because we could have come up with something really special."

"At this point," adds David Braff, "there was a kind of a garrison mentality among the writers. We knew we were on a sinking ship and this was like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, but it's something you've still got to do no matter what you think the end result might be." Admits Faye Grant, "My original vision for V was something different from what the show became. I'd been with it since its inception, and my idea for it as a series was that it could be sort of like Mission: Impossible mixed with a little Hills Street Blues suspense combined with the interrelationships between the main characters."

Marc Singer's feeling is that most of the series was unfocused, primarily because of the number of characters involved with the show. "To try and keep all of those stories alive in every episode was a real burden," he says. "I think we began to find, a little belatedly I'm afraid, in the later episodes that the best story formula was to focus an episode or two or three at a time on a specific contingent of Resistance fighters and carry them through an arc of situations and problems, and then return them to the home base. We began to find that that was going to be the way to be more successful at it, but I think the writing was on the wall that our days were numbered."

Before getting there, however, there were a few more highlights. In "The Littlest Dragon," Philip (Frank Ashmore) confronts Donovan, the man who Diana tells him murdered his brother. Philip wants revenge and plans on obtaining it when Visitor troops trap Donovan, Willie, Kyle and a pair of fifth columnists, the female of which is pregnant and soon to give birth. Philip and Donovan confront each other and eventually realize that they have more in common than they thought, as well as the fact that Diana has been attempting to manipulate this supposed battle to the death. A friendship is struck, and Philip swings over to the other side, deciding to help the Resistance in their struggle against his people. This comes into play in the later "War of Illusion," in which Philip manages to steal the Leader's invasion plans and desperately tries to get it into the hands of Donovan.

Singer admits that he was pleased to be reunited with Ashmore and what their characters represented. "Frank was very successful at presenting himself on screen as representing a large force," he says. "I feel that I was to some degree equally successful on screen in portraying a counterforce to him. When we stood on the set and played out scenes together, each of us had a very clear understanding that what we were promoting were two massive movements in contradiction to each other. If you look back to the original premise of Independence Day, V, Alien Nation and other science-fiction entities sharing a common heritage, or if you look at something like The Maltese Falcon, Blade Runner or Stagecoach, all of them are basically dealing with the same concept, which is human interaction. The setting is what causes the humans to act as they do, but the way humans act and how they exchange information, that's what the story is about. Science fiction very often places less emphasis on special effects and production than people might suppose. The more money you can spend on special effects or production, the more exciting and the more enriched the background of the story is going to be. But the interaction between the characters is the most important element."

Co-star Frank Ashmore agrees with Singer, and is pleased that his portrayal of both Martin and Philip played a significant role in the annals of V. "From the six-hour miniseries, I realized that people really did enjoy the fact that the aliens were neither black nor white--that there were gray areas there," Ashmore says. "There was an area that we could go into and explore a soul and integrity. There was a need to understand right and wrong and allow your integrity to step in and dictate what moves you would make whether you were an alien or a human. I think V ultimately works better when it's a show about relationships and the action comes out of people trying to cause an effect or affect a cause. Simply saving your water is what V should have been about. That's a pretty scary thing when our resources are being taken away from us. That's the basis for the action, and the show worked because it presented itself on that level."

In "The Secret Underground," Julie and Donovan must remove an old boyfriend of Julie's from Diana's clutches and stop him from developing a virus that would make human beings docile.

It all comes to an end in "The Return," in which the Visitor Leader comes to earth based on Philip's suggestion to negotiate a peace treaty. "That's when we were looking to clean house," says David Braff, "and how we would retool the series. When your ratings aren't there, you're open to massive changes. By this time, so many people had their hand in the pie from so many different places, that there was no vision left to the series. We were struggling right up until the end, though we were hopeful we would get a last minute renewal. It didn't happen."

As the Leader's shuttle lifts into the sky, the saga of V comes to a close, unfortunately a mere shadow of its former self. By the time the series ended, its production values had deteriorated dramatically as the result of persistent budget cuts. It was obvious that everything was being shot on the Warner Bros. lot and the use of stock special effects footage from the original miniseries had become ludicrous in its abundance. The show's budget had been cut mercilessly, all due to the fact that the ratings had continued to drop throughout the season.

Today, nearly two decades after its cancellation, most of the people involved believe that attempting to do the show on a weekly basis was a fatal decision.

Brian Taggert, who worked on the second miniseries as well as the weekly show, offers, "I never thought it should have been a series. I felt it should be a series of miniseries. We would be into V -Part XII by now. Like Star Trek. You shouldn't do it as a series because you can't maintain the quality. That was the first mistake they made. Then there was a budgetary problem. It didn't happen until we got, I think, four or five episodes in, then they yanked $250,000 a week out of our budget and no one knew why. I believe our budget had been $1.1 million per episode, and you needed to have that much money to be able to do a sci-fi series. Then our budget went down to $800,000. I think The Fall Guy had more money per episode than we did."

Robert Englund, famous for portraying Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street films, portrayed the friendly Visitor Willie in all incarnations of V, and he has his own feeling as to why the show failed to click with the audience. "Part of the problem is the show strayed from its roots, even though it sounded promising at the beginning," he explains. "There were things that didn't work which looked good on paper. The concept of an open city, having an earth collaborator--Nathan Bates--all looked great on paper, but what it did was remove the threat of the lizards. Looking back at it--and it's easy to be an armchair quarterback--I would have shot the whole thing at night, used that as a mystery, had the city under siege, used the backlot more, turned cars over and put them on fire and had them in the back of scenes. Really, using the concept of this occupied city. The major thing was we did not have science-fiction writers on the show. We had good writers, and I like what was done with my character a lot, the way it was developed. But we also had writers from The Dukes of Hazard. What the hell, were we going to race the mothership with the General Lee?"

Executive story consultant David Ambromowitz, who became the guiding force of Highlander: The Series, was instantly intrigued with the notion of working on the V series. "As a child," he explains, "I was into Norse myths and science fiction, and I always kept up with the show, so I welcomed the opportunity to write it. But I think NBC made a mistake placing it at 8:00 p.m. I would have placed the show at 9:00 and done some more adult themes. That's my only objection, because you couldn't really show the carnage of war, and things they did on the miniseries we couldn't do weekly because of the time slot.

"I also think one of the problems you have with a show like V is that you have a recurring villain who has to lose all the time. So it certainly was difficult to make it work so that it doesn't appear to be farcical. In the miniseries, the villain could appear to win the battle at the end of the hour. At the end of the weekly hour, the villain had to lose the battle so, in actuality, what Diana became was a paper tiger. You always knew the good guys would win in the end. That's the way 8 o'clock television is designed."

Since its cancellation, there have been numerous rumors of a possible revival of V, first by the creative team of the series, then by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski--who wrote a four-hour teleplay for syndication that was ultimately rejected as being too expensive to produce--and, finally, a more recent revisit of the Visitors by Kenneth Johnson himself.

Whatever happens with the future of V, David Braff has one final thought: "My feeling about the series, is that we were doing two different things in what proved to be unwieldy in an hour-long format, and that is we were carrying 12 to 14 characters who had soap operatic problems, and yet the show was an action-adventure formula. I believe the two were incompatible. If it had been successful, I think we would have spawned a new type of genre. But, unfortunately, it wasn't."