I bring you love... (It's bringing love! Break its legs!)

"Saw a great documentary on ABC last night on the lizard people who live among us. The head lizard girl looks like someone
I used to know."

--Nathan Fillion on Twitter.

So awesome. Love him.

ABC's much anticipated V premiere finally came on Tuesday, several weeks after the usual deluge of new programming. It's always a bit of a risk to premiere shows later in the game, but for a show like this, I think it was a very good idea. The risk that is run is that audiences plan on all the new shows to premiere at roughly the same time, so those that premiere early or late sometimes get forgotten. For a show like this, however, I think it was a good idea to let all the other shows play their hand and allow for some hype to build for this one single show. And, from what I'm hearing about the premiere ratings, ABC's tactic absolutely worked. We'll have to see how it fares next week, but the premiere was huge. As in, 14 million viewers overall and a 5.2 in the demos. (I realize that probably means a whole lot of nothing to most of the people reading this blog, but trust me, a 5.2 is very big. Anything over about a 2.8 is quite good, so a 5.2 is quite impressive.) I'm sure the show will slip in the ratings next week (as is a pilot's want), but the show's success will hinge on just how much of their audience is retained.

Anyway, now that the shop talk is out of the way, we can get to the show itself.

First off, a note to ABC: Stop starting your programs early! The pilot for V started a full 2 minutes before the top of the hour, so I had to watch them online after the fact. Annoying. I don't want to think that ABC has some sort of deal with advertisers to piss of DVR users, but that's sure how it feels. A lot of network's do this occasionally, but ABC is by far the most consistent offender. Grrr...

Fortunately, V started off in fairly predictable fashion (given what we've all seen of the promotional materials), so I didn't miss anything very important. The show is a remake (of sorts) of the miniseries by the same name that was a bit of a cult classic back in the 80s. I never saw the miniseries, so I was going into V blind. Well, not totally blind. As I very soon found out, and had assumed based on what I had already seen and heard, for as fanciful a tale as it is, it was very, very familiar.

The pilot centers around the arrival of "the visitors," an alien race that has positioned very large, sun-obscuring spaceships over the major cities of the world. Sound familiar? Yep. It feels derivative, and kind of is, but so are all the others. Fortunately, the writers totally recognized this fact and lampshaded the similarities almost immediately. No sooner had the visions of Independence Day started replaying in my head than a pair of teenagers being interviewed by a news show said, "Dude, this IS Independence Day!" "Which was a rip-off of any number of alien invasion predecessors..." It was a nice touch because at that point in the pilot, it's what every one in the audience was thinking. It's also a shame that this kind of invasion plot is familiar enough that the show can't help but feel derivative, so it kind of comes off as an easy way out. As long as we call attention to it, it's not a problem... Yeah, it kind of is. It may not feel as fresh and original as one would hope, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have potential. In this same vein, I appreciated that the writers acknowledged the redundancy through the characters. It's nice when the characters in a show exist in the same world we do and have the same cultural consciousness. It's always annoying when the characters in TV shows apparently don't watch any TV shows themselves. It makes for some nice meta moments which always bring a smirk to my face.

Anyway, this alien race claims to be bringing "peace, always" and proposes a collaboration between earth's inhabitants and their race. Their obvious goal is to ingratiate themselves with humans and the writers of the show did a wonderful job pinning down just how an alien race should go about winning over humanity. The "V's" tap humanity's love and devotion in the most effective possible ways--they bring medicine, are extremely attractive, and have big shiny toys. I knew the general conceit and the ins and outs of the show prior to the pilot, so there were very few surprises, but for people who didn't know anything, certain aspects were handled very well regarding the V's invasion. The V's claim that they are just now making contact with humanity, but they already seem to know everything about us. I wondered how common parlance like, "You're not so bad yourself," would have found its way into an alien culture, but as the audience finds out later, the V's have been living among us in secret for ages. They know exactly how to make themselves attractive and non-threatening to humanity because they know everything about humanity already. Little things like having a gorgeous woman be their spokesperson and telling the youths that they need a parent's signature to join up makes them seem just like us, only better. Morena Baccarin (aka Inara from Firefly) plays Anna, the leader of the V's. Her cool demeanor is a bit off-putting, but she's somehow very inviting and disarming. It's very clear that this race has put a lot of thought into this invasion, which makes it all the more apparent that they don't have the good intentions they claim to have.

At the same time, however, their surface facade is pretty hard to argue with. There are some detractors among the human race, but by and large, people are thrilled with the V's presence and see them as saviors more than threats. (As was the V's intent.) I was much less impressed with the human contingent in the pilot than the aliens, I have to admit. The way the pilot was structured, it was obvious who the main players would be, but they were set up in such a way that I didn't really care about them until everything came together at the end. Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet from Lost) and Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly/Alpha from Dollhouse) form the most interesting contingent, but even their set-up could have been better. They play FBI agents who spend the better part of the pilot investigating a terrorist cell. Even though the show did a good job explaining why they would be carrying on with their jobs as usual, I couldn't help but to think, "Um, there's a giant spaceship hovering over your city..." It just felt weird to see people going on with life in a normal way with an alien invasion underway... I was very glad to see that the terrorist cell was actually a secret group of aliens, but that isn't revealed until the bitter end and for the better part of the pilot, the audience has to wonder if what they're watching will actually matter later on.

In that same vein, the character of Ryan and his girlfriend don't appear to matter for a good long while. I assumed that all these people actually would matter when all was said and done, but the pacing of the pilot and the build-up for the reveals at the end wasn't as compelling as I would have hoped. Ryan's relationship with his girlfriend didn't have any weight to it till he was revealed as an alien. The secretive text messages and phone calls were intriguing, but again, the set up left me wondering if any of it would really matter in the end. It did, of course, but I think the writers could have done a much better job drawing me in to their storylines much earlier on. As it was, the only characters I really cared about were the aliens and Wash... who turned out to be an alien...

Which reminds me, as I watched the pilot, the most interesting and engaging human relationship was between Mitchell's character (Erika, was it? we'll call her Juliet) and Wash. Being the Whedon fan that I am, I adore Wash and I was really hoping he'd have a good-guy role after his turn as Alpha on Dollhouse. Don't get me wrong, he makes for a great bad guy, but when he was revealed as the leak from the FBI and one of the murderous aliens, I was a bit bummed. The reveal was actually quite well done, but still kind of a downer, mainly because I liked his and Juliet's chemistry on the show. With his reveal, it puts them at odds. It wouldn't have mattered so much, but that the other relationships on the show have yet to grab me. Juliet's relationship with her son was of little concern to me and the set up for it wasn't compelling enough for his betrayal to carry much weight. Newscaster guy (Scott Wolf) was fine and served a necessary purpose, but again, didn't draw me as thoroughly as I would have expected.

All in all, I think the main problem with the character set up was the fact that the pilot was only an hour long. Had the pilot been two hours, the writers would have had plenty of time to set everything up in a more complex and substantive way which would have made the reveals at the end much more powerful. For me, too much ground was covered, too many characters were introduced, and too many pivotal reveals were made in too little time. I'm not saying it should have been a slow, belabored, protracted process, but I think more development over a longer period of time would have given all the characters more appeal and the overall storyline more emotional depth. The pacing was a definite issue and given the time constraints, the writers actually did a pretty decent job. They tried their damnedest to throw little quiet moments into the pilot and add some subtlety wherever they could, but in only 43 minutes, that doesn't add up to a whole hell of a lot.

The cursory overview of the characters was a problem in other areas as well. In other human news, and as is so often the case for me, the religious aspect was off-putting. I can see where it was absolutely necessary (what with religious types probably having a lot to say about something like an alien invasion), but the way it was handled left me unimpressed. It either needed to be explored in much more depth or ignored altogether. As is, it felt like the writers knew they had to include religion (which mostly rests on the shoulders of a priest), but didn't have the time to really do so, so they just put in as much as they could and called it a day. It didn't feel deliberate or all that thought-out and as a result, kind of fell flat. His words weren't as powerful as they should have been and the questions of faith didn't resonate like I would have expected.

The pilot really picks up steam when the underground resistance is exposed. A clandestine group of humans who discovered that aliens were among us ages ago come together at the end of the pilot to discuss the hostile takeover that is to come. The rebels set up the most compelling dynamic for the show. Along with the humans, certain V's (that guy named Ryan--he does matter!) are among the resistance. There's some delightful bloodshed and violence and the pacing finally picks up in a way that made me really pay attention. The peaceful serenity (oh how I miss Firefly) of the V's public persona was interesting and provocative and all, but it wasn't till they started kicking some ass and showing their teeth that I was really enthralled. After seeing the scaly lizard people wreak havoc on the unsuspecting resistance meeting, it made Inara's (sorry, Anna's) icy exterior all the more deliciously menacing. Morena Baccarin does a wonderful job letting the scary, monstrous, evilness shine through the peaceful facade ever so slightly. She was far and away the best player in the pilot and although it was kind of a bummer to see Wash turn out to be a baddie, the thought that he and Inara are on the same team is pretty damn satisfying.

Overall, the pilot was good, but not spectacular, and I have to admit, I expected spectacular. For a show with this kind of high gloss, high cost, high concept approach, I was hoping for more. It was successful, and the end really came together in an interesting and exciting way, but the build up just didn't quite do it for me. The real problem I see is, where does the show go from here? The way the pilot set things up, there's pretty much no other plotline that can be had other than supporters versus resistance, aliens versus humans. It's a stirring dynamic that has a lot of room to explore, but in the end, it kind of feels like it should have been a miniseries... oh wait, it... was. Awkward. The show has set things up so that pretty much every episode has to be about the resistance and I'm just not sure how long that can or should be sustained. I'm hoping the writers can work things out in such a way that the central conflicts don't get old, but I'm just not sure they could keep that going for several years. In that vein, I was very glad to hear that ABC plans to roll out the show much more like a miniseries than an actual series. We'll get 4 or 5 episodes at a time and then a break. I think it's a good plan creatively for the show, but I do wonder what kind of impact that will having on viewership.

In summation (finally, right?), the pilot was good, but I think it could have been (and should have been) a lot better. I really wasn't blown away and I'm not exactly chomping at the bit for next week. I think the show has a lot of potential, but unless the writers find a way to improve the pacing and make the central conflicts more diverse, I think they might be spinning their wheels for a while. I went in with very high expectations and I'm afraid that may have colored my judgment overall. It wasn't a bad pilot by any stretch, but I wasn't as blown away as I had hoped and expected.

Here's hoping the weeks to come live up to (and hopefully exceed) my expectations. I definitely think it can, but I'm still on the fence as to whether it will.

Pilot grade: B-