V (2009) on ABC

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

I can't believe you're encouraging anyone to watch the original V.

You're mistaking a wish to be helpful with encouragement....

The way I look at it there are people who think the original "Battlestar Galactica", "Cleopatra 2525" and "Firefly" were good TV shows....they could very well like this too.

[MrTorso]

Eh.. I watched it as a kid and I have the Dvds (not of the series) and I started watching it again on SciFi. I still like it.

[Doctor Who?]

I am going to rent V to make up my own mind but I think the original BSG is better then the remake and I like Firefly.  Also i try to give all Sc-Fi shows a fair shake before hating them.

[Doctor Who?]

I am going to rent V to make up my own mind but I think the original BSG is better then the remake and I like Firefly.  Also i try to give all Sc-Fi shows a fair shake before hating them.

I prefer the original Battlestar too.  It had characters whom it was possible to like.

That is my feeling too.  I liked evil Baltar more then slimey Baltar. 

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I am going to rent V to make up my own mind but I think the original BSG is better then the remake and I like Firefly.  Also i try to give all Sc-Fi shows a fair shake before hating them.

I prefer the original Battlestar too.  It had characters whom it was possible to like.

I can only see watching the V miniseries again for nostalgia...

Sorry, have to counter the BSG bashing....

I really liked the way the original Battlestar started out, can still watch the first 4 or 5 episodes, but after that forget it...    I really liked the characters in the new BSG, and really liked the more realistic portrayal of what people would do if in fact they were the last 50K humans left and crammed aboard a fleet of ships.  It was great to watch the characters evolve from start to finnish.  My only beef with the show were the supernatural bits and the astronomical errors.

For other shows:

I liked Firefly, for the characters, just had to ignore the somewhat improbable social, political, and technological setting.  The stories were good and it was fun to watch.   I have it on DVD.

I've tried to give SGU a fair shake but the hate came early and isn't going away...  People that thought the characters in the new BSG were whiny losers should take a look at that show, it's loaded with them....  Was really hoping they could pull it off, would have loved to see better characters (and better actors) put in that situation.

Anyway, takes all kinds...  Buck Rogers in the 25th Century  lasted 2 seasons.     

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

While one review does not a quorum make....it sounds like this guy gets it and the news is not good.

One of the things that gets lost in the mix is the subtext, the sense of what the Visitors are meant to represent and how this "V" is made relevant for 2009.
 
I rewatched Johnson's miniseries a few months ago (and many more people watched it in a marathon this past weekend). The effects don't hold up very well. The acting is embarrassing. But what the miniseries still does marvelously is make its ideological point, with clarity and directness. The Nazi parallels, with intellectuals standing in for Jews, are clear and pointed, with a different undercurrent for some viewers in the middle of the Reagan administration. Stilted qualities aside, the original "V" holds up very well intellectually, even if it's not especially subtle.
 
The new "V," in contrast, touches on so many fleeting ideas about "otherness" and "difference" and so many different post-9/11 fears that it really doesn't end up being about anything. Peters and company have no clear targets and no determined allegorical eye. If the original "V" hadn't been so clear in its message, I wouldn't feel that the new "V" had any responsibility to follow suit. But a "V" without subtext is just an alien drama parasitically feeding off the "V" brand name.

And like I said, I know people on here like the original "BSG". But that doesn't stop it from being a kind of "Plan 9" fused with "Chariots of the Gods" crap. It's from that school of "We have effects - we don't need scripts" sci-fi that immediately followed Star Wars (the school that Michael Bay went to).  And "Buck Rogers" was the same production team as "BSG" - which is why both sucked. 

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

Yeah, well, you thought Earth: Final Conflict was good, so...

And it ran for five years (one more than it should have but...).

So, yeah, I was the only one.

[Doctor Who?]

Yeah i don't think EFC fell apart until the mid point of season four.

As for old BSG it had a story that was being pitched since about 72,but it was only meant to be a miniseries when it went to series the writers were giving no lead time and no time to wright new scripts,they were having to write them on the fly.  According to the extras on the boxset they there was at least one scene that was being written as it was being filmed,given that i think it turned out very well.  I have to wonder if BSG would be better remembered if it had gotten a second season and the writers had had time to work on scripts.  i try not to judge shows to much on their first season because a lot of great shows have had rocky first seasons and then gone on to be really good. 

Any way old BSG I have fun watching,new BSG makes me angry and depressed so for me old BSG beats new BSG.

[Bob]

Anyone old BSG I have fun watching,new BSG makes me angry and depressed so for me old BSG beats new BSG.

This is exactly it.  There isn't ONE person on the new BSG (and I watched two full seasons of it) who's actually likeable.

Lick-able or likeable?

[goflyblind]

they're all much too sweaty and grimy to be lickable.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Yeah i don't think EFC fell apart until the mid point of season four.

That show went 5 seasons??  I remember watching it once in a while, wasn't bad but I could never really get into it for some reason.

As for Andromeda, I liked it in the beginning, then it went off on so many tangents I lost interest, if you missed a show or 2 it was easy to get completely lost as to what was going on.

Any way old BSG I have fun watching,new BSG makes me angry and depressed so for me old BSG beats new BSG.

Well, the underlying premise of the show is not a fun one, billions of people wiped out, survivors running for their lives, really better suited for drama than comedy....  And the original did start out as a pretty good drama, but turning it into a fun campy (and then just plain bad) show just wasn't right, for a fun campy show maybe place it before the attack when the Galactica had nothing to do....

[Doctor Who?]

I just don't like episode after episode of dirty people yelling and crying and trying to kill each other for no reason.  They really needed to find some middle ground with the new show.  after about 8 episodes it wore out it's welcome and the producers didn't seem to have any ideas other than "show people dirty","show them having sex","mention god three times an episode for no reason","show that everyone hates each other","then show some stuff that makes no sense and never try to explain what is going on because we are such bad writers we don't even give the plot a second thought".  If you ask me new BSG shows everything that can go wrong with a TV show if the producers don't have a strong idea and don't bother thinking about what they are doing.  It was a show with enough ideas for a two hour movie stretched over six years.  To me it the "realism" only served to make the silly parts look more silly then they would have in any other show.  I think shows like BSG work best when they don't try to be "real" to often Hollywood's idea of "real" isn't "real at all.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I just don't like episode after episode of dirty people yelling and crying and trying to kill eac hother for no reason.  They really need to find some middle ground with the new show.  after about 8 episodes it wore out it's welcome and the producers didn't seem to have any ideas other than "show people dirty","show them having sex","mention god three times and episode for no reason","show that everyone hate each other","then show some stuff that makes no sense and never try to explain what is going on because we are such bad writers we don't even give the plat a second thought".  If you ask me new BSG shows everything that can go wrong with a TV show if the producers don't have a strong idea and don't bother thinking about what they are doing.  It was a show with enough ideas for a two hour movie stretched over six years. 

Well, seems I watched a compleatly different show....   

The show was about people at war, killing was a given right from the start.  I never saw killing for NO reason.

As for the rest, it was highly serialized, so if you didn't watch every episode it would have been easy to not understand why people were doing certain things.

The writing from the hip did put them in some corners but I thought they got out of most of them by the end, going to watch "The Plan" tonight, from what I've read you have to have watched every episode up to the end of season 2 for it to make sense since they weave this story into those episodes.

Not much point going over all this again, but hard not to since I really liked the show...

How about moving on to "Lost"...  Another show that seems to be heading down the "god did it" path....

[Doctor Who?]

I think that was another problem I had with it (and Heroes, to be honest)--it was serialization in the worst sense, where one story would finish 40 minutes into the hour and the next would start for the last 10, so it was more a matter of finishing the goddamn story than it was in really liking the characters and coming back.

As far as "it was people at war," so was Band of Brothers, but every one of those people was more human than any one of the petty, self-indulgent, whining, arrogant, backstabbing, sadistic fuckers on the Battlestar remake.

 

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I think that was another problem I had with it (and Heroes, to be honest)--it was serialization in the worst sense, where one story would finish 40 minutes into the hour and the next would start for the last 10, so it was more a matter of finishing the goddamn story than it was in really liking the characters and coming back.

As far as "it was people at war," so was Band of Brothers, but every one of those people was more human than any one of the petty, self-indulgent, whining, arrogant, backstabbing, sadistic fuckers on the Battlestar remake.

I'll have to disagree with 100% of all of that for BSG.  But nobody is going to change anyone's mind about a show they did or didn't like.   Also first impressions are big, SGU might turn into a great show but I doubt I'll ever like it after hating the beginning so much.

Other than the season ending cliffhangers I didn't think the serialization was that overlapping in BSG where you couldn't pick up what was going on by seeing parts of episodes (or at least the end of each episode), as for Heroes, that was one reason I lost interest, similar to Andromeda it went off on tangents that if you missed even the beginning or end of one show you were lost.  Maybe someday I'll watch Heroes on DVD because I did like the way it started.