Vncertainty

So, last night was the debut of the updated version of the series V. I did watch it, but decided not to comment last night, as I wanted a short time to roll it around in my head to try and develop a more solid opinion of it. Twenty-four hours later, I'm still not sure what I feel about it, so I'm just gonna plow ahead anyway.

It wasn't bad. It wasn't great either, but it wasn't bad. I think maybe I was expecting worse, given the stories of the rather troubled development the series has had behind the scenes. Before the first episode had ever aired, ABC had announced the decision to only run it four weeks before benching it until after the Winter Olympics had come and gone -- hardly a vote of confidence.

Then yesterday, the very day of the premiere, word came that co-creator Scott Peters (one of the writers behind the "hey, I kinda liked that show" The 4400) was no longer in charge of running the show. Whether he quit or was fired was unclear, but head writers rarely leave shows unless either they or the network (or both) are profoundly unhappy with the direction the series is taking.

But then, like I said, it wasn't bad. Still, I'm a bit skeptical. Part of what made the original series tick was the whole journey of discovery that the Visitors were not the benevolent people they pretended to be. In a remake, all that surprise is out the window. And the way the writers chose to address that issue is to just go straight for it. By the end of the first hour, half the main characters know that something sinister is up with the Visitors. It remains to be seen whether this will be a way to deliver suspense in lieu of surprise.

It's also hard to judge the first hour, simply because much of it was just putting pieces into place, positioning versions of characters largely in places also familiar to people who watched the first incarnation of V. Like the updated Battlestar Galactica, a few new characters have some twists (including gender swaps), but most of the raw building blocks are the same. Hard to judge this new series until we see more of what it has to offer that will be different.

But the acting was very good. V is loaded with fine performers from all sorts of other "genre" shows, all doing work here as good as the shows we already know them for. You've got Elizabeth Mitchell from Lost, Joel Gretsch from The 4400, Lourdes Benedicto and Scott Wolf from The Nine, and of course Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk from Firefly. Hard to go all wrong with all that talent.

So I have to say that at this point, I do want to see another episode. It's not that I'm hooked, but I'm certainly curious. There does seem to be potential here, and the show could grow to be something good if it overcomes the apparent growing pains it's been going through.