2009 - 2011
V ran for two seasons on ABC from November 2009 to March 2011. Twenty-two episodes across the full run. Created by Scott Peters as a reimagining of the 1983 miniseries written and directed by Kenneth Johnson, the show picks up the same hook that made the original a cultural moment: giant motherships appear over twenty-nine major cities, their beautiful human-looking occupants announce they have come in peace, and very quickly a small group of people start to suspect that the smiling faces on every news channel are hiding something underneath.
The lead is Elizabeth Mitchell, fresh off six seasons as Juliet on Lost, playing FBI counter-terrorism agent Erica Evans. Opposite her is Morena Baccarin as Anna, the Visitor High Commander, whose serene public persona is the show's central performance and frankly the reason the thing works at all. Morris Chestnut plays Ryan Nichols, a sleeper Visitor who has built a human life and does not want to lose it. Scott Wolf plays Chad Decker, an ambitious news anchor who agrees to be Anna's on-camera mouthpiece in exchange for access. Joel Gretsch plays Father Jack Landry, a Catholic priest whose congregation starts drifting towards the Visitors as a new kind of faith. Logan Huffman plays Erica's teenage son Tyler, who gets recruited into the Peace Ambassadors, the Visitor youth program that is aimed squarely at winning over the next generation.
The original V was Kenneth Johnson's post-war allegory about how fascism arrives wrapped in charm, borrowing heavily from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. The 2009 remake takes that bone structure and retools it for the post-9/11, post-Iraq decade. The Visitors promise universal healthcare, clean energy, and a friendly face on every screen. They offer hope. They are beautiful. They have the press eating out of their hand.
What the show is quietly interested in is how open societies fall for charismatic saviours. The Visitors never seize control. They are voted in, by acclamation, one softened public official at a time. The horror of the premise is procedural rather than pyrotechnic: a slow rot of institutions, clergy, media, and medicine. When the reveal comes (reptilian biology under the skin, a sophisticated mind-control technology called Bliss that keeps Visitor society docile and unified), it lands harder because the show has spent its time earning it.
The human resistance, reviving the original's name, is called the Fifth Column. It is small, compromised, and never quite sure who on its own side is real. That paranoia is the show's best texture.
Mitchell is the anchor. Erica is a single mother, an FBI agent, and eventually a resistance leader, and Mitchell plays her with the same quiet steel that made Juliet on land.
Scott Wolf
Chad Decker
Christopher Shyer
Marcus
Morris Chestnut
Ryan Nichols
Logan Huffman
Tyler Evans
Joel Gretsch
Father Jack Landry
Jane Badler
Diana
Charles Mesure
Kyle Hobbes
Lourdes Benedicto
Valerie Stevens
Baccarin is the show. Her Anna operates in three modes, public warmth, private calculation, and absolute biological alien, and the transitions are the series' signature effect. She does more with a held smile than most antagonists do with a monologue. The role is a clear through-line from her later work as Jessica Brody on Homeland.
Supporting players do heavy lifting. Morris Chestnut's Ryan is the moral centre of the Fifth Column. Scott Wolf's Chad is the show's study in complicity, a journalist who knows he is being played and keeps going anyway. Joel Gretsch gives Father Jack the weight of a clergyman watching his own flock be converted in real time. Laura Vandervoort (Smallville's Supergirl) appears in season two as Lisa, Anna's daughter and heir, and the show builds a real mother-daughter succession story around her. Charles Mesure joins in season two as Kyle Hobbes, a mercenary on the Fifth Column's payroll who sharpens the tone. And Jane Badler, the iconic Diana from the 1983 original, returns as Anna's mother Diana, a continuity choice that is a gift to older fans.
Visually the show splits itself in two. Visitor spaces are clean, ceramic-white, lit like an Apple keynote. Human spaces are washed-out blues and greys, practical lighting, FBI bullpens and church halls. The contrast is the point: the aliens sell themselves as the future, and the future looks sterile.
The effects are a limitation the show learns to work around. Seams show when a Visitor is revealed in their reptilian form, and the motherships rely on recognisable early-2010s network-TV compositing. What V gets right is restraint. Most episodes hold the alien reveals back. The show's scariest moments are not monsters. They are conversations in a living room where you cannot tell who is human.
V launched strong. The pilot pulled around fourteen million viewers and was treated, briefly, as ABC's next prestige genre bet alongside the winding-down run of Lost. Then the network took it off air for a four-month hiatus mid-season-one, a scheduling decision most critics consider the moment the audience drifted. Season two came back smaller, sharper, and faster. And then ABC cancelled it, on a cliffhanger, with the Fifth Column's fate unresolved and Anna's endgame only partially revealed. That cancellation is part of the premise now. You go in knowing the story does not finish, and it colours how you read the second season.
Critical reception was mixed on arrival and has warmed since. Baccarin's performance is the consensus standout. The political allegory, read at the time as either Obama-era paranoia or a fair warning about charisma in politics depending on who was writing the review, has aged into something blunter and less partisan: a show about how societies volunteer for their own capture.
The best science fiction is always about the time it was made in, and V is about the decade that learned to distrust its own news broadcasts.
V is a flawed, unfinished network science-fiction show. It is also smarter than it had any right to be, anchored by two lead performances that are doing serious work, and built on a premise that has not lost a step. If you want the same sub-genre done with more budget and a complete arc, Battlestar Galactica is the natural upgrade. If you want the invasion-and-resistance fight in a different register, Falling Skies is a fair companion piece. And if you want an alternate-history read on what an occupation actually looks like once the charm wears off, The Man in the High Castle is the long version of the horror V only hinted at.
Tonal hallmarks to keep an eye on while watching:
Take it for what it is: an ambitious, interrupted network thriller with one of the best villain performances of its decade, and a politics that turns out to age well. Worth two weekends of your time.
Laura Vandervoort
Lisa
Elizabeth Mitchell
Erica Evans
Mark Hildreth
Joshua
Scott Peters
Creator
Morena Baccarin
Anna