From Friday’s The Oklahoman:
By Matthew Price
WORD BALLOONS
The alien takeover of earth in the hit 1983 TV miniseries “V” spurred comic books, video games and other ancillary spinoffs. Creator Kenneth Johnson returned to the world of “V” this year with his sequel novel “V: The Second Generation.”
“The Second Generation” is being developed as a possible TV movie or miniseries.
The original miniseries, a story of America under occupation seen by 80 million people, was inspired by Sinclair Lewis’ book, “It Can’t Happen Here.”
“With ‘V,’ it was very interesting, because my initial concept for ‘V’ had nothing to do whatsoever with aliens,” Johnson said. “I had been going through the works of Sinclair Lewis, who wrote ‘Elmer Gantry’ and ‘Main Street’ and a bunch of great novels. A lesser known novel of his is called ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’”
“It Can’t Happen Here” details an America overrun by fascism.
“What an interesting idea, to turn America into a state that was run by a tyranny and operated by fascists,” Johnson said, who was inspired to write a screenplay about a grassroots fascistic movement taking hold in the United States.
Brandon Tartikoff, then the head of NBC, read it, and wasn’t sure Americans would get fascism. He proposed that America would instead be under occupation by the Russians, or Chinese. Johnson said he wasn’t sure it was believable that the Chinese or Russians could sustain an occupation. Then, Johnson said, someone suggested aliens.
“Here I go again,” Johnson said. As the creator of “The Bionic Woman” and the developer of “The Incredible Hulk” for television, he was wary of being pigeonholed in science fiction. However, after considering the idea further, he changed his mind.
“The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a great opportunity, because not only could I tell the story that I wanted to tell, about how ordinary people are changed or corrupted or become heroic because of extraordinary circumstances, but I could do it in a way where I had all this wonderful visual eye candy that would attract everyone’s attention,” he said.
This allowed Johnson to tell his story, which was “not about aliens or reptilian races or spacecraft, but a story in which the theme was power,” he said. “People who had power and abused it … and ultimately the heroes, who say, ‘This power is being abused and I have to fight against it.’”
Power returns as a theme in “Second Generation,” as does another theme, which Johnson said wasn’t originally intended, but sort of “bubbled up” as he was writing it.
“Virtually all of the principal characters in the Second Generation have at one point or another a crisis of conscience about loyalty,” Johnson said. “And loyalty is a theme that ruminates entirely through the ‘Second Generation.’”