ABC has started airing its remake of the 1980s sci-fi classic V—and Chicago Tribune critic Glenn Garvin thinks the updated miniseries includes a veiled attack on Obamamania that will make it the most controversial show of the season. Garvin says the parallels are obvious: a “charismatic, telegenic” leader arrives, offering hope and universal health care. Is the beautiful, flesh-eating “totalitarian space lizard” Anna a stand-in for Obama? (Watch a promotional trailer for ABC's "V".)
Democrats won’t like V: The “hopenchange” similarities are pretty striking, says William Teach in Stop the ACLU, and “I’d suspect that liberals are sending plenty of unhinged e-mails, and placing many unhinged, frothing, foaming phone calls, to ABC.” Even if the producers don't make the show more "liberal friendly"—the way the "big shots destroyed Battlestar Galactica"—I wish ABC had just “left the politics out of it.”
“I’m thinking Democrats are not going to like ‘V’”
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Sci-fi culture veers left, not right: It’s pretty doubtful that V is “thinly veiled conservative propaganda,” says Brian Moylan in Gawker. "The sci-fi culture usually veers to the left in its political allegory," so it would be “sort of odd for a sci-fi show on a major network to give credence to tactics and delusions of the far right.” That said, the rebellious “fringe group” that takes on the lizard-like aliens “really does sound like the teabaggers!”
“V as an alien allegory attack against Barack Obama”
The Obama allegory makes no sense: The “only possible way to read V as a coherent text” with “symbolic import,” says Troy Patterson in Slate, is as “an allegory hostile to President Obama and sympathetic with the birthers and other nutcases who believe him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Too bad the script isn’t, “in fact, coherent.” What we’re left with, as V producer Jeffrey Bell notes, is “a show about spaceships.”
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