The Untold Story of ‘V’: The Prophetic Warning Behind Kenneth Johnson’s 1983 Sci-Fi Miniseries
Aliens, fascism and resistance: the real meaning behind 'V' still matters 40 years later
When used properly, science fiction is the perfect prism through which to see ourselves, where we’ve been and where we’re going. Certainly, both Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek utilized it perfectly to address issues they otherwise never could have. And when Kenneth Johnson created the 1983 miniseries V, it was a cultural event that wasn’t designed to be a flashy sci-fi adventure, but was instead trying to make a significant point that has become more true than ever.
The inspiration for V, which starred, among others, Marc Singer as human cameraman Mike Donovan and Jane Badler as the alien Diana, came from Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which asked a simple but unsettling question: what if fascism really could take hold in America?
“We have seen that it can happen,” Johnson shares. “That the winds can shift. There’s a line in the original miniseries where Martin, one of the aliens who is sympathetic to us, is asked by Donovan how someone like their leader could have come to power. Someone who was determined to have whatever they wanted at any cost, regardless of the inhumanity to it. Martin answers by saying something to the effect of, ‘Charisma, timing and not enough of us stood up to speak out against it until it was too late.’ And it turns out that the statement is very prescient. Something I wrote in 1982 we’ve seen happen over and over again in different democracies around the world.”
Before writing a word, Johnson did his homework: he went through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other histories, examining how strongmen take power, how agreements get tossed aside and how leaders charm their way into control. But what really struck him wasn’t the dictators themselves, but rather the people around them. He thought about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and asked himself what would happen if every day Americans suddenly found themselves facing the same kind of threat. In the case of the miniseries, the threat came from an alien race that arrived claiming to be our friends, but, instead gradually stripped away our freedoms and subjugated us.
Dealing with power
He boiled humanity down into three groups. First, there were the collaborators, people who went along for safety, power or profit—“like the Vichy French,” he says. Second were the “go-along-to-get-alongs,” who kept their heads down and hoped not to get singled out. And finally, there were the people who said no, who recognized power was being abused and decided to resist. “V was always about power and how people responded to power,” Johnson explains. “That’s what I was interested in investigating and digging into and exploring.”
Which is why it connected with the audience so deeply. Yes, it had the striking visuals—the giant motherships hanging over cities, the slick uniforms and the smiling faces of the “Visitors”—but the real power came from the smaller, everyday choices: the neighbor who suddenly joins the party, the scientist scapegoated as an enemy or the newsroom deciding what to show and what to ignore. Johnson wanted the story to play out in living rooms, workplaces and labs, because those were places the audience would recognize. The message was clear: this could happen here.
Something familiar, something new
Johnson knew history doesn’t repeat exactly, but that it “rhymes.” He wanted viewers to feel how quickly things could slip when people stay quiet or when institutions fail to act as guardrails, and he never pretended that everyone would become a hero. The “go-along-to-get-alongs” weren’t villains, but they were the hinge—the ones who made it possible for bad things to take root just by choosing not to speak up.
V was, as the New York Times put it, “a Space Age retelling of the rise of the Third Reich.” The details were updated—scientists instead of Jews, reptilian aliens instead of Nazis—but the playbook was the same: scapegoat the vulnerable, put charisma over character and normalize the unthinkable until people accept it as everyday life.
“Certainly we have seen that happen,” he commentss, “and it gets really dicey when there are no guardrails up there. The idea that our founding fathers had in America was, ‘Okay, you’ve got the judiciary as a branch of government, you’ve got the Congress as the primary branch of government and then you have a president who must abide by the rules that have been set up.
“And the founding fathers,” Johnson continues, “never assumed that there would be so many people who would suddenly capitulate, which is what we’re seeing happening in America today. So, I wanted to explore that in a dramatic way to make people think about what the consequences were if you allow that to happen. As soon as the Congress of the United States forgets that they have signed and sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, when they are not willing to stand up to anyone who says, ‘I don’t really need the Constitution, I know what I want to do,’ it means that you’re forgetting that the whole idea of the American Revolution was to get out from under a king.”
That’s why, he emphasizes, the U.S. Military was never supposed to patrol American streets, and that seeing uniformed troops used that way is “dangerous” and, in many cases, “pointless.” He recalls talking to National Guard friends during the Los Angeles unrest who admitted they were deployed to “keep the peace” in a city where the actual disturbance covered only a couple of blocks out of 600 square miles. “They were standing there wondering, ‘What are we even doing here?’”
For Johnson, this is how authoritarianism creeps in. Leaders stir up problems, then send in reinforcements to “fix” them. He compares it to arsonists working for the fire department—people starting the blaze and then showing up to take credit for putting it out.
Recurring themes in his life and work
Johnson has kept exploring those themes in his later work. In his 2018 novel The Darwin Variant, he imagined a comet that nearly destroys Earth. Humanity is saved when said comet is blown apart, but the fragments bring something deadly with them: a virus that speeds up evolution. Plants grow stronger and choke out weaker ones, farm animals turn aggressive and when it infects humans, people become more intelligent—but lose their compassion. They see themselves as a new “master race.”
It’s a concept right out of Johnson’s playbook: ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances that test what it means to be human. “The Nazis thought they were a master race,” he says. “In this case, they actually are the next step in evolution., but is that really the way we want to go?” Insofar as he’s concerned, the struggle is always the same: how do we keep our humanity when power tempts us to abandon it? He circles back to Benjamin Franklin’s famous line about America’s founding: “You have a republic—if you can keep it.”
If you want to know why Kenneth Johnson has spent so much of his career tackling issues like racism and intolerance through science fiction, it helps to look at where he came from.
“I grew up in a very bigoted, anti-Semitic household,” recalls the creator of The Bionic Woman. “As an only child, I would hear racial slurs at my dinner table every night.” He points to one of his favorite songs from South Pacific, written by Oscar Hammerstein: “You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate.” For Johnson, that lyric hit close to home, because that was exactly what he was living through.
He was born in Arkansas but raised outside Washington, D.C., and when he visited the South as a boy he saw segregation up close. “I would go to Arkansas in the summers and I would see the bus stations that had three restrooms instead of two—men, women, and ‘colored.’ And I didn’t understand that.” The contradictions stuck with him. His parents pushed intolerance, but he had friends who were Black or Jewish and saw them for what they were: kids like him. “They had the same wants and dreams,” he says. “It just didn’t add up.”
‘Alien Nation’
That early experience planted the seed for the themes he returned to again and again in his work. By the time he adapted Alien Nation for television in 1989, he knew exactly the kind of story he wanted to tell. “Fox thought they could do Lethal Weapon with aliens,” he laughs, “and I said, ‘No, no. Let me do In the Heat of the Night—that would be interesting.”
The result was one of the most socially direct shows he ever made. Every week it used the metaphor of alien newcomers to explore discrimination, prejudice and cultural clashes—and audiences got it. “Every minority in the country thought it was about them—because it was,” he points out. The critics agreed. “It was the one show I ever did where we never got anything but good reviews,” he remembers.
That passion for honesty makes him bristle when he sees history being rewritten to avoid offense. Growing up in Washington, he spent hours at the Smithsonian. So watching exhibits stripped of uncomfortable details makes him furious. “You can’t rewrite history,” he says flatly. “The old line about history being written by the victors—that’s the dangerous place to go, because then it’s not really history anymore.” He points to Russia as a stark example of how a nation can erase facts to suit those in power, and worries about leaders in America who admire that model.
It’s all part of a bigger pattern, he warns, where absolute power corrupts absolutely. “When you think you have absolute power, that’s the most dangerous place to be,” he says. And it’s why he keeps hoping, even now, that politicians will find the courage to push back. He points to Lyndon Johnson—hardly a progressive by background, but who nevertheless pushed through civil rights legislation in the 1960s. “By God, man, when he said, ‘No, this is wrong’… that’s what leadership is supposed to look like.”
Determination fuels his writing. Johnson recently published a supernatural thriller called The Face in the Mirror. While the plot involves body-swapping, alchemy and centuries-old secrets, at its core it’s about something simple: appreciating life while you have it. He even quotes Our Town in describing its theme: “Doesn’t anybody ever realize life while they’re living it?”
Even when he’s writing about aliens or the supernatural, Johnson always circles back to the same point—stories that ask us to think about who we are, what we stand for and how easily intolerance and abuse of power can creep into our lives if we let them.
Protecting ‘V’ and controlling his own destiny
Kenneth Johnson may be in his seventies now, but he’s hardly slowing down. Alongside The Face in the Mirror, he’s still fighting to bring V back in the way he believes it deserves.
That fight goes back to his 2008 novel V: The Second Generation, which picked up the story 20 years after the original miniseries. He wanted to explore what might happen if the distress call sent into space at the end of V was finally answered. “Suddenly there are these people there who say, ‘Remember that distress call you sent? Well, we got it and we’re here to help’—or are they?” he explains. The setup gave him a chance to test whether humanity had learned anything from the first round of collaboration and betrayal, or if they’d make the same mistakes all over again.
He’s since adapted that novel into two feature-length screenplays, part of a trilogy he’s calling V: The Revival. “It really is a revival,” Johnson insists. “It’s everything you remembered, but it’s brought up into the 21st century.” The plan would be to follow The Revival with The Second Generation and a third film titled V: Their Finest Hour. All three scripts are ready to go—if the right studio finally says yes.
And there is interest. Just this year, Warner Bros. executives reached out about the rights, and Johnson sent them the scripts. He’s cautious but hopeful. He knows how strong the fan base still is. “The fan mail I get for V is more than all my other shows put together,” he says. “It really struck a chord with people.”
But if the deal doesn’t happen? Johnson’s okay with that, too. Over the years, he’s turned down “obscene amounts of money” for the rights to V because he refused to let someone else water it down or miss the point. He’s seen that happen too many times, whether with The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk or even V itself when others tried to remake it. “It’s always disastrous,” he says. “People come back when they see something’s going to be remade. They tune in and go, ‘Oh, no, God, that’s not what I want to see.’”
His wife, Susie, boiled the choice down for him. “She said, ‘Kenny, all you’ve got to think about is this. Would you rather the movies never got made than to see them made wrong by the wrong people?’ And I said, ‘Right.’ That’s the only question I have to ask.”
That attitude reflects how Johnson has approached his whole career. Unlike peers who built empires, he’s always seen himself first and foremost as a director. He tells the story of visiting producer Stephen J. Cannell’s new Hollywood office building back when Cannell was riding high. Johnson admired the success but asked him one simple question: “What happens when you want to say no?” For Johnson, saying no has always been part of the job—refusing projects that don’t match his values, even if the paycheck is tempting.
It meant less money, but it also meant freedom. “I just wanted to be on the stage with my crew and my cast and making movies. That’s fun. That’s what I do best,” he says. Writing became a way to control his destiny—if he created the scripts, he could direct the projects. And while he jokes that he wishes he’d made more money, he’s content knowing he’s kept control of his work and can leave behind stories that matter.
At the end of the day, Johnson isn’t chasing mogul status or another big payday. He’s still chasing the same thing he was when he first read It Can’t Happen Here: stories that make people think about power, morality and the choices we make when the pressure’s on.
“Who do we become when we’re under pressure?” he asks rhetorically. “Do we protect truth or rewrite it? Do we defend humanity or surrender it piece by piece?”
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