Art Imitates Life

In case you missed it ABC unveiled a new TV series last Tuesday at 8:00 PM called ‘V’. You can now watch the pilot full episode on ABC’s website or at Hulu.com which I find worked best.

The storyline is a thinly veiled exposé of our current government. In this story, aliens disguised as humans, are the suspect ones, seeking ‘sustainability’ and ‘peace’ on earth and the sharing of ‘resources’. The metaphors to real life were blatant, right down to the lone black character who said that although he was ‘one of them’ he did not agree with their agenda…

The series was met with cries of outrage from the left who could not understand how this show made it to network TV due to the symbolic references within.

“This is not just a right-wing worldview but the worldview of the paranoid Tea Party movement. I’m really not sure how this made it onto network television” whined Jonathan Chait on his TNR blog.

Amazingly ABC decided to replace the show runner Scott Peters who was demoted to executive producer before the pilot even aired. In fact, ABC hosted a big visit by press people last Monday, but Peters was notably absent. A little pressure from the White House we wonder?

Now here’s an interesting twist… Recalling the infamous phone call where a taxpayer-funded group (National Endowment for the Arts) was heard being “instructed” to create art, music, and writings that promoted the President’s agenda, we note this irony.

Perhaps this filmmaker simply took the administration’s directive to create propagandistic art to heart, and it backfired. If allowed to continue without government interference or censorhip, (FOX’s Chris Wallace revealed that this administration is the worst for constantly calling the networks to complain about how they are portrayed) perhaps the creator hoped that the generally a-politic public will finally see the administration’s agenda in a different light.

We can only hope.