Emmanuel Itier:  You’ve got two actors from Lost, two from Firefly, one from Smallville — is this like the “Loveboat” of science-fiction fantasy? [Laughs]

Morena Baccarin: I love that show.

Scott Peters: Trying to get every single science-fiction fan who’s ever lived to watch our show.  No, we obviously went for the best action we could possibly find, and as we went through this, we’re, like, “Oh hey, somebody from The 4400 and Serenity and Lost…” so we love our cast. They’re wonderful.  They’re really not very attractive people, as you can see. [Laughs] But it’s a nice bonus that a lot of folks have appeared in genre shows in the past, but it was not designed that way.

EI: No disparagement intended, but a serious question: Of all the remakes of science-fiction shows, they tend to really try to re-imagine them completely, and although this is considerably slicker-looking than the ’80s original, just from what I’ve seen, it seems to stick very close to the original story.

SP: A couple of things we tried to do: One is none of us would be here without Ken Johnson, who did the original V miniseries, which was obviously a phenomenal success, so we owe a lot to him.  In that vein, we wanted to make sure, as we moved forward, that we honored and respected the characters and the themes that show envisioned, and tried not to step on those, and introduced brand new characters and brand new themes that would make sense in a post-9/11 world. It’s really an honor to be able to take the story forward, so we’re hoping to bring a whole new set of fans, as well as the folks who watched it originally.

EI: For the producers, one of the things you do in this pilot…whereas the original kept the lizard skin and all that a secret for a little while, you have a character just kind of explain it offhand without us even seeing it.  Was that just the assumption that enough people are going to go into this knowing that’s the deal and we may as well just say it?

SP: Yeah, I think there was an obvious huge awareness of the original.  There are a lot of people who haven’t seen it, but by the time we get to air, we feel like this is not the big surprise that everyone is going to gasp over.  We really want to tell that story that is already known out there so we can leap forward in a very quick manner, so we don’t build and build and build to something that people already know. Hopefully we do it in an artful way and in a twist-filled way that will make folks who haven’t seen the show before jump a little bit.  Our cast jumped, which was awesome. [Laughs] And really try to bring a new audience to it as well.

EI: For the actors, have you all seen the original V when it was on television?  And for Elizabeth, if you could give your thoughts on the characters you’re playing — how much they’re like the one from the original. I take it then you kaboomed yourself with the bomb at the end of Lost?

Elizabeth Mitchell: It did seem that I kaboomed myself with a bomb.  I like that word, anyway.  I’ll have to teach that to my four-year-old.  “Kaboomed” is good.  I don’t think it’s going to be that way.  I am going to be traveling to Hawaii more than once, so we’ll see how that plays out because my producers have said it’s all right, which is good. I did watch V when I was kid.  I think I was about 13.  I was allowed to watch an hour of television with my parents.  I really liked it.  I liked the escape of it, and I liked the entertainment of it.  It was a fun night for me. We kind of made a celebration of it, and I hope other teenagers will do that with their parents.  It’s something kids don’t do as much anymore.  Oh my God, I sound like I’m 80. [Laughs] And, yes, I will actually be back on Lost, and I can’t say whether I’m dead or not, but as in all things in Lost, it will be fairly tricky.

EI: Morena, this is an interesting role to play — first of all because you’re their idea of exactly what earthlings want to see, so it’s interesting to play her that way, and also, in a way, you’re like every kind of a sweet-faced PR person for a seedy cigarette company or something like that. [Laughs] So tell us about playing her and what’s interesting about playing her.  How do you get into her?

MB: I have big shoes to fill as being, I guess — the face of what people want to see — and there’s no way to prepare on how to play an alien.  I did some research, but there’s not a lot out there. I think I am just trying my best to be as trustworthy as I can be and to be what I would like somebody to be like if they were to come down to Earth, and I think there’s an aspect of politician in that because you need to embody what everybody of every nationality and need wants to see, and at the same time, you have your own agenda.

EI: Scott, your character is interesting because he’s an honest journalist first, but you get the feeling, by the end, that they’ve toyed with his ego a little bit; we can’t tell yet, but he wants to still be famous so he might compromise himself slightly. How do you see your character?

Scott Wolf: I appreciate you seeing the legitimate journalist in him.  I see that as well.  I think he’s a guy who’s had success doing what he’s doing, but he sees himself a lot further along than he’s been able to get thus far. Amongst all the different themes that our producers and writers are dealing with, one of them is integrity versus ambition, and this guy is an incredibly ambitious guy, but there’s also a sense of wanting to be a great journalist and be a voice for people so that when spaceships descend over the major cities of the world, they want to go.  He wants people to think, “What is Chad Decker saying about this?”  So I think part of the fun of seeing how the character develops will be that relationship between his ambition and his journalistic integrity, and which one wins out.

EI: For the producers, Steve [McPherson] said that you would tell us the premiere date.  So could you do that?

EM: Oh, this is so great.  When is it?

SP: Do we know?

EM: Yes.

All Panel Members: November 3rd at 8:00.

EI: What day of the week is that?

APM:  Tuesday.

SP: See how well-trained they are? [Laughs]

Could you talk a little bit about how this show is different because it comes after 9/11?  Or is it?  Am I just imagining things?

JB: I think it’s quite a bit different, and in terms re-imagining from the original series, the original series, to me, felt very much like a military show almost.  It was a resistance and gun fights, and there was a very clear and present enemy.  They wore uniforms, and it was the Cold War.  It was the Nazis…whoever it was.  And post-9/11, that’s not who our enemy is anymore. There is no other single threat.  It’s terrorists, and it’s the guy across the street or the woman next door, and who do you trust? I think one of the things we’re trying to do is we have humans who are traitors, and we have visitors who have a nefarious agenda, and we have visitors who are heros. So not knowing who or what someone is, and playing the paranoia that we all experience, living in a world where we wake up every day and everything is at an orange alert… I think the way we’re trying to do it is, first off, not be a military show in terms of we’re not a country at war the way we have been in the past, but we are a country very much fractured and struggling with all these issues.  I think we’ve tried to tell stories that regular people — moms and FBI agents and teenagers — have to figure out what they’re supposed to do.

SP: Honestly, I’m fascinated by stories where there’s a huge over-arching event, that there’s a huge universal something that has touched everybody, and how does that affect a priest and an FBI agent and a teenager and a financier, and this common thread that runs through all these very different stories.  They all start with very different storylines, which gives us the chance to allow these characters to cross in really unexpected ways and come together, pull apart, and those are just really interesting stories to tell, I think.

EI: Can I just ask the burning question that’s looming over the room right now? And that, of course, is: Will Morena be eating a rat? [Laughs]

MB: Guys?

JB: Whenever we talk to people who saw the original, they go, “Oh my God.  I love the original.” We go, “What do you love?”  And they mention about four or five things, and the rat, guinea pig, bunny…

SP: We have to do some research.

JB: Mouse…  We get a lot of takes on it, but that’s one of the things everyone mentions, and we would be morons if we didn’t find a way in the series to pay homage…not that we couldn’t still be morons [Laughs]

EM: You found, like, the prettiest girl you could possibly find, and you’re going to make her eat a rodent.

SP: We asked her if she had any problems with rodents, and she said, “No.”  That was her fault.

MB: I don’t mind holding them. [Laughs]

Morris Chestnut: That was before she got the part.  Now she cares about it.

EM: Actors getting a part will say anything.

SP: Can you ride a horse?

Lourdes Benedicto: Absolutely.

JB: We want to find a way to do it, but if we just had her do exactly what happened in the original — been there, done that.

SP: There are other iconic moments, certainly, within the original that we’ll find our way of paying homage to.

EI: For the showrunners, are the Visitors’ motives the same or similar to what they were in the original series, as far as taking all the water and eating people?  And who does Alan Tudyk play, and how much is he in it?

EM: Oh he’s so good, isn’t he? I love him.  I want him.

JB: Then you shouldn’t have killed him, should you?

EM: I know.  I’ll be telling him that every day.

JB: The first question: we have our own agenda.

SP: Just us two.

JB: Just us two.

EI: Yes, but what agenda do the Visitors have?

JB: It would not be the same as what it was because, again, that’s been done, and the second thing – you’ll see Alan again.

EI: But who or what does he play?

JB: He plays Erica Evans, our FBI agent’s partner, so he’s an FBI agent, counter-terrorist guy.

EI: Has any thought been given, or do you have any plans, to bring on actors from the original — not to play the characters they played then, necessarily, but maybe like Richard Hatch on the new Battlestar Galactica, and if so, who?

SP: I personally like that idea.  We talk about it a little bit in the writers’ room, and we’ll obviously develop that as we go forward, but I think it’s fun for the fans.  I think it’s fun just to see those actors show up.  And you are right.  It wouldn’t be in the same roles, but it would be at an unexpected moment in, perhaps, an unexpected role that would be a little bit of a tip of the hat to the old fans. I think everybody is fair game, but we’ll certainly develop that as we move forward.  I love the idea, personally.

EI: How do you keep the story going?  You had two miniseries and then a TV series that sort of turned into “Dallas” on a spaceship, and I’m guessing that’s not where you want to go with it.  Without giving anything away, of course, what sort of plans do you have, story-wise, going forward? 

JB: The original was conceived as a miniseries, so it was built that way. Knowing that we are built for longer, we’ve structured the end that way, so we’ve set up the first season so, by the end of the first season, you know what the Visitors’ agenda is and sort of where characters end up, on which side of the line they will be by the end of first season, so that would be our first chunk. Then the second season, beginning there, we have a whole different arc again, but we are very much interested in keeping our characters in their own lives.  He’s going to stay at the church.  He’s going to stay with the FBI.  Chad is going to be a journalist.  Ryan is going to be the finance guy he is.  And Val is a therapist. Everybody is going to stay in their lives, because we think it’s more interesting for people watching the show to see someone more like themselves versus we are now on the run from an invading army, and I think we are different that way as well.

EI: Some of the words in the pilot associated with the Visitor agenda are “hope” and ”change” and “universal health care.” Was that intentional, or are you just freakishly prescient? 

SP: Freakishly prescient.

EM: Wow.

EI: Now that you are here and we are in this situation and you are airing it in November, are you going to play off that, or how are you going to work with that? 

SP: Because of the Writers’ Guild strike, this show has been in development for a long time. I wake up in the morning and you look at the news, and you see there are wars, there are new diseases being discovered, there are old diseases that we are dealing with.  The economy is in the toilet.  There are people losing their homes.  Wouldn’t it be awesome if 29 ships showed up and they all said, “We’ve got this.  We’ll take care of you.  Don’t worry about it”?  Wouldn’t this be great?  So that’s really where “hope” and “change” came from.  Joel has a line in the pilot that says, “The world is in bad shape, Father.  Who wouldn’t welcome a savior?”  And I think that’s a pretty interesting thesis statement.  So that’s where this whole thing came from.  And I think shows are open to interpretation. Bring subjective thoughts to it. If you want to ascribe those words to the Visitors or to whatever is going on in our society, that’s up to the viewer, but there’s no particular agenda to hone in on those specific things.

EI: The timing in some of the casting is a little suspicious. Did the lizards bring down Oceanic 815? [Laughs]

EM: Maybe.  I was taught that by years on Lost:  “Maybe.”

SP: That would be an awesome episode.

EI: Post-9/11 V but also post-Lost, do you feel like there’s some pressure to at least have a little…

SP: To not suck?

EI: Crazy… No — to have like heightened crazy mystery stuff going on?  Because it seems like this is a little bit like Lost, at least its look.

JB: Sure. I think what’s different about telling this story now is people are live-blogging and die-hard fans who are freezing frames and TiVo-ing and finding Easter eggs to see what happened on Lost or Battlestar, or any other awesome shows out there, so it’s our job to build those in for those people but to keep the story simple and clean enough that people who just show up at 8:00 can just enjoy watching the show.  But we are aware of both, and we are doing our best to balance that.

EI: Steve McPherson said the show is being conceived as one with a four-year storyline.  Is that still the way you are looking at it?

SP: We’re looking at this first chunk as we’ve got it all mapped out.  In fact, before the show was sold, there was a pretty solid direction to everything, so Jeff came aboard and we talked more about it.  As things developed, we certainly know where we are going the first season.  We know where we are going the second season.  We have a pretty solid plan all the way through. I did a show previous to this that was very serialized, and it helped a lot to know exactly where you were going so you weren’t making it up as you were going along, because that just is too painful, and we spent too much time at night staying up.

JB: We know what the end is.  We know where we are going, and whether that’s three years or four years or beyond that, it’s gravy. But there is a plan, and we will stick to that.

EI: For the producers: Have any of you talked to Ken [Johnson], and if you did, what were his thoughts when you were doing V?

SP: I had a meeting with Ken at the very beginning.  We sat down and got a chance to meet him.  I was very happy to meet him.  And one of the other executive producers, Jace Hall, has been in close contact with him throughout this project, and he wishes us well, which is great.  This was a brand new take on the show. We want to pay lots of honor and salute to him for starting this whole thing, so he wishes us well and we thank him for that.

EI: Do you have any concerns that this might be seen as a slap at the Obama administration, or do you hope that it will be seen that way?

JB: No.

SP: It’s a subjective experience to watch a television show.  I think that if you are bringing something to a show and looking for something in it, you can find it, whether you are on one side of the political spectrum or the other.  The main theme of the show is dealing with blind devotion, and I think you can look at that in two different ways. People will bring to it what they bring to it, and I think it’s our job as storytellers to put some provocative things out there and leave things open to interpretation to really bring an audience to it and really be compelled by it. If one group wants to claim it as their show and another group wants to claim it as their show, that’s their prerogative.

EI: Would you really be that comfortable if the birthers started claiming it as their own?

JB: Obama is an alien?

SP: No.

JB: There are always going to be people who will look for agendas in everything.  This show was conceived during the Bush administration.  It got executed in an Obama administration.  There are people on either side of the aisle who can find things.  You can say, “Yeah, look how stupid these people are for following blindly and believing everything the government is saying,” and you can have people who are upset about that. You can have other people saying, “Look at these people who are promising everything at no cost, and look, they are leading them to their own doom.”  For us, both sides have strengths and weaknesses. Let’s get people to show up and watch it and talk about it.  But to try to tie it to the birthers or anything, I find is kind of…ridiculous.

EI: You talk about the new perspective and the post-9/11 effect on this, but I think one of the more intriguing things about the original was the allegory to totalitarianism going home — sometimes a little too literal Nazi reference.  Is that now gone from this completely?

JB: Yes, but I say it because the fear at the time was Fascism.  It was Communism.  That was the fear, and that’s not the fear now.  We are talking about the metaphors and allegories here, and at a certain level, I just want to remind people it’s a show about spaceships on ABC at 8:00 p.m on Tuesdays. And I mean that seriously in that there’s this wish-fulfillment element of it, so if everybody came true, you would be really excited, and then if it started to turn or you were one of the two or three people who seemed crazy because you knew more about it than anybody else, you didn’t believe it, we are really interested on almost a personal level.  What does a mom do?  What does a priest do?  What does a kid do?  And how this works politically is fun for people to talk about, but as we are breaking the stories, we are really looking to tell really exciting, entertaining, emotional stories that these guys can do what they do…

SP: When we originally conceived the show, I broadened the theme to be about blind devotion.  What happens when you don’t ask questions about the things you believe in? I think that can be applied across the board, whether you are talking about a political issue or a religious issue or a relationship issue — any number of things.  So to me, that was what was really an interesting place to look into — to deal with theme across many different storylines.

EI: The propaganda aspect of that seems to ring true of both cases — propaganda as a tool of domination.

JB: In a sense, the interesting thing to us is propaganda has just become advertising, and everything is branded and everything is turned into a product. So for the Visitors to come in, the Vs are going to do that.  The Vs are going to brand themselves.  The Vs are going to advertise and promote, and we are all going to want to love the Vs.

SP: They’ve already got their own big giant TVs.

EI: Elizabeth, by the end of the hour, you have the potential to be a real resistance leader in a classic-hero sense, and before then, you’d get to shoot people and hit people and so forth, plus being a mom.  This seems like one of the richest roles you have had.  Reflect on this role and Lost, as far as are you surprised by the good things that have happened to you in the last few years?  And what do you think of this role in general?

EM: I’m always surprised, always grateful, and always giggling a little bit, so I hope to continue to feel that way.  I loved my role on Lost.  I thought it was incredibly rich, and I enjoyed every minute of playing it, and I really thought I was going to take a break in between doing that and doing this, and doing the bit of Lost that I had left. My manager called and said that Morris had read the V script and he really liked it, so I thought, “If he liked it, I should read it,” so I read it and I really did fall in love with the character.  I called one of my best friends and I had her read it, and she also fell in love with the character. I like playing a traditional hero.  I don’t think I’ve ever done it before, and it’s big shoes to fill because we’ve had some amazing heroes… I did a panel with Sigourney Weaver, and she said she always chooses male roles because she felt like they are meatier, but this indeed started out as a woman in this incarnation, and then, in the previous one, I believe it was a man.  So I’m incredibly excited, and I do feel like it’s a lot, and I’m hoping to step up to it.

EI: Regarding spaceships, the effects were very good.  Do you have the budget to keep that up every week, and how much will this be effects-heavy?

SP: Yes, we do.

EM: It’s coming.

SP: We were very conscious of this as we moved forward.  We didn’t want to promise something we couldn’t deliver every week, and we are on the cutting edge of some really interesting technology, in terms of how we present the entry of the spaceship, for instance.  We are able to actually shoot all of that on a green screen and the spaceship is built in a virtual world, and it allows us to collect assets.  In other words, we can build these enormous-looking sets in a computer.  We can go back to them.  We can reconfigure them.  We can pop a camera into the virtual set and turn it a different direction and see something that looks like a very different place that we’ve never seen before.  So that gives us the creative ability to really expand upon that so we aren’t leaving everybody in the dark in terms of really wowing everyone on a weekly basis, and that’s really what we are striving for.  But obviously, at first, it’s a character-driven show, and we need to deliver that first and foremost.  The visual effects and all of the fun eye-candy is frosting on the cake, but really important frosting.   So the answer is yes, we are visiting the ship every episode.  We are seeing ships in the sky every episode.  We shoot in Vancouver, so we have to make Vancouver look like New York, so things that don’t look like visual-effect shots are actually visual-effect shots.  We are well-stocked and well-aware of what we have to accomplish every week.

EI: What effects house are you working with?

SP: It’s Zoic, who did the pilot and will do the series, and they are fantastic.

EM: They are awesome.

SP: They also did Firefly.