Those pesky green scaled aliens with the funky glasses will finally get another shot at a major audience 20 years after their first appearance, except it won’t be in the “Second Generation” project that the story’s original writer, Kenneth Johnson, had envisioned. Instead, ABC will be remaking the TV series (spawned from the two original mini-series, “V: The Original Mini-Series” and “V: The Final Battle”) that lasted only a year before being canceled. The new V will be written and produced by The 4400 veteran Scott Peters, who has no plans to stick to what Johnson did in the original, but will instead be diverting the reasons for the aliens’ arrival, as well as introducing new characters in his version.

Variety has more:

The original “V” served as an allegory for the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. Peters said he won’t duplicate that concept, except that the new “V” will still focus on what happens when the masses have blind faith in their leaders.

In this case, the new “V” will center on Erica Evans, a Homeland Security agent with an aimless son who’s got problems. When the aliens arrive, her son gloms on to them — causing tension within the family. As in the original “V,” several storylines will unfold simultaneously.

But even without the same storyline, the original “V’s” bones will remain: As in the ’80s version, the show will open with an enormous army of spaceships hovering over the world’s major cities. The visitors say they’ve come to help Earth, but their motives are nefarious (in the original, they wanted to steal the world’s water supply).

I’m not a fan of The 4400, so I don’t know how good of a writer Peters is, but the very notion that he’ll just willy-nilly dump Kenneth Johnson’s Holocaust and World War II allegory for something else makes me kind of nervous. The original “V” mini-series were simply fantastic stuff, and were really one of the main reasons why I love science fiction stories so much.

The Variety article also makes it clear that this ABC revival of the V show will NOT have anything to do with Kenneth Johnson’s attempts to revive the story via “The Second Generation” movie, his continuation of the original mini-series (but not “The Final Battle”, which Johnson had no involvement in). You can read more about what Johnson has planned for a “V: The Second Generation” movie here. Ironically, if this new V show becomes a hit, that might very well clear the path for a “Second Generation” movie…

Below: They just want to be your friends … and eat you.