V

I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mindcrushing.  It is soul-deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing.  It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.     --Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine

I've just caught up with the first four episodes of the current V remake.  Thank you, Mom, for recording it for me.  

Unfortunately, V is, in a bad way, mindcrushing.  The best compliment that I can give V is to describe it as completely watchable.  I had no problem sitting around for 168 minutes or so even though I started actively disliking it early on in the first episode. 

The story and the dialogue are both stupid.  Not innocently stupid.  Actively and dangerously stupid.  The action is not at all compelling and usually resolves in silly ways.  Elizabeth Mitchell's character is as generic as can be.  I mostly liked Mitchell in Lost.  She's wasted here.  She's not given anything to work with and doesn't rise above the blah material at all.   We get as boring a hero as can be.  It's not any better for any of the secondary characters.

V both succeeds and fails, not by being good or bad, but by achieving perfect mediocrity.