Kevin Bjorke
Kevin Bjorke
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Why this is major news is beyond me, but CNN is reporting via Reuters that the old TV series V is in for a remake. Ungh. One supposes they will say that Osama is a lizard now, or some similarly-pandering “deep” metaphor. Big deal?

What’s annoying to me is that a search of the web still doesn’t show just how much of the original pilot mini was straight-lifted from Bertolt Brecht’s little-seen play The Private Life of the Master Race (aka Fear and Misery of the Third Reich)

A few years back I was rabidly attacked by a certain Warner Bros’ producer for saying this in an online forum, an ongoing barrage of threatening emails until I finally had to contact Brecht’s estate. How dare I impugn the literary majesty of the author of V, who had already said that he was inspired by Sinclair Lewis, not some foreign-refugee upstart?

Still today, one is hard-pressed to find the names “Kenneth Johnson” and “Brecht” on the same web search, save on Amazon.com’s German site (where the audience is far more likely to have ever heard of Furcht und Elend im Dritten Reich). But not here in the good ol’ US of A, no sir. We only credit lifts from Amurrican writers ‘round here.

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