INTERVIEW: Kenneth Johnson
SF Signal had the chance to ask Emmy Award-winning Writer/Director/Producer Kenneth Johnson about his work, which includes such science fiction television classics as The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, V, and Alien Nation. Kenneth has a new book released this month: V: The Second Generation.
Listen to his answers below…
SF SIGNAL: Hi Kenneth. Tell us about the genesis of the Alien Nation movie and television series.
KENNETH JOHNSON:
SFS: The themes of Alien Nation and V (racial prejudice, occupation) are similar. Are there any particular messages you were trying to convey with the premises?
KJ:
SFS: You have a new book, , that picks up the story twenty years later. Can you tell us about how it came to be written and what it’s about?
KJ:
SFS: You’ve developed many of the shows we grew up with: The Incredible Hulk, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman… What is your fondest memory of the early days of your career? What is the memory you’d most like to forget?
KJ:
SFS: What’s your impression of the current slate of science fiction programming available today, on the major networks and cable outlets like the SciFi Channel?
KJ:
SFS: What did you think of the Bionic Woman remake?
KJ:
SFS: Primetime SciFi TV shows like Journeyman and Bionic Woman failed this year. Why do you think the networks introduced those shows and why didn’t they succeed?
KJ:
SFS: Is TV a good medium for SF when compared to movies?
KJ:
SFS: What do you think of the Internet as a first-run distribution system for video content? Is the answer different for SciFi specifically?
KJ:
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Filed under: Interviews
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Awesome. When he said Hulk from the movie looked like Shrek I burst out laughing.
I’ve been going back across the original “V” material, and it seems to me that the ambiguity Kenneth introduces by means of the new saviors-or-are-they? was already present in the original Visitors, in a sense that he might not have been able to see at the time, namely, that it is possible to identify the Visitors with the United States Air Force, who have become widely perceived overseas as a sort of global anti-nazi nazism in their own right, especially as potentiated by evangelical christian zionism.
The stresses and strains of the current presidential campaign, and the alarming possibility of a McCain-Lieberman crossover ticket, are making this paradoxical perspective apparent to Americans for what is probably the first time, and it isn’t reducible to simplistic ideas of left versus right or right versus left (if it ever was, which I doubt).
I find Kenny fascinating to listen to. I’m so pleased to hear he loved working on The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk and V as much as we all did watching them. As a writer, he’s a real hero to me.