V (1983 miniseries)

V opens on one of television's defining images: fifty saucer motherships, each miles across, hanging silently over New York, Los Angeles and other great cities. The red-suited 'Visitors' smile and offer technology in exchange for resources — until the camera peels back their human skin to reveal reptilian faces and a plan to drain Earth's water and farm its people. Creator Kenneth Johnson wrote it deliberately as a parable of creeping fascism, drawing on Sinclair Lewis's novel of American authoritarianism, It Can't Happen Here^[1]. The motherships are not just spectacle but a propaganda machine: the Visitors seize the media, recruit human collaborators, and target scientists first, provoking a resistance modelled on WWII partisans.