Once in a while, there’s a show I watch where I can’t be online when it’s on. I don’t want to miss anything; I want to concentrate.

Lost, unsurprisingly, is chief among those shows. Battlestar Galactica was another. Fringe almost is like that. I get very absorbed and forget I’m online for most of the show. 24 would be like that, except I live-blog it over at Blogs4Bauer, so that’s an entirely different animal. But don’t do other stuff online while I’m watching 24, at least.

V has filled the void left by Battlestar in that sense (though I suspect Caprica will also be an online-free zone for me).

It doesn’t hurt that two of the main characters are refugees of two of my favorite shows: Elizabeth Mitchell, Juliet from Lost, and Joel Gretsch, Tom Baldwin from The 4400. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve seen the original V miniseries from the ’80s more times than I can even count. Possibly as many times as Star Wars. True story. Oh, and I mean the original miniseries, not the sequel miniseries, in which one of the half-alien babies looked like a puppet I could have made. And I suck at art projects.

This is V for a post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. The original V was very much informed by World War II, the Holocaust and a totalitarian Soviet Union. This V has in mind the divisions so prevalent in our world today. In the U.S., between left and right (and make no mistake, the Vs represent neither side, specifically), and worldwide, between the U.S. and Everyone Else. And c’mon, anyway, this show is produced in the U.S. for a U.S. audience, so the action’s going to take place here. Just like Doctor Who takes place in England and Wales.

I like how the spaceships give a nod to the miniseries, too. They bear more than a passing resemblance to the originals, while looking way cooler.

Diana is a more interesting character, than her predecessor, though. She is much cooler. She doesn’t yell to get her point across to her minions. If anything, her voice gets softer, so they must strain to hear her. She’s extremely politically astute.

I wonder, however, if their goal is the same as the original. Do they plan to harvest the humans for food, or do they merely want to enslave the human race? Or something else, entirely?

We caught sight of the fleet amassing, in another solar system (galaxy?), but what is their goal? To strip the planet of all its resources, including humans? How will the altered flu shots (nice nod to the whole flu paranoia that grips the U.S. every year, and the swine flu hysteria of this year in particular) affect people?

I’m a bit frustrated that ABC decided to give us this taste now, only to hold off on the rest until after the Winter Olympics. However, I appreciate that they are telling us now exactly when it’s coming back. Perhaps if CBS had done that with Jericho, things would have happened differently for that show.

This promises to be a very television-heavy winter, with 24 and Big Love returning along with the start of Caprica in January, Lost‘s return in February and then V in March.