The first season of WOTW was a fairly good show. It was a good tribute and followup to the 1953 film, and even managed to fit the Orson Welles 1938 Halloween broadcast into its mythology. And it had a great cast and engaging characters, one of the best SFTV ensemble casts I've ever seen. Even when the writing was weak, which it often was, the characters and the actors made it worthwhile. You could tell that these four people really enjoyed working together, and that made it enjoyable to watch.
The second-season retooling was abominable on multiple levels. For some reason, when Frank Mancuso, Jr. was brought in to revamp the show, he somehow believed that making the show relentlessly grim, depressing, and unpleasant would make more people want to watch it. He also broke up the superb chemistry of the cast, killing off half of them, including the most popular character on the show. And I'm convinced it's not coincidence that the two who got killed off were the Native American and the African-American in a wheelchair. Moreover, the charmingly eccentric Dr. Harrison Blackwood totally lost all his eccentricities and became an ordinary, dull person. Even the aliens lost their weirdness; the alien prosthetics and subtitled alien speech were gone and replaced with a bunch of good-looking white people.
The only good part was when they broke out an original war machine complete with original sound effects.
Unfortunately, they only got two of the four sound effects right -- the rattlesnake-like "scanning" sound and the sound of the heat ray. For the green energy bolts, they used the Trek photon torpedo sound effect, which is similar to the actual sound, created the same way (by striking a high-tension metal cable), but not identical. And they totally left out the sound of the levitation beams, which was the same sound as a TOS phaser but lower-pitched. (I think it was actually a recording of a swarm of locusts.)
Still, my perfectionism aside, it was a good attempt and a loving tribute.
I really felt it was cheap to make the Martians able to look like humans, just so they could use human actors instead of effects. It's a giant sci fi cliche.
Actually, the first season of WOTW had plenty of creature-FX shots; we often saw the aliens in their true form, which was a larger, more robust version of the creature from the movie, redesigned to allow an actor or stunt performer to fit inside. The legs were too humanlike, but the torso was nicely alien. No, the reason for giving the aliens the ability to enter and reanimate human corpses was to make it more of a horror show, the battle against an unseen enemy, and to allow the aliens to function in public without revealing their presence.
It was in the second season that this was abandoned; the new wave of "Morthren" aliens transformed themselves to look permanently like humans, and the monster suits from the first season were never seen after the second-season premiere.
The main thing that I could never get past was this notion that everybody seemed to have "forgotten" the 1953 invasion, and that there appeared to be no lasting damage/effects. That would be like forgetting...wait...what was that ruckus with Germany and Japan? Back in the 40s? Nah. Not ringing a bell....
Yeah, that was annoying. Too many genre shows insist on the tiresome conceit that they're "actually" in our world, so that everything alien or supernatural has to be a deep, dark secret. In this case, it was a particularly poor choice. It would've been far more interesting to embrace the alternate history, to portray a world still bearing the physical, political, and psychological scars of a global alien invasion 35 years before. It shouldn't have been "You expect me to believe there are aliens?" but "I refuse to believe the aliens have come back."
