Pulling out all the stops to promote its reinvention of the '80s miniseries V (if you didn't hear about the national skywriting campaign in the U.S., click here), ABC has released roughly the first eight minutes of the inaugural episode online, and you can watch it by clicking on the player below.

There's little here that we haven't seen in promos previously; the clip gives viewers a thumbnail introduction to the main characters before jumping right into the main event: the arrival of 29 mammoth spaceships above major cities around the world. It's essentially the same as the special preview that was shown at Comic-Con last July.

From the clip, we have to say it looks interesting and well produced. Time will tell if it's compelling enough or has the stamina to stick around for a while, but we'll remain optimistic.

Meanwhile, Firefly alum Morena Baccarin, who stars as Anna, the leader of the "Visitors", spoke to SCI FI Wire recently and said that the new re-imagination is a full reworking of the '80s series.

"It completely re-invents the material, actually," Baccarin told SCI FI Wire. "It's a re-imagining of the old one, so it's the same concept. Aliens come down from space. You have the conflict between them and humans. Why are they here? The show in the '80s was more about communism and totalitarianism, and our show plays a little bit more with the terrorist aspect, which is more the reality of the world we're living in now. And the characters are different. I'm not Diana. I play Anna."

Touchstones of the original remain, however, including the fact that the Visitors are really reptiles, and that they are here "to serve man," which is to say, serve us up as lunch.

Baccarin goes on: "Anna is somebody who is extremely ambitious and will do whatever needs to be done to secure the continuation of her species," Baccarin said. "So she's come down to Earth, and she's going to do whatever it takes to get people to trust her and to listen to her, so that she can get what she wants. So I'd say she's a very motivated alien."

To read the full interview, click here.

Executive-produced by Scott Peters, the Vancouver-lensed V premieres on ABC November 3.