It’s Election Day in America. One election day ago, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, and TV is marking the anniversary with two earnest documentaries—and an alien invasion.

I exaggerate, but only a little. ABC’s V, which debuts tonight, may not be intended as an Obama allegory, but it has enough parallels with the issues, concerns and paranoid fantasies of today’s politics that they were either included to pique interest, or created accidentally by the typing of a million monkeys who had never seen cable news.