of Barack Obama. In his review of the show, Troy Patterson of Slate points out that bloggers and journalists had noticed parallels between the show's premise and the Obama administration, and writes that "if the show is to have the symbolic import that we expect from a science-fiction story, this is the only possible way to read V as a coherent text. The only problem with this analysis lies in its generous presupposition that the text is, in fact, coherent." Lisa de Moraes of The Washington Post noted in her review that the fact the series was debuting on the first anniversary of Obama's election "was not lost on some ... TV critics" and also remarked that the use of phrases present in the series (such as "hope", "change", and "Universal Health Care" being offered by the Visitors) made it seem as though "Lou Dobbs had taken over the network, as those things only became popular with the current administration." Chicago Tribune reviewer Glenn Garvin called the show "controversial", saying the series was "a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president's supporters and delight his detractors." The show's cast and crew deny this interpretation. Actress Morena Baccarin acknowledges that she had modeled her character, Visitor leader Anna, after politicians but she and series executive producer Peters were surprised by the controversy. At a press conference at Summer TV Press Tour 2009, Peters said that the show was open to interpretation and that "people bring subjective thoughts to it... but there is no particular agenda." Bell agreed, stating that it was simply "a show about spaceships." In retrospect, Baccarin said: "Originally what was intended with the show, the aliens—the visitors had been amongst us for hundreds of years and were the impetus and the catalyst for a lot of plagues and a lot of world wars, and had kind of instigated these things to kind of try to end humanity and to control humanity. I thought that was the direction that we were headed, and then we ended up having two or three different showrunners, and ABC didn’t really know which direction they wanted to take the show. It became kind of a mess, but what first attracted me to the show was definitely this possibility that we could make parallels to the modern world." Ratings The pilot episode which aired on November 3, 2009, garnered 14.3 million viewers