visitors from out of town

So Better Half and I started watching the new series V a few nights back, and my only real gripe so far (aside from various engineering and physics qualms) was the acceptance rate. Yes, these aliens are human-looking. Yes, they get here speaking our languages. Yes, they talk some good talk. Yes (not to spoil things), everything they do has been specifically engineered to lower our psychological defenses.
But for Allah’s sake, a bloody space-ship (one of twenty-odd) the size of the island settles over New York City, and the populace applauds right after the world’s largest big-screen TV turns off? No significant panicking in the streets. No apparent military response (the short-range EM-dampening field emanting from the ships would slow/change responses, but not stop them). No mass hysteria. Nothing. We went from, “Dadedaa, humans are alone in the ‘verse,” to, “Hey, look, big floaty space ship thingie!” to, “These aliens R0X0R!” almost across the board, with hardly any intermediate steps.
Yeah, they started giving us wicked-cool technology. Yeah, they started spontaneously curing 60-odd diseases. But the step from “Holy crap!” to “drinking buddy” was simply too smooth, too quick, and too seamless for my “I believe” button to compensate for.
We humans are a notoriously xenophobic lot, and while we have been able to mostly (but hardly entirely) subsume that for little details like skin tone and socioethnic/religious backgrounds, I just have a hard time buying into a one-week acceptance of people from a different solar system, no matter how attractive they might be.
If nothing else, two or three generations have been raised by Hollywood, and we all know how well human interactions with aliens randomly showing up on our planet goes according to their scripts…
Of course, it could be said that the entire pilot proceeded too quickly, in and of itself. We met the characters just as they are meeting the Visitors, and while there is something to be said for immersion, there is also something to be said for backstory. Likewise, one of the corollary characters goes from “wheelchair-bound cripple” to “miraculously healed by the Visitors” to “mysteriously killed (possibly by the Visitors)” in about 10 minutes. I may not be the quickest on my mental toes, but the entire pilot seems like it should have been, and was intended to be, longer.
As for the coincidental parallels between the Vs and Our Glorious President (along with policies, politics, and certain other things), I would remind everyone with a functioning brain that the work necessary to air this show started even before the elections. Odds are, basic outlines of the script existed even before that, so unless Scott Peters is a closet seer, trying to draw direct causal relationships is a fool’s errand (especially given that this reincarnation seems to be closely following the original series, which was written and aired back in the ’80s). Go for the conspiracy theory route if you want, but know full well you will be rightly ridiculed for it.