If you are of a certain age (over 30) and of a certain persuasion (geeky), you probably remember The Bionic Woman the softer-core peddling of American values designed to capture the female 15 and under audience that was being lost by The Six Million Dollar Man in 1976. A quick recap to freshen the memory for those of you with out the auto-geek switch.
The show’s central conceit wasn’t the bionic replacement of limbs and organs – the melding of human tissue with computer technology in an age when the average computer filled a 9’x12′ room – nor was it the idea that a government agency could be fielding operatives who were using experimental technology to achieve slightly shady mission objectives. After all, we’d just come off the Watergate Hearings so the idea that our government was doing something we didn’t know about seemed not only plausible but damn likely.
No, the central conceit of The Bionic Woman was that an operative, an employee of the U.S. government who was the equivalent of a GS 15 (Steve Austin, the titular Six Million Dollar Man), could lay a guilt trip on a Federal agency to the extent that they would spend millions of dollars to turn a tennis pro/school teacher into the first female cyborg and send her out in the field on black-bag missions that would probably have given the CIA pause if the show hadn’t been aimed at kids. The government doesn’t feel guilt. People do, though, and guilt plays a huge role in the new iteration of the show, Bionic Woman (pay attention to that missing article, it will be important later).
After a car accident that should be fatal – you have to give series producers this, they go for verisimilitude when they need to – Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan), a 20-something bartender with no military training at all, gets the cyborg treatment from Will Anthros (Chris Bowers) her college professor/surgeon/research director for a secret quasi-government project boyfriend. And Jaime’s bionic replacements come not just with the usual strength and speed that we of a certain age have come to expect from technology. They come with skills. Mad skills that life-long practitioners of aikido would drool to have. It seems, though, that the massive car accident just might not have been an accident after all.
Oh no, boys and girls, said government project, dark and spooky as it is, has that problem that is so handy for writers: it leaks like a sieve in a hurricane. So now project head Jonas Bledsoe (Miguel Ferrer in a sledgehammer subtle performance) has two problems on his hands. He has to figure out how to convince Jaime to “repay her debt” to the project and come work for him, and he has to figure out what to do about the project’s first bionic experiment Sarah Corvis (Katee Sackhoff, marvelously psychotic and chewing the scenery for all she’s worth).
The screener for this show felt like a thrown together pilot: just enough flash to sell the people who sign the checks but not quite finished around the edges. Executive producers David Eick (late of Battlestar Galactica, Glen Morgan, Jason Smilovic, (Laeta Kalogridis and Michael Dinner, pilot) hit most of the marks weaving in the government conspiracy angle (is this a private project or is it a black bag job?), the unpredictability of the lone assassin with skills (is all of Sarah’s crazy really just sexual jealousy?), our simultaneous dependence on and fear of technology (or is something in her bionics making her a whack job?), and, of course, a good looking cast. But if they’re going to make it work they need to go dark, not that sort of 80% black, construction paper dark that TV is so famous for. No, they’re going to have to go untrustworthy government, no hope, backed into a corner, ready to chew your leg off to get out of the trap dark if they’re going to make it work.
The question then becomes not can Michelle Ryan keep her American accent in place and develop more expressions in a range broader than stunned and totally pissed off. No, the question becomes, does NBC have the courage to put some grit into prime time or should they have put this on the Sci-Fi channel where it belongs?
Cross posted from Amphetameme.org where Victor has written his own take on the new show.