Bionic Woman - Pilot reviews

'Bionic Woman' Season Premiere
September 26, 2007

It seems that Battlestar Galactica has started a new trend: revamping the camp. Bionic Woman is the latest vestige of the 70s to be repainted in darker, more serious tones, and what better person to lead the project than BSG's reimaginer extraordinaire, David Eick?

Perhaps best known of late as "that show Isaiah Washington is going to," Bionic Woman is very true to the Galactica process. The show is dark, dreary, and pulsing with social consciousness. This is definitely not the Bionic Woman that graced tin lunch boxes.

Bionic Woman is an attempt to capture the heightened sense of story that makes sci fi serials pump. The challenge for Bionic Woman is that not many serials have made it. BSG, Lost, and Heroes are the few and the brave. Bionic Woman is treading into an arena where the odds are against here. Unless, the show excels at something unique. It does.

The same simple story from the 70s is there in spirit: a young girl suffers sever mutilation in a horrifying accident. A secret government program is able to replace her limbs with bionic replacements that enhance her strength, and brain implants that give her enhanced senses and immediate access to a library of combat programming. Okay, so not so much like the original, but definitely in the same ball park.

Underlying this new rendition of Bionic Woman is a moire of character connections reminiscent of the synchronicity driven mythos like Heroes, or Lost, except with an emotional density approaching that of NBC's most excellent Journeyman.

Sommers' (Michelle Ryan) sees herself as an underachiever, strapped with the responsibility of playing guardian to her teenage sister Becca (Lucy Hales). She reflects on her lack of identity while questioning the adoration of her genius boyfriend, who ultimately winds up being the one who 'rebuilds' her in the physical sense.

And therein come the layers of character expression that run parallel to the latent symbolism of the story. The same man who builds her up psychologically, rebuilds her physically, which leads to her assumption of a new identity. Her 'new' place in life becomes a secret identity, and no matter how heroic she becomes, she will always writhe in the underachieving skin that her sister knows her by. And of course, underneath this is a deep conspiracy with gruesome connotations to an earlier, more wreckless bionic experiment that ended with fathers locked below ground, while sons basked in the brilliance of their work in also underground laboratories.

The argument could be made that Bionic Woman is not, in fact, all that, and that what seems like a quilt of metaphor and finely drawn symbolism is merely the happenstance of a story that is too busy for its own good, but that would be a stretch.

Bionic Woman has enough soul in its story to succeed where most recent network attempts at serial sci fi end. For starters, the introduction hands viewers a multifaceted chunk of mythology with which fans can feel comfortable pursuing Sommer's adventures in either episodic or serial installments.

Jon Lachonis, BuddyTV Senior Writer

Premiere watch: 'Bionic Woman'
By Ryan McGee

Well, folks, she's here. Bionic Woman! We have the technology. We can rebuild her. And we can also celebrate her re-introduction into the prime-time lineup with a little help from one Alanis Morissette. Alanis, take it away!

A young girl
Gets hit by a truck
She was a bartender
Now she's down on her luck
She's got a smart boyfriend
A surgeon so distraught
And when he saw her mangled flesh he said,
"Hmmm, here's a thought...
She could be bionic, don'tcha think?
She could be bionic, yeah, I really do think..."

And indeed, most of the episode seemed to take place in the raaaaaaaaiiiiin, in a world where scientists can create robot-human hybrids but absolutely no one has ever heard of an umbrella. Honestly, that was just silly.

What stood out this summer amongst the large crop of new shows failed to truly lift off in its premier episode, lumbering along with a huge amount of exposition and a titular character who spent the entire episode acting as if she were waiting at the DMV to have her license renewed. While other fall genre shows such as Chuck and Reaper knowingly embrace the ridiculousness of their premises (while also provided thrills and chills), Bionic Woman takes itself utterly and completely seriously. Makes sense, given that creators of this show hail from the ultra-serious re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica, a show in which people are sent out of the airlock if they so much as crack a smile.

Problem is, Bionic Woman simply can't pull off such Galactica gravitas. It doesn't have the acting talent, writing talent, or even a premise to support such heaviness. Battlestar features Edward James Freakin' Olmos trying to stave off the complete annihilation of the human race from robots once under human control. Bionic Woman features Michelle Ryan sullenly asking "Why me?" for an hour. The stakes just aren't the same.

Throw in clunky exposition to such sullenness and you had a pilot that had me looking at my watch every few minutes: not a good sign, people. The first fifteen minutes chugged through all the backstory the show felt was necessary: Jaime Sommers is dating a successful professor/surgeon, Will, and living with her surly sister, Becca, who inherited her elder sibling's sunny disposition. Jaime announces she's pregnant, since apparently it wouldn't be bad enough that she's merely injured in a car wreck and loses her legs, arm, eye, and ear, but had to lose a baby as well in order for us to truly sympathize with her. (Hint: that's a sign the show doesn't have much faith in their lead's charisma.)

Amidst all this, we learn that Jaime is actually Bionic Woman 2 (Electric Boogaloo), with the first model, Sarah Corvis, having gone a leetle whacky in her post-hybrid life. Corvis, played by Katee Sackoff of Battlestar fame, stood out in this episode head and shoulders above the rest. In her climatic scene with Sommers, she reveals that she's slowly replaced her "human" parts over the years in order to remove "weakness" from her body. Not quite sure where she's getting the parts, though, to be honest. Maybe Home Depot? After all, they keep telling me, "You can do it. We can help." Then again, I can't so much as build a birdcage, never mind a bionic leg. So I beg to differ with Home Depot's assertion. But that's another story for another day.

This scene zeroed in on what will most likely be a prevailing theme of the show: what right to those in Will's group have to manipulate and control the bodies of these women? Who owns their bodies and abilities? It's an interesting debate, one that reminds me of the constant Slayer/Watcher tension on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Bionic, like Buffy, seems to take a feminist stance that the women in question are often singled out against their will by patriarchal forces to do the dirty work these men can't or won't do on their own. But Jaime: I served with Buffy Summers (well, I own all the DVDs, if that counts); I knew Buffy Summers (well, through hand-written fanfic, if that counts); Buffy Summers was a friend of mine (in my really awesome dreams). Jaime, you're no Buffy Summers.

Now, simply because this interesting point was treated ham-fistedly in the pilot is no reason to discard it from the show: in fact, it might be the only thing that keeps this show from sinking into a simple stunt-laden drama. The fact that everything in this happened in this episode happened TO her is dramatically interesting, but what will be interesting going forth is how she turns from a passive vessel into an active force. That's far more interesting to me than extended lessons about anthrocites, this show's version of the dreaded Star Wars midichlorians.

Furthermore, the show needs badly to infuse some of Sackoff's energy into Michelle Ryan's character. I've never seen East Enders, so I don't know Ryan's previous work, but Lord almighty, I've seen people in the middle of dental surgery having more fun than she was tonight. At one point, my wife turned to me and half-screamed, "Why didn't they give her a personality during the surgery?" I understand she shouldn't break into song upon learning that she's a walking laptop with super ninja skillz, but it's a bad sign when I cheer for the show's villain breaking the arm of my supposed hero. Just saying.

But hey, it's all good: there's plenty of good ideas on the show, even if they were clumsily executed on the first go-round. Jaime's journey from drink-slinging bartender to butt-kicking fembot should provide many excellent montages. The idea that Will's father will try and exact revenge on not only his son, but the entire organization, is interesting enough as a season-long plot. (Especially since Will's father, Anthony, is played by another Battlestar alum, Mark Sheppard, so amazingly good as Baltar's lawyer last season. And hey, Chief Tyrol played a prison guard! Yes, I miss Battlestar Galactica, dearly. The way the deserts miss the rain. Is it obvious?)

The seeds for a good show are there. It's just that in this first week, they haven't quite begun to sprout just yet.

http://blog.zap2it.com/

"Bionic Woman"
Title: Second Chances
First Aired: 9/26/07

I have to give the new "Bionic Woman" the benefit of the doubt; scifi and fantasy shows often have weak pilots. The need to crush a lot of information into a small space, and the tendency of networks to assume that viewers are still figuring out how to tie their shoes often leads to a lot of forced dialogue and rushed character introductions. The focus of many scifi shows on special effects also tends to leave character development for later days, after a sufficient kaboom! quotient has been established. Because of all that, I'm going to give it a few weeks before I decide if it's time to give the show its walking papers, but it is most definitely on notice.

Most of the first episode is concerned with getting the titular character into her bionics, and introducing the cast of characters, including one mighty fine villain. Jamie Sommers is a bartender/college student who is struggling to support her angsty, irritating younger sister and look good doing it. She's also dating her professor, and having really forced dialogue about why they're dating. Over a romantic dinner, Jamie tells her main squeeze, Will, that she's pregnant and he proposes marriage on the spot. Despite the fact that their relationship hasn't hit the six-month mark, he thinks they can make a go of it. Of course, this is all cut short when a big-rig slams into their car on the way home, nearly killing Jamie. A big-rig piloted by BSGs own Katee Sackhoff.

Lucky for Jamie, Will works for a super-secret-government-agency that can rebuild her, better, stronger, faster. Unfortunately they couldn't save her baby, so that plot is tied up very conveniently. In one of the more believable parts of an overall wooden performance, Michelle Ryan's Jamie has a solid gold freakout, flinging the boyfriend through a window when she sees her creepy android legs. Then there's the basic super-secret-government-agency montage of meetings in improbably dark rooms, observations from behind a two-way mirror and a battery of psych tests. The characters seem, at first pass, pretty boilerplate. There's a sympathetic shrink, Ruth, the sinister man in charge, Jonas, and the edgy, embittered veteran Jae, who was hitting the sheets with the last model.

Katee Speaking of the last model, Katee Sackhoff as Sarah Corvis, or Bionic Woman 1.0, is one of the clear bright spots in the slightly muddy show. Once Jamie sneaks out of the government installation, she runs across Sarah in the club where she bartends. Sarah doesn't seem to be sure if she wants to kill Jamie, help her, or sleep with her, but she is clearly up to no good. We see Sarah chumming it up with an ominous European guy, who seems to want her to get Jamie's boyfriend on ice. He abandons her after she fails to kill him in the car crash, but she's not one to give up after one try.

Jamie and Will meet up, and she seems to forgive him for making her into a super-secret-government-assassin pretty easily, falling right back into bed for some tender lovin'. The afterglow is ruined, though, when Sarah shoots Will with a sniper rifle. Jamie chases Sarah down, and the two have an impressive little fight until Sarah decides to beat feet. Throughout the fight, and pretty much any time they're on screen together, Sackhoff absolutely owns Ryan. Sarah is dynamic, unhinged and just plain fun to watch, and its hard to buy the bambiesque Jamie ever giving her a run for her money.

After Sarah gets away, with Will's fate an uncertain thing, Jamie faces off with her "boss" Jonas, telling him that if she helps him, it will be on her terms. Not very convincing, but he seems to buy it anyway. In the background of all this, there's some kind of secondary plot going on with a prisoner in an improbably located prison, a thousand feet underground, who the embittered Jae is attempting to pump for information. It was both hard to track and uninteresting, detracting from the main storyline. If only they'd poured that extra time into character development for the one-note little sister, or any of the other characters.

All that said, there are good points. As noted, Sackhoff is magnetic, and there are a couple of other TV actors who I love to see pop up. Molly Price of "Third Watch" fame plays the sympathetic shrink as more than just the bland, mothering archetype she easily could be, and the excellent Miguel Ferrer is the picture of understated evil as Jonas. The action sequences are also very nicely filmed, and there's some nice cinematography used throughout. So, its chief sins appear to be forced dialogue, some flat characterizations and a lead who needs to grow into her roll. A quick look at "Welcome To The Hellmouth" or "Encounter At Farpoint" will show you that many fine scifi shows suffer these ills in the pilot only to outshine the competition. Only time will tell.

http://blog.meevee.com/

TV Review: Bionic Woman
Written by G. Arnold

The title says Bionic Woman, but NBC’s remake of the original series from the 1970s, which was itself a spin-off of the Six Million Dollar Man, takes relatively little from its earlier namesake. The storyline still revolves around Jaime Sommers (now played by Michelle Ryan) as a woman who is given high-end replacement parts after a near-fatal accident. Now partially a cyborg of sorts, Jaime possesses superhuman strength, speed, vision.

In the new version of Bionic Woman, Jaime is a reluctant, unwilling superhero. She wants to carry on with her pre-upgrade life, but the super-secret government agency that operated on her without her consent wants repayment in the form of service. The deal is simple: She does their bidding; they let her live.

If the debut episode is any indication, much of the dramatic tension in the show will come from the tense working relationship between Jaime and the secret agency boss Jonas Bledsoe, played with understated finesse by veteran actor Miguel Ferrer. (Viewers may recognize Ferrer from his previous series Crossing Jordan, in which he played the boss of a sometimes uncooperative medical examiner. Bionic Woman’s producers have not exactly gone out on a limb casting him in this new role, in which he plays the boss of a sometimes uncooperative superhero.)

To further spice things up, the creators of the new series have given Jaime the equivalent of an evil twin, here in the form of an earlier bionic-woman-gone-bad played by Katee Sackhoff. (If it seems like you’ve seen Ms. Sackhoff in this part before, you aren’t completely wrong. Producer David Eick imported her from his other update from the 1970s, SciFi’s phenomenonally successful remake of Battlestar Galactica.) The convenient existence of an instant villain gets things off to a raucous start in the pilot episode.

The production values and performances in the series are solid, if not entirely remarkable. As a remake in the twenty-first century, it’s almost a given that the series has to have a dark, edgy feel, and Bionic Woman does, to an extent. Of course, since the writers try to cover a lot of ground within the confines of an hour-long format, many plot elements feel sketchy and telegraphic, but that doesn’t seriously get in the way. Fortunately, the main cast members do a fine job with the material they’re given, which must sometimes be challenging.

All things considered, Bionic Woman isn’t so much just a new version of an old show as it is an amalgam of many sources that are mixed together to create a new and entertaining brew. The skeletal outline of the old series is here, but the new Bionic Woman shows the influence of many sources, including movies such as RoboCop, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Universal Soldier,and even Frankenstein. Of course, the fingerprints of many previous television series are evident, ranging from Alias and The Pretender from a few years back to the old It Takes a Thief spy series. Most of all, however, the new Bionic Woman shows the influence of the television series La Femme Nikita, the series from ten years ago starring Peta Wilson that was adapted from the movie of the same name.

Early critical opinion about Bionic Woman is split. Writing for the New York Post, critic Adam Buckman called the show a “total loss.” Critic Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe, meanwhile, gave a more positive assessment, saying that the pilot episode was “Sleekly engaging.” Overall, it's too soon to say what the final word will be.

If you’re looking for a startlingly original series with a sci-fi twist, Bionic Woman may not quite fit the bill. It is derivative, of course. After all, it’s a remake. Most viewers are probably not only looking for total originality, though.

Many of us will happily settle for a series that is entertaining, competently produced, and achieves what it sets out to do. So much the better if it throws in a few references to previous productions that we remember fondly. Make a show like that, and we might just watch.

Depending on where the producers take the show, Bionic Woman has the potential to be a show like that, which is just fine for many of us.

http://blogcritics.org/

Bionic Woman 1.1: "Pilot"
By John Keegan

This series has quite the interesting pedigree. Several of the producers and writers have been associated with some of the most revered genre shows in recent memory: “24” and “Battlestar Galactica”, for example. In fact, several of the recurring characters in the pilot are “Galactica” cast members, and several post-production elements, right down to the titles, are reminiscent of that cult favorite. Never mind the similarities in origin: both “Galactica” and “Bionic Woman” are updated versions of a late 1970s original.

Re-imagining the cult classics has become something of a trend lately. “Galactica” stands as the most successful example, at least in terms of critical acclaim and creative ingenuity. More recently, the same treatment was given to “Flash Gordon” with somewhat less success. As with any such endeavor, there is a certain disapproval that comes with retooling the past for present consumption. Ardent fans of the original scorn the slightest change, while others scoff at the lack of “originality”.

Most viewers would agree, however, that every production comes down to execution, and that is how the new “Bionic Woman” should be evaluated. How well does this latest version of the body-mod concept stand on its own?

Casting is important, and in this case, the producers were going for a specific look. Or so one would assume, since Michelle Ryan is essentially a younger, bustier version of Jennifer Garner from “Alias”. The resemblance is uncanny, right down to the mannerisms, vocal qualities, and line delivery. To her credit, Ryan fills the role of Jamie Sommers as well as Garner filled the role of Sydney Bristow, if the series premiere is representative.

The premiere suffers from a mild case of pilot-itis: too much backstory and not enough character development. That imbalance is very difficult to overcome. In this case, the writers manage to make things interesting by developing a simple but effective plot structure. In short, the original “bionic woman” has gone rogue, taking out the research team responsible for her creation, with the help of former researchers. Jamie just happens to be dating one of the researchers (Will Anthros), and she’s caught in the crossfire. Will can’t bear losing her, and thus begins the journey.

One interesting twist is the intention of the research program: military biomodification. It’s hardly the most original idea, but it puts Jamie in a terrifying position. The bionics include significant amounts of nanotechnology with underlying programming. This programming has demands of its own, and Jamie will need to get comfortable with automatic targeting systems flashing on her shiny new HUD. She’s basically an involuntary military cyborg, complete with a bratty little sister to raise while dealing with rogue super-soldiers.

That rogue cyborg is a necessary element of the new status quo. Sarah Corvis (played by a gorgeous and disturbing Katee Sackhoff) is an example of what Jamie might become if the technology overwhelms her humanity. Jamie’s battle with Sarah in this first episode is essentially a metaphor that will likely continue throughout the series: Jamie battling the very technology that threatens to overwhelm her compassion.

From a larger perspective, the rest of the cast lies somewhere along the same spectrum. Will is the most human of the researchers, concerned for Jamie’s overall welfare. Everyone else is more or less devoted to the idea of applying the technology to military or illicit gain, and their attitude towards Jamie is reflective of their own humanity (or lack thereof). This touches on the classic science fiction struggle of man vs. machine and the price of augmenting or modifying our biology. If the next several episodes can correct the balance between plot and character development, as one would expect, then this series has a chance of success.

http://www.mediablvd.com/

Mean Girl Watch Bionic Woman for the best villain on television.
By Troy Patterson

Thirty-one years ago, in the original Bionic Woman, Jaime Summers started on the road to robotically enhanced superheroism after a sky-diving accident—a very '70s way to mangle oneself and one inconsistent with the glossy darkness of NBC's hugely promising remake. Rather, eight minutes into Bionic Woman (Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET), Jaime gets torn apart in a car crash, and her surgeon boyfriend comes to the rescue by souping her up with sci-fi prosthetics. At first glance, the boyfriend looks like every other hot surgeon on television right now, wincingly rugged and perpetually stubbly, but our guy works for some shadowy biotech organization, so call him McSeamy.

Thus, Jaime, theretofore merely an underachieving barkeep, finds herself drafted into duty as a preprogrammed ultimate fighter. This is a La Femme Nikita predicament: There's no way out, but in doesn't seem like any place for a nice lady to be. We don't yet know what Jaime's new sponsors are up to—whether they're malevolent or just uncompromising—but with actor Miguel Ferrer summoning all his woofing gruffness in the part of the boss, it can't be all good.

Much like Nikita and Alias' Syndey Bristow, Jamie's simultaneously a babe in peril and a woman in charge, and Michelle Ryan catches the role's film-noir shades and comic-book angles with all due verve. It's embarrassingly easy to develop a crush on the heroine, and that's partly because she's matched against a worthy foe. Her name is Sarah Corvus—who's actually the first bionic woman, an uncontrollable prototype returned to bedevil Jaime and her superior—and, as played by Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff, she's the most thrilling villain network TV has seen in some time.

We meet Sarah in the opening scene of the pilot. Three years before the main action, we're marching down a corridor at that biotech outfit. Why is the lighting always on the fritz in such places? The fluorescent flicker catches a pack of paramilitary dudes with combat helmets and assault rifles—led by one chiseled devil in blue jeans and a defensibly sleek ponytail—following a trail of fresh corpses in bloodied lab coats. The squad kicks through a swinging door to see Sarah hovering over the last of her kills. She's got a polka-dot hospital gown on her back and a feral grimace on her wan face. Her posture combines a predatory hunch, a prayerful stoop, and an urchin's cringe.

"I didn't want to," she shudders at the slickster. "I'm not in control." He understands that. "Tell me you love me," she begs. But he only tightens his jaw at that one­—not at the office, dear. She springs, and he shoots her. But not fatally, it turns out. She was the rogue driver who plowed an 18-wheeler into Jaime. Returning from this mission, Sarah, now looking as eerily lustrous as a Gucci ad, pounces into the arms of some Euro-scoundrel, panting, again, "Tell me you love me."

So, she's needy, which is understandable and even a bit attractive. She's got vulnerability to go with her invincibility and, as we see later, a stiletto-sharp wit to go with the blunt instruments of her bare hands. In the episode's juiciest scene, Sarah, her mouth as red as a stop sign and almost as wide, slinks into Jaime's bar to size up the new girl. The two are warmly flirting when Jaime's zillion-dollar hearing and vision kick in for the first time—a nauseating experience. The good bionic woman dashes into the ladies' room to be sick, and the bad one follows. At the sink, Jaime splashes her face with water, and Sarah, in a gesture more exciting than her later karate chops and roundhouse kicks, pulls the poor girl's hair back from the washbasin with exquisite tenderness. Sarah Corvus has arrived to haunt and to taunt, to give our plucky heroine a sinister contrast that the show can't do without.

Slate.com

Bionic Woman: Second Chances
by Bob Sassone

Bionic Woman(S01E01)"I guess that makes me your landlord." - Jonas Bledsoe, explaining to Jamie Sommers who he is and all the money he spent on her

Sometimes I really hate first episodes of TV shows. They have to have so much exposition and explain everything and set everything up so fast. In the first 15 minutes of Bionic Woman, the following occurs: we meet the evil killer bionic woman, who is killed by one of her cohorts after a rampage; we're introduced to Jamie and her job as a bartender; we meet her kid sister and see them argue about their absent father; we meet her boyfriend the professor/scientist; and we find out that Jamie is pregnant.

Then as they drive away from a restaurant their car is slammed by a big truck driven by the aformentioned evil bionic woman (who isn't really dead) so the boyfriend (who survived the crash just fine) rushes her into surgery and replaces her legs, arm, and eye (lucky he's in that business) and she flips out about the procedure and loses the baby.

Whew. That's a lot of stuff to digest in 15 minutes.

And that's what's wrong with the first episode of this remake, but it's not the only one. And we can cut them some slack on it, since it's the first ep and we have to get all the info out of the way. But there are some things in this show that make you shrug more than get excited.

This isn't the 70s version of The Bionic Woman. It has been Alias-ized, with a dash of La Femme Nikita and Battlestar Galactica (it's from the same people). It's darker, edgier, and there's a shady government organization (of course!) who wants to utilize Ms. Sommers new body for their own purposes (I sense spy work of some sort?).

This is really a show I should love because I love innocent people who become spies, cool villains, fight scenes and all that. But maybe I'm just getting overdosed on shows like this. There's really nothing new here. And there's a definite problem when the villain (BG's Katee Sackhoff) is ten times more interesting than the hero (Michelle Ryan - another Brit playing American). Every time she's on screen the show's pulse quickens a bit. Though I have to really wonder how smart this evil Bionic Woman is. She's sent by her boss to kill the scientist boyfriend but instead of using her super strength to kill him in his apartment or something, she steals a truck and rams his car? And only ends up demolishing his girlfriend (the boyfriend just got a boo-boo, even though the crash was spectacular)? No wonder her boss writes "You Failed Me" on the wall.

We get the typical scenes of Jamie freaking out over her new body parts, mysterious talk between mysterious people in a sleek, mysterious headquarters, and Jamie trying to figure out how to run, jump, and hear on her own (a la Peter Parker in Spiderman). And these scenes are OK, I guess. We have to build the premise. But there are too many cliches and lame dialogue to let pass. You know from the second the two B-Chicks meet at the bar (side note: I really hate it when TV characters ask for "a beer" - what, TV bars only serve one kind?) that they're going to have a one on one fight on a roof at the end. I guess the downpour adds a little drama to the scene, but you know that the bad woman will explain things, they'll fight, with bad woman getting the upper hand at first, then good woman coming back, only to be interrupted by a helicopter so the bad one can escape (the show wouldn't be much without her so you knew that would happen).

But I'll give this show a bit more time, now that the explanation is out of the way. Let's see what kind of assignments she goes on (gee, it's a good thing her kid sister is some sort of computer hacker - you think that's going to come into play in later episodes??) and see how Isaiah Washington fits into all of it. Lots of promise here, I'm just not sold yet.

www.tvsquad.com

Bionic Woman: Needs More Beta Testing
Posted by James Poniewozik

Judging by the accumulated comments over the summer, Bionic Woman looks like the most anticipated show among the Tuned In community. A Battlestar Galactica producer taking another '70s staple and putting a darker, modern, BSG-style spin on it? '70s transistors upgraded to nanobots? How could it not rock?

All I can say is: lower the expectations, people. Lower the expectations.

If you've been following the Bionic Woman story over the summer, you know that the original, middlingly received pilot got an overhaul, with new producing talent, some new casting and recutting. (We can rebuild it! We have the technology!) The new pilot, however, is if anything, slightly worse than the original.

The premise is the same: Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan) is nearly killed in a car accident. Luckily, her boyfriend (Chris Bowers) is a research scientist who arranges to have her body rebuilt using cutting-edge nanotechnology and computer chips. Unluckily, he works for a secret, and sinister, military program, has arranged her surgery off the books and therefore turned her into an expendable experiment: a "freebie," in the words of his cynical boss Jonas (a deliciously cold Miguel Ferrer). Plus, she has a custom-built enemy in the form of the evil bionic woman 1.0, Sarah Corvus (BSG's Katee Sackhoff).

Nothing wrong with that premise; the problem is the execution. To "humanize" Jamie, or something, the story saddles her with a teen sister whom she's raising. In the original pilot, little sis was deaf and angry; now she's just a whiny brat who threatens to turn the show into Bionic One Tree Hill whenever she appears. The dialogue is turgid and melodramatic (reviewers have complained that the show is too "dark," but really it's just too lifeless). And the acting is spotty: Ferrer is captivating, his associates less so, and Ryan? Let's just say she needs an upgrade or two before she can compete with Sackhoff, whose seductively sneering performance blows the diodes of Ryan's every scene they share screen time. And the pilot falls back on that old pathetic-fallacy cliche of using rain as a substitute for emotion.

The bright side is, there's a good show in here somewhere, and there's nothing wrong with Bionic Woman that can't theoretically be fixed, maybe even Ryan's performance. She pulls off a nice scene in which she giddily leaps from rooftop to rooftop to test her strength, which is good to see in a season of reluctant heroes like Chuck; darkness is all well and good, but you need some sense that having bionic strength is, y'know, cool. The show does an unsettling job of conveying how agitating and overstimulating having bionic senses can be. And the pilot at least sets up questions I'd like to see answered. What's the government's game plan with its bionic program? What is Sarah Corvus so pissed off about? And why does computer-enhanced eyesight in movies and TV always display flashing red and green labels--like "POTENTIAL ATTACKER"--that look like they were programmed in 1980? Why not a nice, eye-pleasing Aqua interface?

I, and I suspect a lot of you, will be pulling hard for them to turn things around. If only there were a brain chip that could harness the power of wanting a TV show to be good and translate it into creative energy to make the show actually be good! Unfortunately, we still have to rely on old-fashioned technology for that one.

http://time-blog.com/tuned_in

‘Bionic’ disappointment
A mixed bag on Wednesday night
Mark A. Perigard By Mark A. Perigard / Television Review
Boston Herald TV Critic

Bionic Woman: C+

We can rebuild her.

We have the technology.

Remind me again, why should we bother?

The weakest part of the new “Bionic Woman” (beginning Wednesday night at 9 on WHDH, Ch. 7) is not the hardware, but the software.

As the refurbished Jaime Sommers, British star Michelle Ryan (“EastEnders”) is as dull as a rusty wrench.

Jaime is critically injured in a terrifying car crash. When she awakens, thanks to her boyfriend - who just happens to be a brilliant cybernetic surgeon - she has a few upgrades: a bionic eye, ear, legs, one arm and even some artificial blood, all to the tune of $50 million.

All that money and effort and they forgot to install a personality.

Jaime looks as quaint as an 8-track tape when she meets up with the first cybernetic woman, Sarah Corvis, played by Katee Sackhoff in a recurring role.

Sackhoff is already a pinup in the lesbian community thanks to her role as a battle-worn fighter pilot on the Sci Fi hit series “Battlestar Galactica.” As Corvis, she’s ready to storm the set of “The L Word.”

When she and Jaime meet for the first time, those flying sparks aren’t coming from just their bionics.

“What do you want from me?” Jaime demands during a rooftop confrontation.

“Honestly, I’m not sure,” Sarah answers lazily. “Jogging partner?”

Sackhoff’s delivery of this twisted metal killer is delicious. She shows Ryan to be the Inferior Woman.

It’s a mystery why the producers retained the name of Jaime Sommers and jettisoned everything else about her. The original Jaime (as played by Emmy winner Lindsay Wagner) was an extreme athlete for her day, a world-class tennis pro who was injured in a parachuting accident.

This millennium’s Jaime . . . is a bartender.

She also serves as guardian to her teenage sister Becca (Lucy Hale), who apparently is a computer hacker. This might be important later in the season. Or not.The special effects are adequate. When Jaime runs, in a nod to the ’70s show, fans will recognize a note or two of the springboard “Bionic” sound effect.

But all the technobabble in the world won’t save a show when the lead is so rundown.

Somebody stick an Eveready Battery in her mouth or something. This “Bionic Woman” could use a jolt.

This 'Bionic Woman' has no strength Article Rating
by David Bianculli

When David Eick was one of the producers who remade "Battlestar Galactica," he and his partners took a vintage sci-fi series that was cheesier than Gouda and rebooted it as a thoughtful, serious metaphor for modern warfare and terrorism.

Eick and some new partners are at it again with NBC's "Bionic Woman." They take a vintage, cheesy sci-fi series and try to turn it into a cross between "La Femme Nikita" and "Terminator 3." This time, though, the reboot deserves the boot.

The original "Bionic Woman," after all, had a solid actress, Lindsay Wagner, at its core, and arrived at a time when the novelty of slow-motion special effects with goofy accompanying sound effects was enough to amuse, if not amaze.

The new star of "Bionic Woman," Michelle Ryan (a Brit imported from "EastEnders"), may be a fine actress. It doesn't bode well for this series, however, that tonight's premiere features a magnetic, dynamic, no-nonsense female cyborg who steals every scene she's in - and it isn't Ryan as Jaime Sommers.

Instead, it's guest star Katee Sackhoff (borrowed from "Battlestar") as Sarah, who identifies herself as "the original bionic woman," and rolls through this opening hour like a juggernaut. At the climax, Sarah faces Jaime in a bionic-babe showdown, and has the clear edge.

"What do you want from me?" Jaime demands.

"Honestly, I'm not sure," Sarah replies with a lilt. "Jogging partner?"

That's the best moment from an opening hour that has few good ones. Miguel Ferrer, as Jaime's eventual boss, and Lucy Kate Hale, as her rebellious sister, make good impressions, but the series itself does not.

This 21st-century "Bionic Woman," whose rebuilt hero is estimated at having a $50 million price tag, isn't money particularly well spent - for the heroine or the series.

http://www.nydailynews.com

Bionic Woman: Series Premiere
Regular airtime: Wednesdays, 9pm ET (NBC)
Cast: Michelle Ryan, Miguel Ferrer, Molly Price, Will Yun Lee, Chris Bowers, Lucy Hale, Mark Sheppard
US release date: 26 September 2007
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor

The Illusion of Freedom

A wolf only makes a good pet when it thinks it’s a dog.
—Jae Kim (Will Yun Lee)

Standing before a lecture hall full of attractive, earnestly note-taking bioethics students, Professor Will Anthros (Chris Bowers) shows slides: a badly scarred victim of a Baghdad car bombing, a triathlete, and a woman with gigantic breast implants. What do they all have in common, he asks, then answers, “These people have altered themselves.” It’s a striking formulation—that anyone might manage such surgery himself—especially given the next problems Will poses: “Where’s the threshold? When is it okay to intervene in God’s work?”

At the back of the room waits Will’s girlfriend Jamie Sommers (Michelle Ryan). At this point, she’s still a San Francisco bartender, but you know, during these early minutes of the premiere episode of Bionic Woman, that she’ll soon be a test case for this supposed “threshold.” Sending his students away to ponder what he might even mean by “God’s work,” Will strolls with Jamie in the parking lot. Here she presents him with another sort of question: “Why are you with me?” His response should sound all kinds of alarms for Jamie: she’s “different,” he offers, and then, “You’re the one choice my father didn’t make for me.” Um: ding ding ding ding.

The new Bionic Woman is all about broken families and personal traumas. And oh yes, secret government plots, super-max prisons, and pheromones. After five months and 14 days of dating father-obsessed Will, 24-year-old Jamie is trying to decide on the next step: he wants her to go to Paris for his research grant, but she has obligations, in particular her PopTarts-eating, angry adolescent sister Becca (Lucy Hale), on some kind of no-internet parole and fondly remembering the days when she was living with their alcoholic dad, who reportedly dumped her on Jamie’s “doorstep.” Ah well, it’s not long before the decision is out of Jamie’s hands. A terrible car accident leaves her with all kinds of catastrophic injuries, and Will, stunningly whole following the wreck, decides to rebuild her.

Conveniently, or perhaps nefariously, he has access to a super-secret facility, where head-guy-in-charge Jonas (Miguel Ferrer) appears not a little annoyed on learning that Will has performed multiple hours of fantastically expensive surgery on his girlfriend. “Why didn’t somebody stop him?” wonders Jonas, leaving open just who that “somebody” would be. For a highest-tech, covert government-funded center, “Wolf Creek” is remarkably security-free. Ah well, sighs Jonas, un-monitored operations are “the price you pay for working with a so-called genius. Guess he must have left his IQ in the car.” One more time, Miguel Ferrer helps the medicine go down.

The rest of this first episode borrows from any number of sources, including Le Femme Nikita (including cursory counseling by Ruth [always good Molly Price]), nip/tuck, Dark Angel, the Aliens, and the Terminators, with surprisingly little direct connection to the original Lindsay Wagner series, itself derived from The Six Million Dollar Man. The price tag for new Jamie’s enhancements, Jonas announces dourly, is $50 million, which pays not only for the usual bionic arm, eye, legs, and ear, but also nanotechy anthrocites in her bloodstream, which exponentially accelerate healing. Jamie’s upset on waking to find herself so rebuilt revisits the episode’s opening questions, as “God’s work” is plainly jeopardized by Will’s Frankesteiny plotting, and Jamie has plainly not “altered” herself.

But wait. It turns out this last issue gets another go in Bionic Woman, namely, Sarah Corvus (Katee Sackhoff), who introduces herself to Jamie as “the first bionic woman.” Whether her count is accurate or not is unclear (Jonas’ unit has apparently been working out kinks for years), the point is that Sarah is also enhanced. And since her brief appearance during the premiere episode’s very first scene—exceptionally bloodied, seemingly psychotic, and shot mid-leap by a rueful Jae Kim (Will Yun Lee)—she’s been showing up in cryptic inserts with someone designated The Man (Thomas Kretschmann). Maybe lovers, maybe haters, they share excellent bodies, a love of makeup, a propensity for self-implanting and self-stitching, and serious condescension for mere mortals (the tourists at Disneyland, he sniffs, are “fat people with fat children walking around aimlessly").

On the run from Jonas and the Wolf Creek team for three years, Sarah presents herself to Jamie as both sympathetic sister and deadly rival, explaining the steps that will attend her change, steps the doctors have not explained and so catch Jamie off guard, as when her “ear and eye inputs come online,” assaulting her with “too much information” and sending her to the bathroom to vomit and sweat. As Jamie struggles with her hyper-evolution, Jonas watches and waits for Jamie to become “combat ready” and Will makes a feeble effort to declare her a “civilian,” just the girlfriend he happened to save using the program’s resources. “Everyone has to sing for their supper around here,” growls Jonas. The boys argue, stalk off to their corners, then argue again.

The girls, though, look promising. Granted, the initial Sarah-Jamie fight scene occasions the series’ first spectacular special-effectsy scene, as the women engage in some grandiose bionic-body slamming, on a rooftop at night during a pounding rainstorm (oh the drama!). But it’s clear their microchips connect them in some intuitive, overwhelming, even womanish way. They see each other in their dreams, they’re both mad at and distrustful of the men who remade them, and they look at each other with sincere appreciation.

And this bodes well. Even when Jonas’ smarmy effort to recruit/command Jamie suggests she’ll be conscripted into male fantasy à la Painkiller Jane), Sarah just might grant her another plot, maybe more like Aeon Flux (Peter Chung’s animated version, of course!). “I know what I’m capable of now,” Jamie tells Jonas. “So you send whoever you send, and I’ll bury one guy after the next.” It’s unclear whether this means she’s playing into Jonas’ self-described “game,” asserting her independence, or aligning herself with the stunningly red-lipped Sarah.

Bionic Woman (2007)

Start Date: Sep 26, 2007
By Gillian Flynn

At one point in Bionic Woman — NBC's sleeker, faster, cooler version of the 1970s series — a little girl looks out the window of a car to see the 2007-model Jaime Sommers (East Enders' Michelle Ryan) zipping through the woods like a cheetah. The child alerts her disbelieving mother, and then smiles: ''I just thought it was cool a girl could do that.''

Too much? Yes, too much! And yet, it's one of those moments you just have to shrug at and enjoy. Girls can do lots of things in this energetic, dark drama: They can leap buildings, cartwheel around rooftops, and pounce across rooms in flimsy hospital gowns. As rethought for the 21st century, Jaime is no mere girlfriend of Steve Austin. She's the girlfriend of a cute scientist (Will Anthros)! When a car smashup threatens Jaime's life, he copters her off to his underground lair, er, research facility, where the majority of her body parts — both legs, an arm, an ear, an eye — are replaced by futuristic military bionics. The compromise? She's now government property, and must participate in secret operations or be killed. When she's informed of this, her beau is apologetic, but not that apologetic: ''You're hardwired for highly specialized warfare, yes,'' he admits in a hilarious Oh, did I forget to mention that? moment.

But the writers need to tweak the irony: Bionic Woman is a flowery-feminist show whose go-girl premise depends on some dude asserting control over a young woman's body without her permission. Will this be a clever commentary on current sexual dynamics? Or just unimaginative storytelling? (The whole aggro-male vibe is partly due to poor casting: Anthros appears a good decade older than baby-faced Ryan, giving all their interactions a skeezy overlay.) Whether Bionic Woman plays with its contradictions and proves to be an insightful, allegorical series like exec producer David Eick's other show, Battlestar Galactica, remains to be seen. It could end up being simple, popcorny fun (no small feat), in which case the only other worry is Ryan. The Brit actress has the same brunet intensity as Alias' Jennifer Garner, but lacks the innate confidence. This absence is glaring anytime she's acting opposite slick, pissy Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar), who shows up as the very first bionic woman, gone bad, determined to get badder. ''I'm cutting away all the parts of me that are weak,'' she tells Jaime, creepily, before trying to kill her. The problem is, if you're a fan of Sackhoff's throaty, chin-jutty delivery, she absolutely overpowers the callow Ryan, and if you're not a fan of Sackhoff...she still overpowers Ryan. It's not going to get easier for the actress when the gravitas-enriched Isaiah Washington starts his guest arc in October. In short, this Bionic Girl had better hurry up and become a real Woman. B
Posted Sep 26, 2007

www.ew.com

"Bionic Woman" kicks in for NBC [ratings summary]
By Paul J. Gough, Reuters.com

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - The fall season shifted into high gear Wednesday with the first heated showdown between NBC's "Bionic Woman" and ABC's "Private Practice."

NBC's sci-fi drama prevailed in the coveted adults 18-49 demo, but ABC won the night overall, noticeably in total viewers and by the slimmest of margins in the demo.

After lackluster freshman premieres so far, Wednesday produced three strong launches -- "Bionic," "Practice" and NBC's "Life," which to date rank as the top three new series among adults 18-49. Word wasn't that good for another new ABC drama, "Dirty Sexy Money," which got off to a slow start.

Despite NBC's dominating performance from 9-11 p.m. with "Bionic" and "Life," ABC edged NBC by a tenth of a point to take its second nightly victory in the first three nights of the new TV season among the 18-49 demo. The network was bolstered by the third consecutive night of "Dancing With the Stars."

CBS' "Kid Nation" (7.6 million viewers, 2.8 rating/8 share in adults 18-49) and Fox's "Back to You" (7.5 million, 2.8/9) each lostr almost two million viewers from last week's premieres, bowing to ABC's "Dancing" (16.8 million, 4.1/12).

The 9 p.m. showdown between "Bionic Woman" and ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff -- along with the established "Criminal Minds" -- was won by "Bionic" (13.9 million, 5.7/14), which grew exponentially from its "Deal or No Deal" lead-in (8.9 million, 2.6/8) and logged NBC's best numbers for an NBC Wednesday series premiere since "The West Wing" in 1999.

"Practice" (14.4 million, 5.2/13) also did well, losing more than a million viewers in the half-hour but holding steady in adults 18-49. The season premiere of CBS' "Minds" (12.7 million, 3.5/9), with the last episode prominently featuring departing star Mandy Patinkin, couldn't keep up, slipping from last year's premiere by 22% in 18-49; neither could the second episode of Fox's "Kitchen Nightmares" (5.4 million, 2.5/6), which fell from last week (6.6 million, 3.1/8) against all-original competition.

NBC stayed in the game at 10 p.m. with a win for "Life" (9.9 million, 4.0/11). The Damian Lewis police drama won in the demo against ABC's "Dirty" (10.4 million, 3.6/10) and the season premiere of CBS' "CSI: NY" (12.7 million, 3.7/10), which was down 26% among 18-49 from last season's premiere.