Review: Bionic Woman
UPDATE: The ratings are in and Bionic Woman did quite well with 13.9 million viewers. It built on it’s lead in from Deal or No Deal and in fact grew even more in the second half of the show. Sweet.
You know of the three premiers I was looking forward to (the other two being Chuck and Heroes) this was definitely my favourite. Which is not to say that Bionic Woman blew my mind, but it seemed like a very solid pilot to me, they’ve definitely got me watching the show.
It didn’t hurt that BSG vet Arron Douglas (Chief!) made a cameo in addition to Katee Sackhoff’s presence. But beyond that I think it was an interesting show all on it’s own. The scope seems very small, which I appreciate, and it was personality driven. There’s just enough mystery and backstory to keep things together and interesting, but they don’t beat you over the head with it *cough*heroes*cough*lost*.
I think the acting, while certainly not the best was good enough to not be distracting. If there’s one big problem with the show it’s that it feels very cold. All the friendly relationships in the show were portrayed very clinically - while it didn’t prevent me from believing they were friends/lovers/sisters I didn’t particularly love any of those scenes. They were just good enough to make the relationship believable but didn’t really do much for the show. Even the color palette of the show was very cold, all blue and grey everywhere. Hopefully things’ll warm up as the season goes on.
Parts of it were also confusing, essentially Katee Sackhoff’s motivation throughout the show. This could be remedied in subsequent shows - but it was hard to gather what was going on when and where she was involved. That could turn into something interesting putting you in Michelle Ryan’s place of not knowing much. But if we were actually supposed to infer her actions from the few scenes she was in with the other nefarious bad guy, well, then that’d be awful.
I do like the re-envisioning of the Bionic Woman as some empowered lady with real world problems. For me that’s why the first season of the Soprano’s was unmatched in that series - it was a tiny show that focused on the domestic problems of this big mobster. Granted, at times David Eick was a little ham fisted in driving the girl power point home like when the girl in the car says “I just thought it was cool that a girl could do that” after seeing Katee running alongside the car for a bit. But you know, it was fine.
Easily the best of the premiers (although, I’m still kinda waffling on whether or not to give Reaper a shot… the pilot was directed by Kevin Smith, hrm..). There’s obviously room for improvement, but none of the problems I had really distracted me from enjoying pretty much the entire episode. The show could definitely go either way, but I’m pretty optimistic given how much I enjoyed the pilot and how I do love Eick’s work. I think the internet kinda didn’t like it? Did you?
