Bionic Woman

May 1st, 2008 · No Comments

I’m still planning to finish my buying guide for Mother’s Day but it is very time intensive to write a post like that and i’ve not had the time today to get to it yet!

Instead i’m going to cover Bionic Woman - Volume One which I just finished watching on DVD a couple of days ago.

First off, the title of the DVD set is a bit mis-leading and i’m not sure what NBC was shooting for by calling it Volume One instead of just saying “The Complete Series”. The DVD set consists of two DVDs with 4 episodes on each disc and a few, extremely short extras. Overall, i’m not very impressed with the extras and time they put into the release, but the image quality and sound is good with no transfer issues on my DVD.

Now, on to the show itself - I love it! I really got hooked into the show after about 2 episodes and early on they had some really strong guest starring by Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica. She left after a few episodes though in the show which was never really explained (she had to go film season 4 of BSG is why it happened I think). They also picked up some threads and then didn’t revisit them which was kind of annoying, but given they only had 8 episodes and didn’t know they were going to get cancelled (thanks writer’s strike!) I can’t completely blame them for it.

Be warned going in: the show has no “end” to it, it just leaves off as a regular episode in episode 8 and leaves you hanging. There are no more episodes and probably never will be of this great show that got canned by NBC after the writer’s strike was over. There is no “official” release from NBC saying that the show is canceled but the actors have all gone back to other jobs and there are no more episodes for season 1 for sure.

I really liked the show a lot because it reminded me of what a weekly super-hero/Matrix type show would look like. The Bionic Woman had super speed (could run around 60 mph), super jumping like the Matrix between buildings etc, super hearing, super vision and super strength (a la superman). The main actress, British new-to-hollywood Michelle Ryan was great in her role even if a lot of critics panned her for some reason. Other than the issues I mentioned above where plot threads weren’t carried to conclusion, the show was off to a fairly good start and the network had hired a new show runner to pick up after the writer’s strike ended so I was looking forward to good things. I guess spending $6 million per episode on a show that was tanking in the ratings wasn’t a reasonable business investment though so Bionic Woman will share the fate of shows that are usually shown on FOX (Bionic Woman was on NBC): still-born, poorly marketed and the only memory being a one-off DVD set.