A "Bionic" Mess

I watched the pilot episode for Bionic Woman today and would recommend that none of you do the same. It was probably the most boring 43 minutes of my day thus far. It was highly stylized, super-glossy production and slick editing skills were employed to, presumably, help cover up the fact that the characters were flat, dialogue a snore and some scenes had absolutely no flow from one act to the next. By the time the action starts to ramp up for the final act, there is virtually no emotional interest spent on the characters, not even on the main character herself. (The actress does a decent job with her role, but she can't save the show, in my humble opinion. She is the episode's two bright spots, the other being the villianness' almost-pithy dialogue in the final showdown.)

Forgetting for a moment that it's supposed to be a "re-imagining" of the classic TV series, this episode felt very un-original. A young woman who is thrust unknowingly into a much deeper, darker plot than she ever thought possible? That's Alias there. So is the fact that the Bionic Woman works in a trashy nightclub/bar just a homage to all of Alias? (The show's later seasons were known for having the "eurotrash bar of the week.") The best un-original element of the show is that the main villianness smokes. (Smoking is, of course, now the universal way for TV and movie stories to tell us that this character is e-v-i-l.) The way the characters stood, facing one another often felt wooden and unnatural, as if they were trying to be cool, but couldn't pull it off.

NBC was wise not to pair this show with the ADHD-like Heroes. Watching a fast-moving disjointed show leaves little time to dwell upon the many shortcomings when you are actually watching it. Bionic Woman leaves you plenty of time to consider what else might be airing Wednesdays at 9 pm. Could the show get better? Pretty much, I think that's it's only option. But I don't care enough to find out.

3:50 UPDATE: I just finished watching the pilot for Chuck and enjoyed that a lot. It was so funny, it could almost be a show on the USA network! (Which, okay, NBC and USA are owned by the same parent network. But, as of late, USA has had much more enjoyable programming than NBC.) It's not a great show, but I think I'll probably give it a go for a few episodes to see if it can stay as fun and campy as the first episode was. (Chuck is made by the creator of The OC, so there might even be a "built-in" fan base for the show already! Plus, the geek talk? I didn't understand most of it but the way it was said made it really funny.)

(BTW, I'm watching these courtesy of NBC through AmazonUnbox, which takes as long to install as Apple's iTunes does, which is really not a great thing at all. But, these episodes were free so I'm not going to argue much.)

Not 3:50, but LATER UPDATE: I'll say one more maybe negative thing about Bionic Woman, and that it did actually have a very distinctive The Matrix-esque feel about it. Which, if there were only one Matrix movie and no franchise, this would have been extremely cool. (Even the show's opening "sound effect" is like the Matrix version of the Lost opening.) But in a post-Matrix Revolutions world, I'm curious as to why anybody would make anything that has even a hint of a Matrix feel to it.

Okay, I need to stop hating on it, because for all I know, it's just the first episode that's flat and the rest of the show is awesome. (It's happened many times over... Pilot episodes can sometimes be a bad judge of a series overall. They shouldn't, but, they can be.)