Bionic Woman (2007)

Bionic Woman (2007) is a remake of The Bionic Woman. Both series center on a lead female character named Jaime Sommers, though the two incarnations are played by different actresses, and have different stories, backgrounds, and personalities.

The show took a hiatus due to the 2007-08 Writers' Strike, and was cancelled.

Laeta Kalogridis is one of the writers attached to this series.

Cast

Female characters (all white):

• Michelle Ryan as Jaime Sommers
• Lucy Kate Hale as Becca Sommers
• Molly Price as Ruth Truewell
• Katee Sackhoff as Sarah Corvus (recurring)

Male characters:

• Miguel Ferrer as Jonas Bledsoe
• Will Yun Lee as Jae Kim
• Isaiah Washington as Antonio Pope
• Chris Bowers as Will Anthros
• Mark Sheppard as Dr. Anthony Anthros

Note: Mae Whitman was originally cast as Becca in the pilot. At that point, the character was deaf. When Becca was recast for the retooled pilot and the series, her disability was also written out.

Comments

Annalee Newitz at Alternet compared the premise of the old vs. the new series:

This time around, Jaime isn't an independent career jock: she's a 23-year-old bartender and college dropout who has just gotten pregnant and is about to marry her surgeon boyfriend. (...)

This kind of weirdly retrograde treatment of Jaime and her relationship is all the more perplexing because the show is produced by David Eick, whose other show, Battlestar Galactica, is known for its strong female characters. Indeed, when Eick talked about Bionic Woman before the show debuted, he claimed it would focus on how we feel about women's roles now that we know women can do anything men can. Jaime is hardly the kind of woman to tell that sexual equality story. She's in a low-status, low-paying job, looking down the barrel of her future as little more than a rich man's wife.

(...) the entire premise of the show -- that Jaime becomes a "saving the world" type -- is founded on the idea that she has no choice because her body literally does not belong to her. Most of her body parts are the property of a corporation. We are left to assume that if she refuses to do what Wolf Creek tells her, they'll take their toys back and she'll die.

The show was not well-received. Some months after its demise, Katee Sackhoff said of it:

What went wrong on Bionic Woman, where she played the psychotic original bionic woman, was that there were "too many cooks" and "too many hands in the pot. You can't agree on what you're trying to make, [so] you get a stew that's full of shit." (At least that's what that last part sounded like to me.)

External Links

• IMDb listing
• NBC Fall Preview (include video clips)
• Television Without Pity episode recaps

References

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