Fall TV -- Does the Bionic Woman Premiere Live Up to Its Predecessor? -- a Review

From 1974 to 1980 (or thereabouts), you'd be hard pressed to find a set of kids who hadn't played Bionic Woman or Six Million Dollar Man in their backyard. All of us got a certain thrill from emulating the shows cheesy effects. We ran in slow motion to show how fast we were really going. We slowly lifted incredibly heavy things (like cardboard boxes and small rocks) in our back yard, and of course, we jumped from things, always saying "do do do do do do do do do do" in our lame imitation of the "bionic" sound effect on the shows.

If we were lucky, we even had the dolls, with their gross "skin" and bionic modules.

Oddly though, I couldn't tell you the plot of a single episode.

In an odd bit of reinvention, NBC is bringing us a remake of the Bionic Woman, which jettisons its hokey origins in 70s actions to create a darker series.

The show's disturbing opening sequence has a military style operation walking down a corridor of dead bodies. They get to the source of the dead bodies, a bionic woman who has gone insane.

The show then turns its focus to Jamie Sommers (Michele Ryan), a bartender who is dating a college professor and surgeon, Will Anthros (Chris Bowers). Her home life is a mess, as she is helping to take care of her younger sister following the death of her mother and an absentee father. One night, following a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, she is almost killed in a horrific accident (nicely shot, but stolen directly from a VW ad). An eye, ear, both legs, and an arm are all destroyed in the accident. Her surgeon boyfriend, who turns out to work for an organization that has developed the bionic technology for military purposes, decides to save her life by turning Jamie into a bionic woman, leading to an effectively creepy scene in which Jamie is told a good part of her body is no longer hers.

Unfortunately, the organization her boyfriend works for is worried about Jamie going insane because of the bionics, and wants to control and/or eliminate her. Her boyfriend decides to help her escape, where she gets to discover her bionic powers on her own and find out the truth about her car accident.