Bionic Woman is dead. Again.
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This show was troubled and probably doomed right from the very beginning. We've seen some success with this reboot/reimagining phenomena over the past couple of years in Battlestar Galactica on the television side of things, and Batman Begins on the feature side.It can work and in some cases with wonderful results, but that doesn't mean it will work, nor it is reason enough to try. It also helps not to force out the show's creator and begin a revolving door of showrunners before the first episode even hits the airwaves.
NBC did precisely that, and not-so-shockingly the results are a whole lot of people looking for new jobs:
Although NBC isn't talking, I'm told by multiple sources that Bionic staffers were informed late last week that the troubled reboot has indeed been canceled. That means no spring relaunch under new show-runner Jason Cahill -- which is too bad. Cahill's a talented guy (see: The Sopranos), and I was anxious to see what he would do with the show. But I guess it wasn't meant to be.
You kind of got that feeling all along that this series was in the kind of tailspin that you just don't recover from. If you haven't got the right person to lead the series right from the beginning, the pilot and first half of the season are going to feel aimless and confused, and sometimes you're going to have that no matter what, but this just makes it worse. That describes Bionic Woman in a nutshell -- it never had the time to break out of the mold and actually took several steps backwards right away by making a virtual parody (without the funny) of a Million Dollar Man episode that really just made me want to scream.
I'm sorry to hear it, because I know that regardless of the result, a lot of people worked damn hard to make this show a good one, and with the messed up pilot season because of the strike, they may be out of work for a spell because of this.
It can't feel good to have your work crapped on, and then get fired basically, but that doesn't really change reality here. This show was pretty terrible, it was a bad idea and should have never been done in the first place. But if Bionic Woman was, as Michael Ausiello said, "the most spectacular freshman flame-out of the 07-08 TV season", does that mean the next award will be handed to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles?
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