Friday Night Bionic Woman?
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This news is a little stale at this point but I figured I'd collect a couple of items to burn off some time on this very fine Tuesday morning, during which I'd rather sleep through. There are three things going on right now and it's too early to know if any of them have much significance, although when you add them together, things aren't looking so rosy for this remake that absolutely nobody was actually asking for.
First off the top is news that NBC ordered a couple of extra scripts for their top performing new fall shows (notice I said new, not overall) which means they'll likely have those shot and put in the can for airing sometime later this year, or perhaps in early January when they'll start running out of scripts because writers got sick of being cheated for the past two decades and went on strike.
Bionic Woman was one of these shows that got the extra script orders, though we're only talking about 3-5 here. So that's the good news, and really the only good news thus far.
The bad news is that while Bionic Woman's pilot started out with better numbers than Heroes (though not in the demo) those numbers have since fallen every single week for the first three episodes. On a personal note, I thought the third and most recent episode was a huge improvement over the month-old-garbage that was 1x02 - that was such epic junk that they ought to save it for future generations of writers to learn what not to do...ever.
Starting with 14 million viewers overall, Bionic Woman dropped to 11 million and 10.1. The first hit hurt the most, but dropping a million per week is going to get this show killed extremely fast. With what it probably costs to make, I doubt NBC will keep it around below 8 million unless the demo becomes competitive.
And for the worst news of all, the show has lost yet another executive producer after EP Glen Morgan quit over creative differences with NBC, and is now being run by the show runner for Friday Night Lights, one of NBC's ratings challenged series holdovers from last year. Along with 30 Rock, FNL isn't like to survive for a third year and is suffering even worse ratings problems this year.
Like they say, in Hollywood, people fail upwards.
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