I have seen the pilot for the new Bionic Woman and it doesn’t completely suck.
Sure, the editing is a little first-year film school: bump cuts with virtually no narrative transition. Yep, they need to work on the tech; those heads-up displays need to be readable or they need to go.
Absolutely, the dialogue is a little flat, as is the lead actress (note to Michelle Ryan: develop more than one facial expression; the deer-in-headlights look is only going to carry it for about another episode, maybe an episode and a half).
And sure the inciting incident in the narrative (yes, I’m like that little kid in The Sixth Sense only with story structure instead of dead people) is a brutally realistic car accident that will have you flinching harder that those execrable VW commercials from last year.
But Will Yun Lee and Miguel Ferrer look like they’re ready dig in and create characters with believable conflicts and motivations, and damn Katee Sackhoff does evil so well; she makes me want to be bad.
It will be interesting to see what NBC does with the pilot given the protests from deaf advocacy groups over the fact that Corporate <gasp> didn’t have the foresight to cast an actually deaf/hearing impaired actress to play a deaf character. But given the way they’ve reframed the organization behind the bionics program, if they can get their act together once they’ve gotten by all the backstory the series looks like it will be chock full of chewy, conspiracy laden, good vs. evil vs. man’s inherently grayscale nature goodness.