The Bionic Dud
When I was a kid, I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. When I heard that the team that put together Battlestar Galactica was remaking The Bionic Woman, I thought for sure the show would do well.
Yesterday afternoon, I got an email from Amazon which was an offer to download certain NBC shows for free from their Unboxing service. I did hear that you could grab The Bionic Woman from iTunes, but as much of a tech geek I am, I’m still tied to watching TV and movies on a TV/projector. I still don’t like watching shows and movies on a desktop computer monitor. Intrigued, I clicked the link and of course, it was Windows only. That didn’t sit well with me and I was about to close the page when I noticed the little TiVo logo. It turns out that if you have a TiVo Series 3, you can link your TiVo to your Amazon account, and then tell the TiVo to download the show. Now that’s wicked, so I did it.
After the kids went to bed, my wife and I decided to watch the show. I don’t know what brainchild at NBC was thinking this up, but the show was 4×3 letterboxed and mono, which means that on a 16×9 HTDV, not only did you get black bars on the top and bottom, but on the sides, making the show hard to watch without fiddling with the video controls (which I don’t like to do). The mono track was a terrible mistake, it wasn’t even in stereo.
The show was just awful. Somewhere along the line Jamie Sommers was demoted from tennis pro to bartender. You would think that you’d want someone with a little athleticism in them to be a soldier for the company that put her together. Her boyfriend is a neurosurgeon. If you think that these two don’t belong together, you’re right. The writers even put a scene in there where they ask each other why they’re together. This is top-notch Emmy stuff, folks.
The biggest oversight is when Jamie and her boyfriend are out to dinner and she takes a sip of wine just before she says “I’m pregnant”. Sweetie, put the wine down and have a water with lemon.
I’m not going to give any spoilers away, but there are plot holes you can throw a Sasquach through. So much of the show just didn’t make sense. I swear, don’t these people have focus groups anymore? Nobody noticed the problems with the plot? It doesn’t take a lot of work to rewrite a line here and there to make the show consistent.
Another thing wrong with the show is that it needs time to unfold the story more. There’s so much jammed into 44 minutes that it makes you wonder why they didn’t turn this into a two-hour or two-part premiere.
So between the Amazon Unboxing not up to speed and the show itself being a dud, I’ll be staying away from both.
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[...] Originally Posted by scottiB Letterboxed I can somewhat understand, but mono? Other than that, how was the show? Starman’s Blog