Is Bionic Woman Any Good? Nah nah nah nah nah... No no no no no no

I've tried to hold off on weighing in on NBC's Bionic Woman. The blogiverse is aflame with complaints of the show being an abomination: too dark, too sexual (a booze-fueled bathroom hookup kicked off the second episode), too lame. By now, you already know the premise of this 're-imagined' version of the 70s-era action series: 20something bartender girl raising her teen sis while dating genetics professor... brutal car crash... geneticist beau saves 20something bartender by tricking her out with $50 Million worth of bionics (arm, eye, ear, legs)... covert special ops force (think Blackwater with an intellect) behind the bionics... all manner of ass-kicking superwoman mayhem ensues. But after sitting through three episodes, I can no longer hold my tongue. Unfortunately, the show does not have legs, and I can't imagine it will last past this first season before being relegated to cable's Sci-Fi network where it so obviously belongs.

Bionic Woman is a convoluted mess of a TV show and makes about as much sense as a cut scene from a third-rate video game on a first generation PlayStation. No amount of sultry, pouty-lipped, blue-eyed sexiness via Michelle Ryan (who plays Jaime Sommers) can save this show from baffling plotting, a failed narrative structure, and god awful writing that no self-respecting fanboy should ever tolerate. Then again, I'm a grown adult, and this is clearly a show custom-made for ADHD-afflicted middle schoolers. The amount of narrative leapfrogging the show expects viewers to commit to as we follow Sommers from proletariat barkeep to military-grade killing machine is one thing. Serving up an actress who is unconvincing in the role is quite another. Gorgeous as she is, Ryan is either miscast as the lead, or one of the worst actresses of our time. It's virtually impossible to have any concern for the psyche or the feelings of Jaime 2.0, partly because she went from naive to sassy in the span of a commercial break. The banter between Ryan and Miguel Ferrer's Jonas character (he runs the secret agency) is some of the worst writing on TV (she speaks to him as if he's a sorority pledge, and he takes it like a pantywaist every time while casually reminding her that he owns the $50 million worth of hardware fused into her body). Jaime has more disdain for the man who runs the secret unit that created her new self than her bionic doppleganger Sarah Corvus (Katee Sackhoff), the woman who snuffed out her geneticist fiance.

This then, brings up another glaring problem with the show: The Sarah Corvus story arc ("the first bionic woman" who, somewhere along the way, went bad and had to be put down like a rabid dog in the first scene of the series) is much more compelling than the story arc of Jaime Sommers. Sackhoff, who also plays Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, burns up the screen as Sarah Corvus; you want to know how Corvus came to where she is today, and what is fueling her rage (beyond the bullet to the head). She even takes bionically bad dialogue ("Why don't you just hang yourself or something?" she says to a spoiled trust fund kid in episode three) and makes it digestible. A better setup for the show would've been to give the Sommers character the Corvus storyline and have her evolve over the course of the season from an enraged revenge-seeking hellion to a willing super soldier in the ongoing battle to "prevent rogue groups from ending civilization as we know it."

There are other supporting characters who serve as filler for situation room scenes, and they simply aren't worth getting into here. Jaime's little sis is a 'troubled teen' who doesn't seem to serve any narrative purpose. Will Yun Lee plays Jaime's trainer, teaching her how to harness her bionic fighting skills (he also had a relationship with Sarah Corvus, and was forced to execute her in the pilot episode). Much has been made of the addition of Isaiah Washington, who will forever exist with a figurative red "H" branded onto his chest. His character is plagued by equally bad dialogue: watching his constipated acting makes one think he's in it for the paycheck and a bit of salvation. The rest of the supporting cast is made up of super techs who run all the software and do a bunch of server-switching stuff that you can bet won't be explained as effectively as they do it on Fox's 24.

Which serves as a nice segue for how this show fails to live up to expectations. Network TV has embraced the idea of the ass-kicking superchick over the years, which is a good thing when done right (think the first two seasons of Alias, or the first several episodes of Dark Angel). There's also a glut of TV shows that have taken the mythological tack of The X-Files and attempt to tell a single, interwoven story that takes entire seasons to unfold. What made The X-Files work was that each episode stands alone, regardless of whether it dealt with one-off "monster of the week" stories or mythology-based installments dealing with the alien-human hybrid conspiracy. The other piece is quality writing, which The X-Files had in droves. Lost also has quality writing, as does 24 (if you don't count the final seven hours of Day 6), and NBC's Heroes (which has proven quite deft in handling it's multiple, sprawling storylines). Despite waiting entire seasons for resolution, the sophistication and gravitas of the shows retain viewers for the duration. Bionic Woman tries hard and fails miserably to lasso in fans of the original series, while catering to a 12-24 demographic that speaks in abbreviated colloquialisms ("c u L8r", "rofl", etc.). And when there are options on basic and pay cable that really showcase brilliant writing and daring subject matter (Damages, Dexter, Nip/Tuck, etc.), what's the use in waiting around for Bionic Woman to find it's voice?