Flight Test: Bionic Woman

"Reer!" "Catfight!"

Back when Michelle Ryan first joined Eastenders, I was still at college and my love for American TV felt like a relatively rarified thing. Before the impact of HBO and The Sopranos in particular, my schoolmates argued that American comedy didn't translate very well and that American drama was generally vacuous, overblown garbage, and all my attempts to convince them otherwise met with very little success. It was a very frustrating time. It is a great shame, therefore, that Michelle Ryan's appearance in NBC’s much-hyped Bionic Woman (Tuesdays, ITV2) might just give the dying argument fresh ammunition.

To be completely fair, there aren’t that many things to complain about. Michelle Ryan does a passable job as Jaime Sommers as her world is turned upside-down, Katee Sackhoff is fun as the murderous original “Bionic Woman” and the show looks really nice and sleek throughout. Unfortunately, good looks do not a good show make, and the Bionic Woman is showing all the signs of a classic bimbo.

Rushing through the story faster than Jaime Sommers can run, the script played like a bad action movie; all set pieces with no real effort at all put into bridging them together. Important things would happen and where you would expect some kind of emotional fall-out, there would be one line of dialogue to gloss over it and lead merrily into to the next big scene. I couldn’t believe my ears when Jaime’s fiancé broke the news that she’d lost her baby by essentially saying, "it’s all cool, you’re not damaged down there so we’ll go again". It was crazy. It was as if a 90-minute pilot got trimmed down to 45-minutes by cutting out all of the character work. And where the slightest touch of artistry – a telling conversation or subtle look – might have earned the show some emotional investment, there was nothing. It was everything my old schoolmates used to protest US drama was.

The question now is whether it will improve or not, and it’s hard to be optimistic. Already looking dead in the water in the US and unlikely to be given a reprieve, there’s no good reason to think there will be time for things to get better. In fact, having seen the original version of the pilot and liking it more than the final one, I might even suggest things are already heading in the wrong direction and will only get worse.

Unless you have absolutely nothing better to do on a Tuesday night it's probably not worth your time.