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You have to be of a certain age to remember The Bionic Woman, the late Seventies TV series that spun off from The Six Million Dollar Man and later spawned several made-for-TV movies reuniting Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) and Steve Austin (Lee Majors), the woman and man in question. It was brought to mind by Scott Collins' article for the Chicago Tribune, "New 'Bionic Woman' battles the old image" (May 28, 2007). "Of all the new fall series unveiled by the broadcast networks recently in New York," Collins writes, "the title that got the most attention" was Bionic Woman (no The), a remake of the show that originally aired from 1976 to 1978.
Well, maybe not anything as declasse as a "remake": rather it's a "re-imagining," NBC execs explain to Collins, reflecting an "industry trend toward darker, more complicated stories and characters than would have been imaginable in the three-network era." Forget the "cheesy" humor of the original, not to mention the Bionic Woman lunchboxes with matching thermoses beloved by schoolgirls thirty years ago (available on eBay for $20, Collins reports). And be prepared for a re-imagined Jaime Sommers: "What does it mean to be an empowered woman in the 21st Century?", executive producer David Eick wonders. For starters, whereas the Lindsay Wagner version was a tennis pro whose radical surgery followed a skydiving mishap (her parachute didn't open), the new Jaime (Michelle Ryan) is a bartender who nearly dies in a "horrific" car accident. Hmm.
"Cheesy" doesn't begin to describe the original series, so ludicrous as to approach the sublime. (Remember the episode in which Jaime was disguised as a nun?) As with so many products of the televised imagination, there was a doubleness to the premise, barely developed in the series itself yet present beneath the surface. On the one hand, Jaime Sommers was a corny Role Model of empowerment (hence all those girls with their lunchpails), coeval with Ms. magazine and "I Am Woman" and watered down for TV consumption. On the other hand, the show raised profound questions about embodiment, especially for its male viewers. (What did the bionic woman look like with her clothes off? What would it be like to make love with a bionic woman? And so on.)
Jaime Sommers is a primitive model of the cyborgs who turned up a few years later in William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy. On the other side of the family, she's related to mermaids and seal-women and fox-women. Plenty of imaginative capital there, but the original series, as if by perverse deliberation, settled for gimmicky kitsch. Will the re-imagined series do any better? I'm not sure, though I'm tempted to check it out in the fall. In the meantime, here are a few ideas for shows I'd like to see.
Bionic Housewife. Madison Miles is a young lawyer on the fast track. She and her husband, also a lawyer, have a daughter who is enrolled in an elite preschool. Madison is fluent in Chinese, Arabic, and Turkish and unwinds by playing the saz (a long-necked Turkish lute: the theme music for the series will feature Talip Ozkan). In the first episode, Madison is rushing to pick up her daughter when she is broadsided at an intersection by a drunk driver. When she regains consciousness, she finds herself in what looks like a futuristic hospital room. Turns out that Department 911, a shadowy unit formed when Homeland Security got bogged down in bureaucracy, has been keeping an eye on Madison with hopes of recruiting her. Intervening after her accident, they have rebuilt her shattered body. She is now a bionic woman.
The plan calls for her to resign from the law firm and become a stay-at-home mom who does a little "consulting" on the side: cover for occasional clandestine trips abroad. Many of her friends, despite their sympathy for her after the accident, berate her for her decision to give up a very promising career. After all, they argue, she seems to have made a phenomenal recovery. Now she's setting such a bad example.
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