Snap Judgment TV, Part 2: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

So, here it is. The entirely unnecessary TV prequel to the already entirely unnecessary Terminator 3. Like that movie, it has zero involvement from James Cameron; and also like that movie, it's about ten times more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Let's start with the credits. The pilot was written by Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, The Black Dahlia) and directed by David Nutter (Smallville, Without a Trace, and roughly every other major TV pilot in the last eight years) under the supervision of fellow executive producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, who founded the legendarily money-hemorrhaging studio Carolco in the 80s and, upon its collapse, held onto their Terminator rights with an Ultimate Fighting Champion-esque vice grip.

The choice of Lena Headey in the title role heralds the advent of a younger, prettier, and more British Sarah Connor than we've seen before. She certainly looks nothing like Linda Hamilton, but then again, neither does Thomas Dekker (the new John Connor) look remotely like an accurate representation of the developmental stage between Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl, so I guess it's safe to say that we're kind of throwing the movies out the window at this point. Which is fine with me, since, as I already said, the show is entirely unnecessary -- and, let's face it, potentially harmful -- to the continuity of the films. Essentially what the creators said here is, screw whatever happens before or after this timeline and let's just make a big-budget show about a bazooka-toting paranoiac mom and her maladjusted kid laying low in suburban America for a few minutes at a time until another killer cyborg blows their house up and they just barely escape; then let's do that again the next week but see if we can get, say, Luke Wilson to do a guest spot.

That's what they appear to be doing, anyway, for the first 15-20 minutes of the show. And then... But soft! What Summer Glau in yonder window breaks! And by "breaks," I mean "turns out to be a good-guy female Terminator masquerading as a high school student." (This, of course, is where that "abandoning all notions of continuity" thing really helps, since you'd think Nick Stahl might have mentioned this little anecdote at some point in Terminator 3 while he was cooped up in the back of a truck with Claire Danes for about a decade with nothing to talk about. But anyway.) So the SummerNator, naturally, kicks all manner of evil cyborg ass and helps our fresh-faced mother and son* escape; and by this point we're comfortably ensconced in the narrative structure employed by all three movies.

Except, wait! In the timeline of the show, it's still the late 90's! That means no iPhones, Priuses, or Fall Out Boy! Whence the product placement opportunities? Whence, goddamit?!

Oh, they've got that taken care of. You think anything is going to get between a big network and its chance to feature the Wii in a prominent scene? Please.

So, unsarcastically, how good is the show, really? It's good. At least for the time being, it's good enough to make me forget that it's telling the same exact story as three movies I've already seen, the last two of which had bigger budgets than an entire season of this show. On the other hand, speaking of entire seasons, I must admit I have a lot of trouble understanding how they're going to drag this out for the promised twelve episodes. Will Sarah turn out to be evil? Will John and the SummerNator attempt to defy the taboo against human-cyborg love? Will any of them find out who killed Laura Palmer? Recycling the usual Bad-Terminator-vs.-Good-Terminator-plus-humans action on a TV budget (even a big one) was a pretty impressive feat -- and yet a small one compared with sustaining a running time equivalent to five more movies. We'll just have to wait and see what the producers have in store for us as (or, well, if) the show goes on. My guess? Violence!

*In this case, mother and son are only fourteen years apart in real life. This is a calculated risk on behalf of the network: on one side of the scale there's the marketing advantage of providing nubile eye candy to both sexes; on the other side, the danger of a verisimilitude-killing offscreen romance.

Snap Judgment TV, Part 1: Bionic Woman

(Big disclaimer here. The pilot I watched will most assuredly not be the one that hits the airwaves in the fall; in fact, except for one thing, I have zero idea how much will be changed in the meantime. Here are my thoughts nonetheless.)

In a post-Buffy/Alias/Heroes TV landscape, remaking Bionic Woman with today's special effects and mass-marketing technology seems like at least as safe a bet as any other show that gets millions poured into it before being yanked from the schedule by Thanksgiving. And yet, when I was a lowly staffer at USA back in 2003-04 (they owned the rights back then), this property just sat on the shelf as producer after producer came in to pitch his or her take on it -- none of them able to fashion an idea exciting enough to get funding. (Rob Thomas was actually one of the closest to making it happen; I'm not sure why his deal fell through, but clearly it was a boon to the future fans of a tiny wisecracking detective.) In case you're curious, the team that ended up bringing it to fruition is comprised of:

• David Eick, co-developer of Battlestar Galactica;
• Jason Smilovic and Michael Dinner, writer/director team behind notable NBC cancellations Karen Sisco and Kidnapped; and
• Laeta Kalogridis, screenwriter of Pathfinder and Alexander but also -- more importantly -- also of the many who took a stab at Wonder Woman. Plus, she did that totally awesome (in a finger-quotey way) WB show Birds of Prey, about crime-fighting Batgirls.

So, let's see. High-priced producers? Check. Fancy network effects budget? Check. Unknown British actress in title role, ripe for exploitive long-term contract? Check! So how, pray tell, do these elements manifest themselves on the smallish screen?

The answer: not terribly! (And really, "terribly" was a definite possibility. "Worse than Dark Angel*" was a possibility.)

Anyway, here's the deal on the plot. There's this bartender chick whose boyfriend is a super-smart professor and surgeon. They get into a horrible car accident one night in which the bartender chick is almost killed but the surgeon boyfriend walks away with injuries minor enough to allow him to perform surgery on her that same night. The surgery he performs on her is somewhat outside the scope of your typical Addison Montgomery or Rocket Romano-type TV sawbones, since by the time he finishes, the bartender chick has the combined powers of Trinity, most of the Incredibles, and Mad-Eye Moody.

Also, instead of Seattle Grace or Cook County, the procedure is done in the bowels of a super-secret facility in beautiful foresty Vancouver which is run by Miguel Ferrer and an Eastern European woman vaguely reminiscent of Frau Farbissina from Austin Powers. The super-secret facility people are like, "Um, boyfriend dude? Who gave you permission to turn your girlfriend into She-Ra?" And he's like, "She was totally going to die [from that same car crash that I needed about two band-aids from] and obviously the only option was to shoot her full of experimental nanobots, so lay off!"

Super-surgeon boyfriend helps her escape the facility, and the stage is set for all kinds of mayhem, some of it involving another Bionic Woman whose intense need for love leads her to maladaptive coping mechanisms like killing people and destroying stuff. There's also a lot of plotty stuff about the shady scientific Vancouver-forest club and what they're all about. And the bartender has a deaf sister played by Ann from Arrested Development, except she's now been replaced by a girl who was a finalist on American Juniors (a.k.a. American Idol II: Electric Tween-A-Loo), so at least that part of the show will have been re-shot by the time it airs.

* * * *

The upshot is this: Bionic Woman tries really hard to be fun and believable and succeeds occasionally in both areas. In and of itself, the pilot's not a life-changer. Mostly it's there to lay the groundwork, introduce us to the players, tell us what's at stake. Yes, generally speaking, if a pilot can do all that and still be remotely watchable, it's an impressive achievement. (It's also why almost every pilot you see is either written or rewritten by one of a dozen or so people.)

But I gotta say, I can't ignore the bar that the Alias pilot set for the whole "ass-kicking girl involved in some pseudo-government conspiracy type deal" genre, even though that bar was so high that Alias itself stopped being able to clear it after the first couple seasons. I was hoping Bionic Woman would knock me on my ass to at least half that degree, and it didn't. It's too all over the place to be a real nail-biter; the exciting parts keep getting interrupted so the show can remind us how many other characters we're supposed to be paying attention to. Which, again, is excusable since a pilot's most important goal is to demonstrate that there's potential for a series.

And yeah, I think there is. The acting and writing is up to par, the action and effects are good and even occasionally stellar, and there's enough intrigue and unanswered questions to provide hope for some interesting twists down the road. In other words, it'll be good as long as it keeps getting better. I'm reasonably confident that NBC is motivated not to screw this up in the wake of Heroes being such a cash/publicity cow (not that any Hollywood entity ever really learns from experience, ever); but the next few episodes will, obviously, be the real evidence of that. And all I know about what happens next is that Isaiah Washington is coming on for a several-episode guest stint. Hey, maybe they'll finally let him be gay.


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*Dark Angel was a James Cameron-produced crap-tacle on Fox, circa 2000, that committed three of the most grievous sins in TV history: sucking, really sucking, and launching Jessica Alba's career.)