I gave a slightly lukewarm third-episode verdict of The Class last week. This week, it’s actually gone up again in my estimation. Quite a cracker of an episode, both funny and interesting, with more plot and character development. So if you’re looking for a new sitcom, my verdict is The Class is the one to go for.
Year: 2006
News
Bionic Woman to return as superwoman
Back in the 70s and 80s, there was a whole fleet of bionics shows: The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors, which slowly metamorphosed from being rather an interesting spy show into a lump of rubbish kids’ sci-fi show; and The Bionic Woman, a spin-off starring Lindsay Wagner, which from day one was a lump of old rubbish about a bionic schoolteacher who also does spy work on the side. There was also a pilot, The Bionic Boy, but the less said about that the better, as well as a series of reunion movies in the 80s, one of which starred Sandra Bullock as a potential new bionic woman.
It’s old, old news that The Six Million Dollar Man is being remade as a comedy movie starring Jim Carrey. My, am I ever looking forward to that. But who would have thought the more anticipated remake would be The Bionic Woman?
It’s been announced today that David Eicke, exec producer of Battlestar Galactica, is to remake The Bionic Woman as a television series. Being me, I’m slightly miffed they’ve decided to do away with the spy angle, in favour of exploring “the role of professional women in contemporary society and how they juggle their various roles.”
“It’s a complete reconceptualization of the title,” Eick told Daily Variety. “We’re using the title as a starting point, and that’s all.”
“It’s using the idea of artificial technology as a metaphor for what contemporary women sometimes feel is necessary to do everything that needs to be done,” Eick said
Bionic woman as metaphor for superwoman? That’s, erm, literal. Plus plot-wise, who’s going to stump up the extra cash necessary to make the world’s first bionic career woman-come-soccer mom? “Six million dollars just so she can work and spend time with the kids? Hire her some domestics, you fools! You can buy a truckload of illegals for that money! Or how about we get her deadbeat husband to help out round the house sometimes, rather than spending taxpayers’ dollars to fix up their home life!”
So I’m still not looking forward to that. I’m just looking forward to it more than I am to The Six Billion Dollar Man, or whatever they’re planning on calling it.
Today’s Robin Hood reviews
While Stu_N and I are busy discussing the definitions of “family entertainment”, feel free to enjoy these choice quotes of mild praise/not outright scorn for Robin Hood from today’s papers. I think we’re all agreed about Jonas Armstrong though:
Robin Hood, BBC1
“We’ll have to wait until the merry men are all assembled before a final scoring, but on the strength of this first episode, they haven’t missed the target altogether.”
Thomas Sutcliffe, The Independent
Robin Hood, BBC1
“Jonas Armstrong as Robin could have come straight from the pages of Lisa Simpson’s favourite magazine, Non-Threatening Boys.”
James Walton, The Daily Telegraph
Robin Hood, BBC1
“I like that it’s managed to put aside the legacies of Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner and Robin Hood: Men in Tights to realise that, if Robin Hood is about anything, it’s about left-wing northern lads spoiling for a fight with the establishment.”
Caitlin Moran, The Times
Robin Hood, BBC1
“Despite the glorious Technicolour, it’s comforting to watch something so black and white.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express & Daily Star
UK TV
Review: Robin Hood
In the UK: Saturdays, BBC1, 7pm. Repeated Sundays and Fridays, BBC3.
In the US: BBC America, which co-funded it. No air date yet.
As a dyed-in-the-wool lover of the first two seasons of Robin of Sherwood, I was expecting to hate this. From the trailers and the casting, I was expecting something truly awful and sickening to watch. Even during the first few minutes of Saturday’s episode, I could feel my “I knew it!” reflexes kicking in.
But you know what? It wasn’t awful. It was actually all right. Nothing truly special, nothing ground-breaking (unlike Robin of Sherwood), but a regular piece of family entertainment that’s an enjoyable way to spend an evening, probably with a couple of kids lodged at your feet.
US TV
Review: Battlestar Galactica 3.1-3.2
In the US: SciFi, Fridays, 9/8c
In the UK: Sky One later in the year/start of next year.
Characters re-cast: 0
Major characters gotten rid of: 1-3, but I started to lose count
Major new characters: 0
Format change percentage: 90%
Pies eaten: All of them
The Battlestar Galactica of the late 70s/early 80s was a simple affair. Loosely based on the Book of Mormon, it featured a bunch of humans living on “the 12 colonies” who create a race of robots, the cylons, to do their bidding. The robots turn, there’s a war, and almost all the humans are killed. The survivors huddle together in a few ships guarded by the last “battlestar”, a kind of spaceship version of an aircraft carrier, and this “ragtag armada”, as it was called in the opening narration, heads off to look for the 13th colony, Earth.
Each week, the cylons would catch up with them, there’d be a fight and the armada would escape, typically then finding some kind of Old West-styled planet or casino that had a disco. Formulaic but fun.
SciFi’s remake of Battlestar Galactica has been running for three seasons now and has continually shifted upwards the quality bar for science fiction on television. The cheesiness has gone, replaced instead with the bleakness of a group of 40,000 people on the run from an unrelenting enemy that used nuclear weapons to destroy 16 billion of their friends, families and neighbours and seems to want to do the same to them.
The producers haven’t been afraid to tinker with the format either. The new cylons create human-looking, biological versions of themselves that believe in a single God, while those pesky humans continue to worship Athena and Apollo. A second battlestar, the Pegasus, turns out to have survived, making the entire name of the show slightly redundant; and at the end of the second season, the armada finds a planet capable of supporting life, so decides to stop running and settle down. Then, for a last format tinker, the producers posed the question, “What if the cylons caught up with the fleet while their guards were down?” and left us waiting all summer for the answer.