Battlestar Galactica

UK TV

Mobisodes none too popular

16 October 2006 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

TardisodesApparently, those Doctor Who mobisodes (aka TARDISodes) were none too popular. Although 2.6 million people downloaded them onto their home computers, only 40,000 people watched them on their mobile phones.

Iain Tweedale, the new media editor for BBC Wales, points out that the pricing to download mobisodes – £1.50 to £2 – probably put a load of people off, particularly when all they had to do was watch them for free on their home computer. But I think there were a couple of other obvious problems:

  1. They were only a minute long and nothing happened in them really
  2. They didn’t feature either the Doctor or Rose.

So £2 to download something that wasn’t actually very interesting, £26 to download the whole season’s worth. You could get several DVDs for that price. I know which I’d rather watch.

Still, Lost is going to up the ante in the US with mobisodes that star the actual cast members, and Battlestar Galactica‘s webisodes already did more or less the same thing. So maybe next series’ will be better.

News

Bionic Woman to return as superwoman

10 October 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Steve Austin and Jamie SummersBack 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.

US TV

Review: Battlestar Galactica 3.1-3.2

9 October 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Battlestar Galactica

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.

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