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The $50 Million Dollar Woman
Oct. 4th, 2007 11:44 amI've been working hard on catching up on all the season premiers that happened while I was at the Browncoat Ball. One of the most important ones, to me, was the first episode of the new Bionic Woman series. I'm a big fan of the new Battlestar Galactica, and since the Bionic Woman is done by a lot of the same folks my hopes are high.
I actually saw the pilot several months ago when it was shown at Comic-Con is San Diego. I'd heard that the broadcast version of the pilot was different, and I keenly felt the differences. There were two notable changes.
First off, they switched the actress who plays Jaime's sister. In the version I saw originally the sister is deaf, and she and Jaime communicate by sign language. That version of the sister was a much more emo teenage girl that came across as a drop-out, not a computer hacker like the new version of the sister is. I much preferred the original version, since 1) the new version didn't play/present a convincing hacker, and 2) the original version was completely self sufficient, but Jaime felt she had to be extra protective of her because she's deaf, even though she didn't actually need that protection.
The other big difference was pacing. The version I saw was 90 minutes long, not the 60 minutes of the broadcast pilot. The broadcast version felt incredibly rushed to me. They covered the same material, but they'd chopped out a lot of stuff to get it all in an hour timeslot. This includes a lot of scenes where they'd trimmed just a few frames here and there, which to my editor's eye makes a huge difference, even if the average viewer who hasn't spent the same 13 years in an editing suite that I have would never notice a thing. The longer version felt a lot more cerebral, and did a much better job of exploring Jaime's sudden sense of disconnection with her own body and life. For example, the scene with her looking at herself in the mirror and crying in the bathtub had much deeper emotional impact, instead of being just a quick flash of a montage.
Overall, though, I'm still quite happy. I'm looking forward to seeing where this series goes.
I actually saw the pilot several months ago when it was shown at Comic-Con is San Diego. I'd heard that the broadcast version of the pilot was different, and I keenly felt the differences. There were two notable changes.
First off, they switched the actress who plays Jaime's sister. In the version I saw originally the sister is deaf, and she and Jaime communicate by sign language. That version of the sister was a much more emo teenage girl that came across as a drop-out, not a computer hacker like the new version of the sister is. I much preferred the original version, since 1) the new version didn't play/present a convincing hacker, and 2) the original version was completely self sufficient, but Jaime felt she had to be extra protective of her because she's deaf, even though she didn't actually need that protection.
The other big difference was pacing. The version I saw was 90 minutes long, not the 60 minutes of the broadcast pilot. The broadcast version felt incredibly rushed to me. They covered the same material, but they'd chopped out a lot of stuff to get it all in an hour timeslot. This includes a lot of scenes where they'd trimmed just a few frames here and there, which to my editor's eye makes a huge difference, even if the average viewer who hasn't spent the same 13 years in an editing suite that I have would never notice a thing. The longer version felt a lot more cerebral, and did a much better job of exploring Jaime's sudden sense of disconnection with her own body and life. For example, the scene with her looking at herself in the mirror and crying in the bathtub had much deeper emotional impact, instead of being just a quick flash of a montage.
Overall, though, I'm still quite happy. I'm looking forward to seeing where this series goes.
