The Old School Lunch

Is the phrase that creator, writer and executor producer of David Eick used when describing the new show Bionic Woman. I just watched the first three episodes on NBC’s website (i’ve just about had my fill of Charles Schwab and Navy commercials but compared to paying 2 bucks a pop on iTunes…) and immediately I do like the show and i’ll watch the next episodes but it just made me think when he said it like that.

It reminded me of when Kate Beckinsale, after Underworld was released, said that if anything, she just thought it’d be cool to have a movie out there where a female lead was kicking ass and she, of course, was right. The movie isn’t as simple as that because she (spoiler alert) doesn’t do all the ass-kicking herself and whatnot but the point is she’s the main character. With Bionic Woman, Eick really seems to want to portray this as the “everywoman” sort of struggle which always conveniently goes into how “emotional” and “vulnerable” the character also is at the same time of being strong. It’s almost as if we’re still on these sort of tentative training wheels when it comes to female power and representations of strong women. We’d like to think that we’re OK with seeing the Beckinsales and Michelle Ryans, but we only see them after we throw a kitchen sink’s worth of “emotional grounding” in there which of course is good for the story but just interesting to see because you never see that to that extent with other lead male characters of similar situations.