Bye Bye Bionic Woman.

After a - by US standards - poultry 8 episodes, the remake of the 70s show is now merely (allegedly) awaiting the official confirmation of its cancellation.

Some might blame the poor timing of the writers' strike but that seems likely to only be an aggravating, rather than causal factor. The simple fact of the matter is that the show was weak, derivative and rather prosaic.

Ever since Buffy and Xena popularised the idea of ass kicking wise ass heroines, we've had a slew of them on our screens. Bionic Woman just goes to show that you can't simply cross your fingers and hope that it'll magically work... and it's very easy to see the similarities to Buffy here. Girl living an ordinary life, gets abilities, has to start fighting bad guys... except of course, whereas Joss Whedon had a rather well articulated metaphor of High School literally being Hell, Bionic Woman went for the rather more tedious Alias angle... fitting that spying in with class, home life and of course, romantic dalliances. At least we didn't have to suffer any Bionic wigs...

It's simply somewhat tedious that there seems to be a compulsion to portray strong women as capable of doing so many roles, so flawlessly that they're essentially perfect and hence, rather shallow and uninteresting characters. Our Bionic Woman is pretty much capable of - on any given day - keeping her somewhat rowdy sister in line and fulfilling her role of surrogate mother, doing an A-grade paper and of course, smashing whatever evil criminal/terrorist gang there is out there and probably managing to flirt with some preternaturally handsome romantic interest too. Women are supposedly better at multi-tasking but that might be pushing it - still, at least she was more likeable than agent Sydney Bristo.

In truth, the ease with which parallels can be drawn to other female led shows the inherent problem with Bionic Woman. It was very much paint by numbers - specifically other people's numbers. Beyond her superhuman abilities - and these days, that's not exactly a unique selling point - there wasn't much to recommend it. The mish-mash of elements never really allowed anything to shine through. There's action but it's not awe inspiring, there's drama but it's not going to knock your socks off, there's humour but it's fairly bland.

Bland, prosaic, mediocre... all apt words to describe the show. It's an inoffensive way to pass the time but so much so that you may find yourself unable to really recall WHAT exactly happened... Oh, there were probably some terrorists in there... something about a bomb but details will be dim. Really, the best thing about the show was Starbuck being the "evil" Bionic Woman and her roll was rather transitory. All in all, the show is - or was - a perfect storm of bland and it's cancellation should not be mourned.