Bionic Woman Troubles

Glen Morgan, one of the show runners on the new Bionic Woman series is leaving the show immediately. The reason cited is "creative differences". At this stage of production my only guess to what that means is that NBC wants to take the show in a direction that he wasn't comfortable with.

According to imdb.com, Morgan produced Space: Above and Beyond (a show that bombed fast), The X-Files (from 93-95, or in other words, before it got weird even for scifi geeks), and Millennium (which was always too weird). His writing credits include 10 eps of Space, 15 eps of X-Files, 15 eps of Millennium, the screenplay for Final Destination, and he wrote Final Destination 3.

Looking at that, it seems like he knows how to make good TV. It also looks like he doesn't stay in one place for too long.

But let's look at this from an NBC angle. NBC was last in the ratings last year out of the major networks. Their ratings are so bad that even Jay Leno and Conan O'Brian have made fun of their own network. Just about the only breakout hit last year was Heroes. And now they want to capitalize on the comic book genre with Bionic Woman.

I can' t blame them. If you were a major network whose ratings were embarassing, what would you do? Well, for starters they put Deal or No Deal on just about every night of the week because it got good ratings and was cheap to produce. Then, you look at what is working. Heroes works. Let's do more of that. It's the same deal with Journeyman and Chuck.

So, what happens now? Well, this isn't Fox, so they'll probably give the show a reliable schedule instead of kicking it all over the week and it'll probably stay on the air even if it sucks at first. Studio 60's ratings were very poor and the show still kept going. When your ratings are as bad as they are the studio is willing to let you bumble along longer. In the case of Studio 60, it didn't matter. The longer it was on the air the worse it got (even though I really liked it at first). The opposite was true for Heroes. The longer that show was on the better it got.

So Bionic Woman will get a fair shake. If it works, it works. If not we'll move on.

On another note, here are the series I'll be paying attention to this fall:

Heroes debuts 9/24 at 8/7c on NBC
Bones debuts 9/25 at 8/7c on Fox
NCIS debuts 9/25 8/7c on CBS
Bionic Woman debuts 9/26 9/8c on NBC
The Office debuts 9/27 at 9/8c on NBC
Scrubs (unknown debut date) at 9:30/8:30c on NBC

Unfortunately New Amsterdam and The Sarah Connor Chronicles have been pushed back until January by Fox, and it seems ABC isn't offering any shows that I'm interested in.