Meaning she's, what, a £3 million woman? Here's more on that and other casting bits for the new pilot season, courtesy of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter:• After eyeing some faces better known to the U.S. audience, NBC tapped Michelle Ryan (of the BBC's EastEnders) to play Jamie Sommers in its revisiting of The Bionic Woman.• Jimmy Smits has landed the lead in CBS' untitled drama centered on a Latin American family in the rum business.• The Practice's Steve Harris will play an imposing but physically unfit veteran cop in CBS' Protect and Serve. • Matt Lanter (aka Heroes' Brody) is an undercover narc posing as a high schooler in ABC's Judy's Got a Gun.Also, NBC has pushed production on Kath & Kim to summer, but says the show is still in the running for the fall.
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The most recent fall-pilot developments, as reported by Variety:• NBC has nabbed X-Men's Famke Janssen to fill the lead in House creator David Shore and Peter Blake's untitled drama about a female cop.• Kidnapped's Michael Dinner will bring Jaime Sommers back to life, directing NBC's The Bionic Woman.• ABC has picked up a police precinct-set comedy from Britcom scribe Victoria Pile (Smack the Pony).
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Battlestar Galactica exec producer David Eick is teaming with scribe Laeta Kalogridis (Birds of Prey, Alexander) on a new version of The Bionic Woman, the Six Million Dollar Man spin-off that showed the world what Lindsay Wagner's ear looks like way up close. "It's a complete reconceptualization," Eick tells Variety. "We're using the title as a starting point, and that's all." Just as Eick reinvented that other '70s show, BSG, as a compelling poli-sci discourse, his new Woman aspires to use "the idea of artificial technology as a metaphor for what contemporary women sometimes feel is necessary to do everything that needs to be done." But hopefully, there will probably be some wicked-cool steel-bar twisting, too.In related news: BSG season premiere ratings can be found here.
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Question: I can't believe my buddy and I are having this argument, but our excuse is it started after a few beers during a football game. We don't agree on exactly what was bionic in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Can you lay it out for us? They could both run fast and one had supereyesight, as I remember. And didn't he have superhearing, too? Thanks.
Answer: Why the shame, Charlie? Wear your fascination with the trivial proudly — it beats watching the game.
For the record, astronaut Steve Austin (Lee Majors), "a man barely alive" after his test plane went kerflooie in the March 1973 TV-movie that spawned the show, was made "better than he was before — better, stronger, faster" when he was given bionic legs, a new right arm and a left eye that allowed him to see g
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Question: What were some of the more popular shows of 1976?Answer: Well, since we're actually talking about two seasons in any given calendar year — for example, the tail end of 1975's fall season and the first half of 1976's — it's a whole host of programming. But because I like that time-capsule stuff, I'll give you a taste.
The Top 5 shows for September 1975-April 1976, together with each one's network and rating (percentage of total TV households in the country at that time) were: All in the Family (CBS, 30.1); Rich Man, Poor Man (ABC, 28.0); Laverne & Shirley (ABC, 27.5); Maude (CBS, 25.0) and The Bionic Woman
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