thin air's as sweet as water

I never grew up on the Bionic Woman, or Wonder Woman, or the Six-Million Dollar Man, but I find myself owning all of those shows, anyway.

And really, it's because a) they remind me of the cheesy 80s TV shows I watched (or were watched in my vicinity) as a child, and b) sometimes they're really damn good. I haven't seen much of the SMDM--just the Bionic Woman episodes, the crossover episodes and a few of the first season. I don't like it as much as I like the Bionic Woman, but I'm going to give Steve Austin some time to grow on me.

I've only just started Starsky & Hutch, so judgement is going to have to wait on that one, too.

I've seen the second season of Wonder Woman, enough to know it's ridiculous and I love the ridiculousness, but I haven't watched past that.

But the Bionic Woman? I'M MAD IT DIDN'T GET A FOURTH SEASON.



Lindsey Wagner is a treasure, and she's hot, too. She carries the role of Jaime Summers beautifully, so even when the episodes are obviously recycled from old scripts (one is legit a SMDM episode, just tweaked for TBW) or kind of dumb (one time Jaime has to defend a performing lion from hick stereotypes), Wagner's performance carries the show. Even when she has to sing a slow romantic seventies love ballad.

No, really.

Some of what I love is the cheesiness. I grew up in the eighties, okay, cheese was the order of the day. But there's a lot of other things--Jaime is torn between a normal life and working for the OSI and all the danger that comes with that. In the first season we get her teaching sixth grade, and the associated grossly cute kids that come with that. That falls more and more by the wayside as the series goes on, but there are other moments when she brings it up. It's not quite as blatant as Buffy's continual longing for a normal life, but Jaime does feel a certain amount of upset between her regular life and her espionage work with the OSI.

There's a definitive feminist bent to the show, though it's not obvious. Jaime is a school teacher, but only because becoming bionic meant she had to retire from professional tennis. And she's a spy. And she has super-speed, super-strength, and super-hearing (albeit on one side of her body for those last two), plus the brains to use all of the above effectively. She doesn't bang on about women's lib because, to a certain extent, she doesn't have to. While there is still a degree of sexism--this is the 70s, not paradise--it's not overt or blatant the way it would have been a decade earlier. There are plenty of times when Steve, Rudy, or Oscar are over-protective of Jaime, but sometimes it's justified--and when it's not, Jaime lets them know.

The show is not as good when it comes to race, though it is obviously trying. I have to say, it does better when it comes to African Americans; Asians (or Asian-Americans) are almost never there, and when they are it's usually as bad guys. African-Americans, and Africans, are not really equals when they appear, but the show tries harder to do right by them, and it shows. (My favorite is the African woman, Leona Mumbassa, who straight-up says her country's problems are because of white colonialism, which is why she'd rather not have a white savior. Of course, this being 1977 and a show about a white woman superhero, that doesn't actually end up happening, but the fact that the character got to say it is pretty good.) The other significan African-American character is a one-off computer genius, Benny, who hacks into banks in order to fund his education, as well as that of his other poor non-traditional students.

Where the show tries, and stumbles, the hardest is with Native Americans. Now, AIM was still a big thing in the seventies; the occupation of Wounded Knee was only a couple of years in the past, and the occupation of Alcatraz was not far behind. So there's obvious attempts in the show to bring in Native American characters. This, uh. This goes pretty badly, I'm not gonna lie. And as much as I love the gimmicky wrestling episode, the "Native American" costume that Jaime wears as part of her cover is pretty damn racist. It wouldn't have been thought of as such by white audiences at the time, but yeah, it didn't age well.

I can appreciate the effort put forth. It's not really true representation, but I can see it and acknowledge the effort. That said, any time Jaime heads to the Middle East or countries associated with it, it's cringe city. And that's something else to remember: this was written and filmed during the 1970s, so we were still very much in the midst of a cold war. The nationalism shows, is what I'm saying.

There's pretty much no queer vibes at all, which is a bummer, but the rest of the show is fun and makes up for a lot.

There's Bigfoot! And aliens! And people faking aliens! Spies! There's an episode with a psychokinetic kid! Another one with a beauty pagent! There's a body-double episode, which later turns into a real examination of identity! There's Jaime going undercover as a cop! There's the episode where she's a nun! There's supervillians and freakish robots! My favorite episode is the one with Vincent Price, Abe Vigoda, and Julie Newmar as a family of crooks looking for an inheritance.

If you're a Buffy fan, or a fan of Xena, then there will be a lot in this show that will feel familiar. I'm convinced Sarah Michelle Geller studied Wagner's performance here--some of Jaime's expressions and little faces feel very familiar. There's also just a lot of tropes that are familiar, probably because all three shows are about heroines, but also because they all cross those fantasy/sci-fi genre lines.

Overall: this show is definitely worth a watch. It surprised me how much I like it--enough that I still haven't finished it, because it had to move networks after season 2 and got cancelled after season 3. It's very 70s (how could it not be?), but I love that, too--I love the seventies' horns, the fashion, the sometimes tacky clothes and the cheesy tropes. I love the way Jaime's apartment is decorated, because vintage 70s tacky aesthetic is like, ME. I love that it's upbeat and optimistic, even when some of the episodes can get very dark.

That's why I've never been interested in the reboot--it sounds wholly too grimdark, and that's not the Bionic Woman. The Bionic Woman is feminist, yes, but it's also kind and optimistic and a bit ridiculous, and aware of its own ridiculousness. Grimdark doesn't mesh with 1970s half-hippie optimism. I don't know why they even thought it would.