Mourning Last Season's TV Casualties

It's a shame NBC canceled Bionic Woman and Journeyman, particularly Journeyman. Bionic Woman's demise came as a surprise to me. I expected five seasons or more. Alas, that didn't happen. I liked the show even though it was a re-imagining of the original series and not very faithful to canon. Usually, I don't go for that kind of stuff. For instance, I did not like and do not like the new Battlestar Galactica.

I also despised Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes production. (Hollywood miscast the astronaut with Mark Walberg whom was not compelling nor convincing in the role. No anti-war message existed anywhere. Since Planet of the Apes is an anti-war movie, you kind of have to have an anti-war message somewhere when you revisit decades later.)

The Bionic Woman is another sci-fi franchise that probably shouldn't be tampered with, but I was willing to see what NBC could do. I thought it was a nice effort, even without Steve Austin. I particularly enjoyed the episode where the population of a small town had been wiped out by a virus, leaving the area uninhabited. That kind of doomsday stuff interests me. Michelle Ryan did an excellent job as Jaime Sommers, and I wanted to see where the story arc would go.

Journeyman met its demise during the 2007 Writer's Guild of America strike. NBC opted not to order nine remaining episodes to fill out the series. It's an interesting way to treat loyal viewers. I had invested 13 weeks into Journeyman, and I never found out how the story ended or how the characters wound up. I really wanted to know. The series was becoming even more interesting as it continued.

The series' fifth episode, The Legend of Dylan McCleen, renewed interest in the mysterious D.B. Cooper plane hijacking. I found this episode to be one of the more compelling stories on television in 2007. It was so clever. In fact, the whole series amounts to a clever take on time travel. I thoroughly enjoyed Journeyman.