Bionic Woman

The alter ego of cute CIA agent Tom, Jordan Bridges, will star in a comedy called Say Hello to Stan Talmadge that is scheduled for release later this year.  The film is a nostalgia comedy set in 1979, when the title character takes his family on a cross country adventure:

“Set in 1979 and told in flashback, the film follows the misadventures of the title character (Gary Cole), an estranged ex-husband who tries to reunite his family with a cross-country motor-home trip to a ‘Family Feud’-style game show called ‘Beat Your Neighbor.’”

Early word is that Jordan will be playing the host of the game show.  It sounds like Jordan’s role will be more goofball than hardball, and he probably won’t have much use for the hand-to-hand combat skills he displayed on Bionic Woman.

“Stan hopes that by getting his family on TV, it will make them a real family again,” writer and director David Moreton told The Hollywood Reporter last May.  Moreton is also producing the project with Rob Aitro and Jenny Hinkey.  The Hollywood Reporter also said that “Aitro describes the screenplay, based on Rick Barrett’s unpublished short story ‘Feud,’ as ‘a charming indie in the tone of Little Miss Sunshine.’“

Jordan’s co-stars in the movie will include Teddy Dunn, who played Duncan Kane on Veronica Mars, and Jennifer Coolidge, who is familiar to audiences as “Stiffler’s Mom” in the American Pie movies and also for her long-standing membership in Christopher Guest improv comedies such as Best in Show and For Your Consideration.  Jennifer will be playing Stan’s drunken wife, the type of role she excels in based on her previous movies.

We are taking a break from The Will Anthros Wish List this weekend to talk about an actor who was actually cast on Bionic Woman.

Before he was working with the CIA and romancing Michelle Ryan’s Jaime Sommers in Paris on Bionic Woman, Jordan Bridges was suffering through the horrors of an early law career on the short lived Dick Wolf drama Conviction.

If you missed the series, Jordan was the fresh faced son of a legendary lawyer who passed up the opportunity to practice with his father’s "tall building" firm in order to prosecute cases in NYC.  The series also starred Stephanie March, reprising her role of attorney Alexandra Cabot from Law & Order: SVU, and Julianne Nicholson who went on to play a detective on another Wolf series Law & Order: Criminal Intent.  Eric Balfour played yet another character with intimacy and dependency issues, and Milena Govich was a D.A. here before she went on to play another D.A. in last fall’s K-Ville.

Conviction did not last a full season, as it suffered many of the problems that plagued Bionic Woman.  Last minute casting changes, inconsistencies of character and plot, and a lack of firm direction eventually tanked the series.

Nevertheless, all thirteen episodes feature Jordan Bridges’ charm and big brown eyes so I suspect I will be checking them out eventually.  But here is a bionic mystery: how big of a strike sin am I committing by actually watching them on Hulu?  And is it a sin I can wash away by, say, buying x dollars worth of pencils for the Pencils to Media Moguls campaign?  If you have any thoughts on that, please let me know.

Last night’s Bionic Woman episode, “The Education of Jaime Sommers,” introduced Jordan Bridges to the cast as an undercover CIA agent posing as a university teacher’s assistant.

Jordan’s character Tom is a definite love interest for Jaime Sommers, and in our opinion he makes a much more interesting boyfriend for Jaime than the evil and uncharismatic Will Anthros. Next week Jaime and Tom travel to Paris on a mission to save the CIA and the Burket Group, and hopefully while they are there they will have time to see more than the City of Lights’ warehouses.

So who is Jordan Bridges? And why does he look so familiar? Jordan has been acting for over a decade and has a long list of television and movie credits that includes playing screenwriter Oliver Chirchick on the later seasons of Dawson’s Creek. He also played Nick Potter on the short-lived law drama Conviction, and has had guest roles on many TV series including Charmed, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and CSI: NY. Jordan also played the man who married Kristen Dunst in the Julia Roberts movie Mona Lisa Smile. If you missed Jordan’s performance as one of the guys with Adrian Grenier in the Melissa Joan Hart movie Drive Me Crazy, you can catch it on Oxygen several times in the next few weeks.

In his real life Jordan is the son of Emmy & Golden Globe Award winning actor Beau Bridges, the nephew of four time Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges and grandson of Hollywood scion Lloyd Bridges.

Jordan Bridges, Jaime Sommers, Dawson’s Creek, Beau Bridges, Lloyd Bridges, Jeff Bridges, Mona Lisa Smile, Kirsten Dunst, Adrian Grenier, Melissa Joan Hart, Drive Me Crazy

The former Conviction co-star is joining the cast of BW.  Bridges’ character, via TTV, is an

an unassuming teacher’s assistant at a prestigious university who also works for the CIA and is a potential love interest for Jamie [sic] Sommers.

This is interesting.  Did Anthros not survive Corvus’ sniper shot near the end of the premiere episode?

A possible new love interest for Sommers sounds good, because as Margie admitted to our fellow blogger Roco at Bionic Blog, the chemistry between Ryan’s Sommers and Bower’s Anthros is just not there.

I definitely think Bridges has more sex appeal, in a cute, studios way, than Bowers showed in the pilot episode.