Bionic Woman

Our good friends at Hulu have deemed us worthy of admission to their online video experiment and the site is very impressive.  According to the site:

Hulu’s ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web’s most comprehensive selection of premium programming across all genres and formats – television shows, feature films, clips, and more. Additionally, we want to give you more choices of when and where you can enjoy your favorite programming, while creating innovative experiences that let you watch and participate in online video in new and exciting ways.

Partnered, with NBC, Hulu has all 8 of the 2007 BW episodes available for free (with limited commercials) and they are kind enough to give us a player to post the full clip on our site.

Since the WGA strike is keeping us from new episodes of the series, let’s start from the beginning.

The pilot, entitled “Second Chances,” premiered in the United States on NBC September 25, 2007.

The pilot is still the best episode of the series because it has the great fight scene between Michelle Ryan and Katee Sackhoff on top of a rooftop during a rainstorm.  Sackhoff instantly transforms her character Sarah Corvus into a TV villain icon.

After watching the clip, you can read Margie’s take as well as Ryan’s take on the pilot.

Enjoy!

NBC has partnered with Amazon.com and made several of their new fall premiers available for download now. Bionic Woman is one of the ones available. We told you earlier that a preview DVD of these pilots was available at Blockbuster. Now you can download them directly from Amazon.

I think it’s pretty smart of NBC to release this BW now. Since the pre-air pilot is already out there, this is a good way to get people downloading their final product. My review of the pre-air pilot is here, and I found it to have serious flaws. I am hoping those flaws have been fixed since that April pilot. Five months is a long time to make corrections and I hope the producers used this time wisely.

I have my Tivo set to download the episode (via my Amazon download account) and I will have my early review up in a couple of days.

If you don’t have Tivo, in order to down and watch this episode and any others, you’ll need to download their proprietary "unbox player." At least this episode is free. Not a bad tradeoff: their software for early viewing of the pilot.

If you download and watch the pilot, let me know what you think in comments.

Bionic Woman, Bionic Woman Pilot, NBC, Amazon.com, Tivo

According to The Hollywood Reporter, NBC has brokered a deal to allow Bionic Woman to be seen on demand starting September 10th. The deal includes over 30 cable systems across the country, and will potentially allow millions of viewers to see the pilot early in a way that is legal and free of charge.

The move is part of the network’s aggressive plan to build viewers for the show, and was inspired by the success of last season’s Heroes which was downloaded via Yahoo! by over 300,000 people before it premiered on television:

We’re engaged in the most aggressive sampling of any of the networks, and we have the research to back it up,” said John Miller, chief marketing officer at NBC Universal Television Group. “We generally feel (that) if someone has seen a show and liked the show, they will tell others and come back for more regardless of where they saw it. That builds ratings.”

This is great news for Bionic Woman fans, as we all know the secret to the show’s success is to attract as many viewers as possible. Other NBC shows that will be available as part of this plan include Chuck, Life, and Journeyman. The shows will also be available via DVD at Blockbuster.

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