David Eick

November 2007

By CONTACT _Con-3F4A1850B c s l Mansha Daswani

In the run-up to this
year’s fall season, one of the most buzzed about shows was NBC’s new Bionic
Woman. The casting of British
actress Michelle Ryan in the lead role of Jaime Sommers garnered a lot of
attention, but much of the anticipation, at least from science-fiction fans,
came from the fact that it was David Eick who was bringing Bionic Woman back to tele­vision screens. The acclaimed producer has built a
devout fan base from his work with Ronald Moore on updating the 1970s
mini-series Battlestar Galactica
for SCI FI Channel. And all of that buzz has translated into solid ratings for
NBC, especially in the key 18-to-49 set. Eick spoke with World Screen about embarking on season one of Bionic Woman and wrapping up Battlestar Galactica with its fourth season, in 2008.

WS: What led
to the idea to revamp the original Bionic Woman?

EICK: It
came through an unorthodox way. We were talking at the studio about a project
that involved a woman in charge of a crime syndicate. I was interested in
pursuing the theme of a woman who is not being judged purely on the basis of
whether she was good professionally or good as a wife and mother, but both.
That didn’t get off the ground, but I was still enthusiastic about that theme.
I figured that maybe a better way to pursue that idea was with a hero character
as opposed to an antihero. And knowing that Bionic Woman was a title that had been kicked around for a
several years at the various networks, I knew that it was available and I
thought it might be fun to try, with that theme in mind.

WS: What
elements have you kept from the original?

EICK: The
original involves a woman who is in an accident and has these extreme powers
and abilities imposed on her by an operation. That’s still very much part of
the nucleus of the show. The rest of the story is very different. She is much
more of a normal girl, someone who is not really grown up yet. In the original
she’s already an exceptionally strong person and so you’ll believe that she is
able to do these things. Our focus is not on whether a woman can do what a man
can do, which was the women’s lib line underlying the original Bionic Woman. It’s more about how they’re judged differently.
We’re still using a female empowerment theme, but it’s a different
interpretation than it was 30 years ago. From a conceptual standpoint and a
character standpoint, this show couldn’t be more different.

WS: With so
much buzz surrounding the show, and its strong debut ratings, does that put
extra pressure on you for the rest of the season?

EICK: The
expectations on something like this are rather complicated, because you’ve got
a title that has some built-in awareness, then your expectations go up, and
there’s a great deal of money being spent on advertising and promotion by the
network, so your expectations go up a little higher. And then you realize we’re
going to be telling stories that will run the gamut from lighter to
darker—you never know what the reaction to that kind of creative
experimentation is going to be. So maybe your expectations are down a little
bit because you want to be a realist and the ratings can never be the same as they are for a premiere. And
before you know it, you’ve thought yourself into a complete circle. So I
decided to ignore all expectations and hope that whoever is in charge of making
the decision about whether this is called a success or a failure opts for the
former!

WS: How much
of the broad story do you have mapped out?

EICK: The
first 13 episodes have a fairly sturdy game plan, and then after that, we have
some sense of where we want to be at the end of season one, but the steps in
between episodes 14 and 22 are a lot looser. [In shows like] The X-Files and Star Trek, the game plan for the writers was extraordinarily specific and rigid.
With a show like this, you want to have a structural skeleton, and within that
you want to leave room for experimentation and creativity and adventure.
Sometimes that can bite you in the ass, you can get the wrong kind of surprise
and wonder why [the writers] went off [in that direction]. But on the whole the
odds are in your favor that you’ll end up with something more interesting.

WS: Why did
you choose to wrap up Battlestar Galactica?

EICK: Ron
Moore and I were in agreement that the show had reached its proverbial third
act and that we would rather end it on our own terms and be able to dovetail
the epic tale in a premeditated, proactive way and not have it ended for us.
When you can plan your own death you have a lot more control and you can do it
in a much more elegant way.

WS: Did the
process for reinventing Bionic Woman differ from your experience in bringing Battlestar Galactica back?

EICK: [The
original] The Bionic Woman was
a much bigger hit than Battlestar
was; oddly enough, it didn’t have the fan base that Battlestar did. We experienced a lot more grief from the
message boarders who were apoplectic at our changing [the character] Starbuck
into a woman, for example. For The Bionic Woman, the fan base was much more mainstream and less
cultish and less sci-fi oriented, so there tends to be a less vocal movement
against things. In the case of Battlestar, there was more of a mythological core that we knew we were going to
be able to use. At its core it remained a story about a holocaust that decimated
an entire people, leaving only a ragtag band of survivors who go about looking
for a place called Earth. There’s more of a common thread that both shows have,
even though stylistically and every other way, the new Battlestar couldn’t have been more different and more removed
from the old one.

With Bionic Woman, it’s really the title, the character’s name,
Jaime Sommers, and the notion of an ordinary person who has a set of abilities
imposed on her, as opposed to someone who is an alien who comes from outer
space to be a superhero on purpose. But none of the characters—except
Jaime Sommers—none of the mythology surrounding the technology, none of
the supporting characters, [are derived from the original].

WS: You
mentioned Battlestar’s devout
fan base—how much of their online critiquing plays into how you craft the
show?

EICK: Ron
and I have a tendency to try to balance each other out in most areas, and this
is one of them. When you have thousands of people out there constantly giving
you their reaction, it can be very tempting to want to immerse yourself in it,
because you’re getting feedback. I don’t want to find myself sitting at the
computer at 4 o’clock in the morning having done nothing with my entire day
except reading people’s reactions to my work. [Ron] tends to consume a lot of
that stuff. If someone has a good idea or a compelling argument or an
insightful comment, you want to listen to it. But at the same time, you don’t
want to overcorrect. From my standpoint I just wanted to remain unbiased. That
way if a bad idea comes up and everybody is arguing for it because six guys on
the Internet said it, I can be the guy in the room saying, I don’t care, it’s
still a bad idea! When we first started the process, Ron watched the original
1970s pilot and I didn’t. I said I was going to and I went home that weekend
and blew it off. The interesting thing that happened was, as we began to
discuss the new show, one of us had the ability to root the discussions, where
appropriate and where necessary, in the old show, and the other one could have
a cleaner interpretation and respond to whether or not it was a good thing or a
bad thing, based on its own value, versus being persuaded by the old show. If
you have a partner and you want each to bring different strengths to the table,
sometimes it’s good to blow off your homework.

WS: Have you
found any major differences in working for network versus cable TV?

EICK: In
broadcast there are more opinions and more points of view to hear and to serve.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re dealing with a larger body of
people, and with that comes a lot of experience and people who can help you not
make the same mistakes other shows may have made. The downside is, it can be
tricky to navigate all those points of view, and sometimes you find yourself
going one step forward, two steps back as you attempt to maintain hold of your
own vision while being respectful of the people who helped you get to where you
are with the show. That’s the challenge for anybody who works in this business.
It remains a collaborative medium, and if you want to be a unilateral artiste
you can write a poem but you can’t make a television series.

WS: There
seems to be a lot of sci-fi programming on the air these days. Do you think
there might be too much, and viewers will start to switch off?

EICK: For
me, it’s less about the genre itself and more about being subversive and
unexpected. What excited me about Battlestar in the beginning was the idea that we could do
something with the so-called “space opera” subgenre that was in every way,
shape and form a departure from Star Trek and all of its disciples and offspring.

In the case of Bionic
Woman, there is an expectation
that it be escapist, and I think we’re going to go ahead and deliver on that
expectation. But there will also be an expectation that it be frivolous or
shallow or silly, because of the title, and I don’t think we’re going to fall
victim to that. I actually think we’re going to make it more sophisticated,
textured and daring than one might expect from the title. It’s less about are
we in a genre that’s flooded, and more about what are you doing that is going
to upend expectations within that?