As picket lines swamp the streets of La-La Land, the media has so far spent its coverage of the Writers Guild strike by either staring awestruck at the black hole that was late night television, or else cringing with fear over The Office and 24 shutting down. I’m more interested in whether or not smaller shows, the ones still clinging on by their fingertips, will manage to keep their fires lit under the wet blanket of the strike’s creative lockdown.

Heroes for example can use the layover to re-energize what has proven to be a rather tepid sophomore season. But a show like Bionic Woman, which has executed another nearly perfect swan dive in the rating (for any of you interested culture vultures it now draws exactly half the audience of its September premiere) but likewise continues to improve at the pace of, say, a bionic snail…make that an aged, half-blind, bionic snail. Wait, where was I going with this? Oh, right, so how does a show like that — a timeslot killer showing modest but discernible signs of improvement — how does that show survive when stripped of what little momentum its gained?

Forward momentum is the whiskey of choice for a successful genre show and continuity is its best chaser: retain what works, keep it all moving. Even when a show feels like it’s been intentionally placed in a holding pattern (witness the third go-rounds for Lost and Battlestar) the goal is to maintain that fly-by-your-seat appearance or risk your audience growing bored. And grumpy. Grumpy usually follows bored.

Last week’s episode of Bionic managed its first real streak of continuity and momentum, by bringing back Jaime’s CIA love interest, a role portrayed by the son of one of the Bridges (Jeff or Beau — I couldn’t be bothered to look it up). Anyway, the Bridges kid is charming enough and it is nice to see the show branching out from its mostly vacuous and decidedly less than charming cast of regulars. Unfortunately, the writers took a familiar spies-in-Paris set-up and rather than push it forward into new territory, they quickly sat down and parked it safely on the corner of the rue de paresseux, which is French for “lazy.” (And, yes, while I appreciate the potential irony — that one I did look up.)

This post was authored by Jim Titus, a man worth significantly less than Six Million Dollars

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