| [ Peta Wilson in "La Femme Nikita" ] |
AND "BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER" WILL
"LA FEMME NIKITA"
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BY JOYCE MILLMAN | anyone who has suffered through Don Johnson's slurpy pseudo-sincerity on "Nash Bridges" and Lance Henriksen's morose I-feel-your-freakin'-pain empathy on "Millennium" knows that there is something deeply wrong with network TV's male action heroes. In a misguided attempt to lure prized female viewers, networks are softening and sweetening and sensitivity training all over the place -- as if we delicate women would have to take to our beds at the sight of a hero with a big fat gun who didn't give a rat's ass about the bad guy's abused childhood. Hey, who do you think is buying all those tickets to Nicolas Cage action movies? Men? I think not. So what is the deal with these allegedly female-friendly TV heroes, like "The Pretender" -- an overgrown, dull-witted child -- and the boring puppy-dog Superman of the mercifully canceled "Lois & Clark"? Wimps. All of them. The toughest, coolest TV heroes right now are women. There's Xena, of course, whose female viewership is on the verge of eclipsing its male numbers. There's teenage Buffy Summers, the kickboxing heroine of one of the year's new cult hits, WB Network's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And there's Nikita, the sleek, strapping secret agent of the year's other cult hit, USA cable network's "La Femme Nikita." They don't look alike, they're not all the same age or body type, they don't even exist in the same century, but Xena (and her feisty poet-Amazon sidekick, Gabrielle), Buffy and Nikita have the right stuff. They're hard of muscle, flinty of eye and they get the job done because somebody has to. The major networks have got it all wrong. We don't want girly men -- we want manly girls! Thanks to "Xena," "Buffy" and "Nikita," there are now more women on TV whose boots should be registered as lethal weapons than at any time since the glorious '60s heyday of Emma Peel, Honey West, Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain's character on "Mission: Impossible") and Catwoman. Oh sure, we had "Wonder Woman" and "Charlie's Angels" and "The Bionic Woman" in the interim, but they were kid stuff compared to the women who came before and since. Xena, Gabrielle, Buffy and Nikita are action heroes for grown-ups (and, in the case of "Xena" and "Buffy," mature girls). They're moody and sarcastic. They're thrillingly agile and strong. They fight with confidence. Yet, they're all but absent from the Big 4 networks. Above ground, so to speak, female power is depicted as cerebral (Scully on "The X-Files") or sexual (Amanda on "Melrose Place"); it's measured by career success (Murphy Brown, Dr. Austin on "Chicago Hope") or by how indispensable a woman is to her family (Jill on "Home Improvement," Debra on "Everybody Loves Raymond"). The most physically imposing women on network prime time are Brooke Shields on "Suddenly Susan" and Kristen Johnston on "3rd Rock from the Sun," but both use their stature strictly for bull-in-a-china-shop laughs. The networks have been mired for years in (perhaps homophobic) showbiz canards that women don't want to watch female action heroes or women's sports (the latter notion was recently debunked when ratings for NBC's first telecasts of WNBA games exceeded the network's projections). But in TV's subterranean realm of cable, syndication and "emerging" networks, it's the power-suited career women and supermoms who are the anomalies -- here, the fierce, fantasy figure avenger women rule. "La Femme Nikita" (10 p.m. Sundays, USA), which just began a new round of episodes June 22, is gaining on "Xena" for fan Web site popularity -- as much for the show's high-tech noir look and "Mission: Impossible" tone as for star Peta Wilson's statuesque charms. "La Femme Nikita" is based on the 1991 Luc Besson film (later superfluously Americanized as "Point of No Return") in which a feral junkie cop-killer (played in the original by Anne Parillaud), sentenced to life in prison, is furloughed by a super-secret government agency and transformed into a chic assassin through rigorous training at a facility that's a cross between finishing school and Hezbollah summer camp. If Nikita screws up, she dies. Fans of Besson's flamboyantly brutal thriller might (rightly) dismiss the TV series as a cleaned-up approximation of the real thing. The TV Nikita never actually killed the cop, ya see, she was framed. And compared to Parillaud's grimy pit bull characterization, the exceedingly healthy-looking Wilson is a poodle with a mohawk. Since the show's January premiere, Nikita has gotten more and more lovable. She doesn't seem terribly concerned about being killed ("canceled," is the show's term) by Section One ("the most clandestine organization on the planet"); she rolls up her sleeves, ties her white-blond hair into pigtails and digs into her anti-terrorist missions with such cheerful ardor you practically expect her to whistle while she works. Still, "Nikita" has an awful lot in its favor. It's reminiscent of two of executive consultant Joel Surnow's previous credits, CBS's "The Equalizer" and UPN's "Nowhere Man," in the way it plays out themes of identity, patriotism and personal and political corruption within a hypnotic shadow world of espionage and paranoia. And "Nikita" has the strapping Wilson, who is pure uncut heroine from her square-jawed mien to her kinky boots (this show has the best spy-femme fashions since "The Avengers"). The Australian Wilson is convincingly toned and athletic; she kickboxes with balletic grace and her husky voice reverberates with authority. And she's amazingly changeable -- she can look wholesome one minute and slinky the next, which serves the part well. Nikita becomes whatever her prey wants her to be, from a woman arms dealer's long-lost daughter to a high-society slave trader's classy arm candy. There's a "Vertigo"-like current of masochism and voyeurism running through "Nikita," and the episode about the slave trader slyly made the connection -- wearing a blue strapless ball gown that bared her sturdy shoulders, with her hair pulled tightly up onto her head, Wilson was a ringer for Kim Novak in the Hitchcock classic. The show's most intriguing plot line, though, is the relationship between Nikita and her Section One mentor, Madeline ("You can learn to shoot. You can learn to fight. But there's no weapon as powerful as your femininity"). Played by the wondrous Alberta Watson ("Spanking the Monkey"), Madeline is elegant and inscrutable and she has a smile that could flash-freeze boiling water. Madeline is the sort of deeply-flawed anti-hero character usually written for a man. She orders cancellations without blinking. She is a frighteningly efficient torturer. In the recent "Gambit" episode, we learned the crucial information that, as a child, Madeline caused her sister's death by pushing her down the stairs in a fight over a doll. Nikita, whose function it seems of late is to get her tight-lipped bosses to talk about their feelings, tried to let Madeline off the hook ("It was an accident"). Madeline eyed her for a beat, then offered a succinct correction: "I wanted the doll." End of discussion. "Nikita's" acknowledgment of women's violent impulses gives it a gravity, a provocativeness, that sticks with you long after the rush of the martial arts and the plastique-in-the-lipstick-case gadgetry have faded. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (9 p.m. Mondays, WB) is a considerably sunnier show -- if a show about a teenage girl methodically driving stakes through the hearts of vampires (did I mention that her fictional California suburb sits atop the mouth of hell?) can be considered sunny. This action drama-with-humor was also based on a movie, but its creator, Joss Whedon (who wrote the movie, as well as a little something called "Toy Story"), has built a better Buffy for the small screen. Here, the preordained, once-in-a-generation vampire slayer is played by 20-year-old daytime soap veteran Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose petite frame and sweet face in no way prepare you for her character's snappy sarcasm or her poise and agility when she's facing monsters twice her size in fights to the finish. What's so clever about "Buffy" is the way Whedon never resorts to obvious high-school-as-hell metaphors. Yes, Buffy has her problems -- she wants to fit in, have boyfriends, be a cheerleader and all that. But she has to hold back so as not to endanger her friends with her nocturnal exploits. Although she may whine about having to spend the night of the big dance keeping watch over a fresh grave, Buffy takes her responsibility seriously, and that wisdom beyond her years gives the show a dash of poignancy. Buffy knows that high school heartaches are trivial compared to, like, saving the world. In this awesome task, Buffy gets help from her trusted pals Xander (the geek who is hopelessly in love with her), Willow (the geekette who is hopelessly in love with Xander) and Giles (played by Anthony Head, the Taster's Choice guy), the shy, veddy British librarian who serves as Buffy's "watcher," or portent-interpreter, and who seems to be ever so slightly smitten with his underage charge in a Henry Higgins sort of way. But at crunch time, it's always just Buffy, and it's thrilling to watch her going one-on-one with some fanged creature, keeping her wits about her as she somersaults in the air, comes down kicking and drives the point home -- literally. Yes, the Scullys and Captain Janeways still matter: Their intelligence and courage are now firmly anchored in the pop consciousness. Sometimes, though, in our wildest daydreams, we want our heroines to fly. |
PHOTO BY FIROOZ ZAHEDI | COURTESY OF USA NETWORK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
