How Desperate Can the CW be?

I had intended on sharing with you a photo of X-man on his new bike... but I'll do that tomorrow. Instead, I'm sitting here absolutely horrified by the last 3 minutes and 25 seconds I just spent watching a "sneak preview" of Nikita a "new" show on the CW.

For those of you who don't know, I was a big fan of the original French movie La Femme Nikita. The original is based on the concept that a street rat gets arrested and then ends up being trained to be an assassin for a secret government office. Then they did a bad American Remake "Point of No Return" which made her pretty lame and starred Bridget Fonda.

In 1997, while I was living in Washington, D.C., over the summer, I was up late one night and caught part of a campier TV version of the movie on the USA Network. The Nikita in the show had gone from a tiny, French woman to a tall, leggy blonde. Weird and wrong, at first. But there was nothing else on TV, so I continued to watch. She was more innocent (the original Nikita ran with a bit of a bad crowd) and as the series continued, I got a giant crush on Michael, her mentor... and on her. Seriously, I love watching good people walk the line of good and evil, only to come out still shiny while surviving the crappy underworld. It gives me all kinds of hope. Plus, um, I really liked when she kicked Michael's ass. And she wore some damn fine Roberto Cavalli during the series, too. (This is when I began my appreciation of asymmetrical necklines.

Anyway, I saw that the CW (formerly WB, which owned the 1997-2002 Nikita Series) was coming out with a new revamped Nikita. From what I read, it was basically combining two different elements of the Nikita series that she escaped between season 1 and season 2 (thanks to Michael) and that she was somehow going to take control of the secret government agency and work with new recruits (an episode in Season 4 called Time to be Heroes.)

I scoffed. For those of you who don't know... the creators and writers of Nikita from the 1990's went on to use the character Michael in creating Jack Bauer in their next series 24. They took everything they did (as well as several of the actors) and pushed a bit harder (hooray for having a larger production budget).

Tonight, while watching the sneak preview, I gagged. The WB even recycled the names of the characters. Michael and Birkoff (the tech geek) still freaking exist. They even gave Birkoff the same stupid glasses.

Is the TV genre really so dead that they're just going to recycle this crap again? It's like making Robin Hood movies -- I think we should have stopped at the summer when Men in Tights was released as the same time as the Kevin Costner movie (let's face it the best part of that film was Alan Rickman).

But Ug! Seriously! Ug!