David Eick to Tackle "Bionic Woman" for NBC

Call it a hunch, but I'm guessing that, unlike Starbuck, this Bionic Woman will stay the same gender.

Battlestar Galactica executive producer David Eick is partnering with feature writer Laeta Kalogridis (James Cameron's Battle Angel) to develop a re-imagining of 1970s series The Bionic Woman (itself a spin-off of the Lee Majors-led The Six Million Dollar Man), in which Lindsay Wagner played cybernetic tennis pro/secret agent Jaime Sommers, for NBC. Eick will executive produce and Kalogridis will write the pilot for NBC Universal.

Like Eick's update of Battlestar Galactica, this re-imagining of The Bionic Woman will start from the ground up and will use the title merely as a jumping off point. Unlike the original series, which centered around the rise of terrorism in the 1970s, the new version will instead explore the complicated role of professional women in present day. Or as Eick told Variety, "It's using the idea of artificial technology as a metaphor for what contemporary women sometimes feel is necessary to do everything that needs to be done."

Details are being kept under wraps, but Eick says that with the huge technological achievements and innovations of the past thirty-odd years, viewers should expect some up-to-date tech for this new bionic woman... and possibly nanotechnology. (So it's the Six Billion Dollar Woman, then?)

As for Kalogridis, let's hope that The Bionic Woman is better than her last foray into the world of TV female superheroes... the WB's Birds of Prey. (Ouch.)