L.A. Machine

Yancy Butler as the Bionic Woman? The star of Switchblade played a robotic woman of the future who fought off the bad guys... Mann & Machine was a filler show that only lasted about 9 episodes. I remember getting very excited about this show coming on (as I LOVED the Bionic Woman) but this one just couldn't measure up. It was actually yesterday (March 1, 2004) that I came across the pilot episode that I taped back in 1992...after watching it (12 years later) I see a lot of the hit show "Alias" & the motion picture "Laura Croft" mixed in it. Still, it wasn't a great show, but maybe in 2016 (12 years from now) I will watch again & give it another shot! For now I'll give it a 5 out of 10.

Best show of the early 1990s to manage cancel the alarm. Who episode Yancy Butler was cool.

In the future a cop gets a beautiful female robot as his partner. this is an experimental project. Detective Mann knows he is being monitored, so he has to be careful, If she were a real woman and they were not being monitored, he would fall head over heels in love with her. However he fears he would look foolish if he showed his true feelings for her. The audience was not fascinated with this and the show got poor ratings.

Being of the generation that was too young to have watched the Bionic Woman, I was just getting into SF when Mann & Machine came around.. *Wow* what a great show. Until Mann & Machine, the only android character on TV that I was accustomed to was Data from Star Trek and even then as young teen, I was absolutely fascinated by his journey to and among humanity. Mann and Machine neatly addressed my android fascination by following Eve in her learning of humanity, and to me this was by far the most interesting part of the series. Today's equivalent (albeit in a different setting) might be Kyle XY. I think that the cop show genre worked well, as did added that addicting little "will they or won't they" that seems to be present in so many cop series that have male and female partners.

Since Mann & Machine, technology has made huge advances (check out the Actroid Robot on YouTube), and Sci Fi is becoming more mainstream. I think that this concept still has a lot of potential and hope that someone out there decides to give this idea another go, it could do really well.

I remember watching this back in the early 1990's when, aside from the Star Trek franchise, there was very little in good sci-fi on TV. This show had some good potential that, unfortunately, never got explored. The vision of the future was well done (one of the better semi-dystopian interpretations on TV since Max Headroom), and the ongoing chemistry between the two leads was pretty good. Never intended to be "the bionic woman" that one reviewer labeled it, Yancy Butler does well as the new-model robot/android, with the right touch of unintentional sexuality in a character just learning the nuances of actual human interactions (esp. between the sexes). Plus, they didn't bring on all of her artificial abilities all at once, instead developing them - and the relationship between the two leads - as they went along. (The scene where she takes out her eyes, and her partner's reaction, comes to mind as an example.) Would it have survived if they'd given it the full season to blossom? In the TV environment of the day, probably not, but it probably would have fared better today on the cable landscape.