I remember this show being one of those shows that was decidedly PG-13 growing up- you weren't entirely sure you were supposed to watch it or not which made its allure all the more sexy. The titular blonde femme fatale Nikita was played with icy cool by Peta Wilson, her grizzled love interest Michael by Roy Dupuis and it was a mainstay of the USA Network (at least that's where I remember watching it) back when Silk Stalkings was in his hey day (a show that everybody wanted to watch but nobody wanted to stay up that late to do so.)
It was a good show. I didn't realize it had quite the cult following that it did so it was something of a head scratcher when I heard that the CW was resurrecting the show (or rebooting? It's not entirely clear) as plain old Nikita. I mean of all the shows you could reboot/remake, they picked this one? As I've been working my way through the first two seasons on Netflix, I'm beginning to see why.
The original show wasn't your typical shoot-em-up, spy thriller... a quick glance at Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge) revealed that the Canadian produced show wasn't the most big budget show around so the writers had to get cerebral, had to develop their characters and you know, work on things like plot as a posed to explosions and special effects. That tactic (spearheaded by future 24 creator and La Femme Nikita creator Joel Surnow) served the show in good stead as it ran for five seasons from 1997-2001.
But I also think it's more than just budget. Some further digging revealed that before it was ever a television show it was a French movie, Nikita, directed by Luc Besson (who also directed one of my favorite movies, The Fifth Element) and the original movie (which I dug up in my early Netflix days) is sprinkled with French actors like Jean Reno and Tchéky Karyo (you'd recognize both of 'em if you saw 'em) and carries that Gallic sense of je ne sais quoi throughout the whole movie. But I guess you need that kind of cigarette smoking sense of 'don't give a f--k' if your Intelligence Agency is going to do things like blow up a Greenpeace Boat in real life.
But give the French some credit, they can really do the femme fatale thing, despite the fact they executed Mata Hari back in the day.
So, to summate the weirdness: a 1990 French spy thriller gets remade three years later by Hollywood (the bonus weirdness I found was that Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda was a remake of Nikita) turned into a Canadian television show four years after that and that show aired on basic cable for five seasons before nearly a decade later being revived/rebooted on of all networks, the CW.
How does that even work? By all accounts the new show with Maggie Q and Shane West is doing pretty well on the CW. I think the 2nd Season fell off a bit but I'm not through it yet. But apparently shows about deadly female assassins are popular enough to warrant a reincarnation or two or three- which both makes sense and is kind of strange as well. Who knows how long Nikita could continue in its present form?
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