A former mercenary turned defender of truth, justice, and the Greek way, Xena
is played by New Zealand actress Lucy Lawless. In defending anyone she finds
in trouble, Xena displays a don't-you-dare-mess-with-me attitude you
don't often see women portrayed as having. Xena is one woman capable of
kicking some Real Serious Butt.
Like its brother show Hercules, Xena is
filmed entirely on location
in New Zealand--frequently outdoors where there isn't always much of a
time window for filming, especially considering the monumental time
pressure inherent to producing a weekly, one-hour TV series of any
type. The choreography involved in staging the hand-to-hand combat scenes
must
itself take a lot of time to rehearse. And that the special effects
department can take an actor and make him actually look like a
centaur
just boggles my mind. That all this can be accomplished on a
television
budget just blows me away.
That latter episode focused primarily on Gabrielle, played by Houston-born
Renee O'Connor, and I found myself absolutely captivated by her ambition
to help others be their best. But I wasn't going to be able to watch her
for long: the ten-day preview was hours away from ending. Oh, well, it
was nice while it lasted... (*sigh*)
Six weeks later, I found Xena again, this time on WUTV, the Fox
affiliate in Buffalo. I saw "Altared States", "Ties that Bind" and "The
Greater Good". The latter episode marks the moment when I absolutely
knew Renee O'Connor was destined to rank among my top favorite
actresses. The episode features a scene in which Gabrielle, believing Xena
to have just died, takes out her anger, hurt, and frustration out on
defenseless trees, struggling to regain her focus on the prospect of so
soon having to take over where Xena left off. Before I saw the episode, I
read
on the net that the production crew applauded when Renee played that scene.
When I saw it, I could not help but believe that applause to be justified.
Alas, Xena was again short-lived: WUTV decided it wanted to run
baseball games instead. But the show wasn't gone forever. Canwest Global,
also known as the Global Television Network, has now run Xena and
Hercules on Saturday afternoons since the beginning of their current
season, and I haven't stopped watching since. And now The New RO, a local
station in Pembroke, Ontario, has started an airing schedule that is
nearly identical to Barrie's CKVR, and as a result Xena can
be seen on Wednesday nights when not pre-empted by Ottawa Senators hockey.
However, they have recently begun shrinking the credits in order to
promote "what's coming up next"--a practice I strongly disagree with
since it makes the humorous disclaimers
impossible to read--and so I prefer Global's broadcast of it to the new
RO's.
Set in the time of the ancient Greek myths, Xena chronicles
the adventures of a warrior princess named Xena, from the point of view of her
young comrade-in-arms, a bard named Gabrielle.
In April 1996, when our cable company unscrambled for ten days a series of
American superstations that it normally offers only as pay-TV channels,
I was flipping through the channels one evening, interested in what the
superstations had to offer...and there she was, "Xena, a mighty princess
forged in the heat of battle." They were running the episode "The Black
Wolf" that week, and I was hooked instantly. I wound up taping two subsequent
episodes during the next eight days, "Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts" and
"Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards".