Kristanna Loken as 'Painkiller Jane' Vasco.

Welcome to “The Can Opener”, The Enthusiast’s new occasional column about TV series that were canned after a single season. I’m kicking it off with Painkiller Jane because of the coincidence that it was cancelled on my birthday.

The title character was created in 1995 by Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada for a mini-series in the duo’s independent imprint, Event Comics. In the comics, Jane Vasko was an undercover police officer blown up by a bomb planted on her by a suspicious mob boss. Her life was saved by a henchman who mysteriously imbued her with the power to recuperate from any harm. She goes on to become a vigilante and to survive a range of horrible injuries; however Vasko can still feel pain. Hence the name Painkiller Jane.

In 2005, the comic was adapted as a telemovie for America’s Sci-Fi Channel, starring French-Canadian actress Emmanuelle Vaugier. The telemovie took plenty of liberties with its source material, but was popular enough to justify a 22-episode series, also for the Sci-Fi Channel.

Much more faithful to the original character’s origins, the TV series made Jane Vasco (note the consonant change) a hotshot DEA agent. On a routine drug bust, she’s confronted by a man who causes her to hallucinate. At the same bust she meets Andre McBride (Rob Stewart), whom Jane knows works for the government. Jane can’t resist tracking McBride to his secret headquarters in an abandoned subway station.

There she discovers that his agency is in the business of hunting down “Neuros” – people with a variety of superhuman mental powers. The government believes neuros are dangerous because their powers interfere with their ability to discern right from wrong. Now that Jane “knows too much”, McBride forces her to join the team. After falling out of a window to her apparent death on her first day’s work, she discovers her own power: she can heal quickly and miraculously from injuries, but must still endure the pain.

As well as Stewart, Painkiller Jane’s cast included Alaina Huffman as Jane’s best friend and former DEA partner Maureen Bowers, Stephen Lobo as the team’s medical officer Dr Seth Carpenter, Noah Danby as smart-arsed field operative Connor King, Sean Owen Roberts as IT and communications nerd Riley Jensen, and Nathaniel Deveaux as Joe Waterman, a former subway caretaker who now works for the team.

In the title role was Kristanna Loken. This American model/actress had plenty of TV experience in guest and recurring roles. More importantly, Loken had proven action-star credentials in both film and television.

Unfortunately, she’d mainly used her butt-kicking to bring established franchises to their knees. In 2003 Loken was the red-leather-clad Terminatrix in the critically derided Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. She also starred in BloodRayne (2005), German bad-movie auteur Uwe Boll’s multiple-Razzie-nominated version of the vampire-slaying video game. For her trouble, Loken was nominated for a Worst Actress Razzie.

Most ominously, from 1998-99 Loken had starred as thief-turned-warrior Taja in Mortal Kombat: Conquest, the TV series prequel to the first Mortal Kombat movie. It, too, was cancelled after a single 22-episode season.

Things didn’t begin well for Painkiller Jane – its pilot episode aired on Friday 13 April, 2007. It got a lukewarm reception from audiences, mainly for its poor scripting and confusing plotlines. Many viewers complained that there was no governing logic to the Neuros, whose wildly varying powers included telekinesis, psychic vampirism, shapeshifting, mind control, precognition and turning back time.

Others couldn’t resist pointing out its striking similarities to Heroes, which features a beautiful blonde character with miraculous self-healing powers, and Torchwood, which is about a covert agency that investigates extraterrestrial incidents.

User reviews on the Internet Movie Database include such damning tidbits as: “A show without a backbone or its own original voice”, “It has the look and feel of an amateur production,” and “I didn’t get beyond the fourth episode before my brain went into a self-induced coma to protect itself.” Another user diagnosed the overarching problem with Painkiller Jane: “TV execs believe Sci-fi fans are to stupid to notice how bad these shows are.”

The critics didn’t like it either. “What was originally a cool and well-executed premise has been dumbed-down into contrived banality,” wrote Ray Richmond in the Hollywood Reporter. Seattle Post-Intelligencer reviewer Melanie McFarland wrote that “the imaginations behind “Painkiller Jane” are so thin, and each hour’s progression so randomly executed, that one imagines the scripts were written using the Mad Libs method.” And in Variety, Brian Lowry excoriated its “stiff dialogue, clunky voiceover narration, uneven performances and indifferently staged action sequences” and warned that its “herky-jerky slow-motion set to a heavily synthesized score” might make painkillers necessary for the audience, too.

Painkiller Jane was put out of its misery on 15 August, 2007, with six episodes left to air. The final episode screened on 21 September. However, something good did come out of the show. Its stars, Loken and Danby, married on 10 May 2008. The pair are currently filming Darfur, a movie about the Sudanese civil war co-written and directed – worryingly – by Uwe Boll.