DEA agent Jane Vasco stumbles across a secret government strike team that hunts "Neuros": people with strange mental or physical powers. The strike team identifies these genetic aberrations and injects them with a microchip that generates a small electrical charge, neutralising their powers.
The leader of this team is impressed with Jane and resolves to recruit her, whether she wants it or not. That seems to come to tragic consequences when, on her first mission, Jane plummets 40 stories out of a skyscraper.
But then she wakes up in the morgue ...
Painkiller Jane is a superhero TV show from the time before Iron Man. Among other things, that means it comes from a time when comic book adaptations were still seem as something of a gamble, rather than just one of Disney's many licenses to print money. It's conspicuous that no-one wears a costume, and that no mentions the "superhero" word.
It's also a low budget show, as is painfully apparent in a few green screen sequences. I suspect that the production either ran into budgetary or personal issues too, as several characters seem to suffer abrupt reductions in their significance in the show.
So is it any good? Well, the cast are quite personable and I did actually quite enjoy it when it first came out, but the past decade has not been kind to it. The bar for comic book TV has well and truly risen in that time, and left this show far below it. In particular, the show's efforts to have a longer-term plotline in addition to its "Neuro of the week" challenge are uneven at best. It's an interesting historical artefact in the evolution of superhero shows, but not a program I would recommend seeking out to watch.
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