Even Critics Sneak In Viewings Of ‘La Femme Nikita

She kicks. She shoots. She kills. And she looks darn good doing it.

She’s Nikita, a blond-haired, blue-eyed assassin whose weekly adventures on the USA network have made “La Femme Nikita” cable’s highest-rated drama series.

Sentenced to death for a crime she didn’t commit, Nikita is rescued at the last minute by a mysterious government agency, cryptically referred to as Section One, that specializes in killing for the common good.

Given the choice of either dying (this time for sure) or killing, she chooses the latter.

Guided by her enigmatic superior, Michael, Nikita becomes pretty good at what she does, while never turning down the chance to let viewers know she’s far from enjoying it.

“La Femme Nikita,” airing Sunday nights, averages about 1.7 million viewers - subpar by network standards, but up there in the cable universe. Its primarily adult audience is split about 50/50 between men and women, which is good news for advertisers.

The actress who plays Nikita, Aussie Peta Wilson, is popping up on talk shows and in magazines all over the place, including a 12-page spread in the September issue of In Style, where she (looking decidedly un-Nikitaish) models what a host of fashion designers regard as sexy.

And perhaps most telling of all, it’s a show the critics hate themselves for loving. A recent poll listed “La Femme Nikita” as the second most popular guilty pleasure among TV critics, behind only the syndicated tabloid news show “Hard Copy” (and ahead of Howard Stern).

“I think that’s probably really accurate,” says Alberta Watson, who plays Madeline on the show. “We’re not looking at (prestige film producers) Ivory and Merchant material here or really some deep introspective piece of artwork.

“I think the show is what it is. That it doesn’t pretend to be anything else is what makes it fun.”

That’s some reputation, but not one the show’s creators are ready to embrace without reservation.

“I like to think that the show is popular because it’s good and because the mood of the show is unique,” says Joel Surnow, its executive consultant and writer. “The stories we tell and the characters we’ve created … without sounding immodest, I think it’s a fascinating group of people we’ve created.”