The Bionic Wiki
Register
Advertisement
The Bionic Wiki
for other uses, see The Bionic Woman (disambiguation)
Titlecard-bionicwoman

English title card

The Bionic Woman was a television series spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man. It starred Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers, a former tennis pro who gains superhuman abilities through bionic implants and prosthetics. The series was created by Kenneth Johnson, but since it used concepts and characters devised by Martin Caidin for his novel, Cyborg, Caidin received a special credit in each episode. (However, the character of Jaime Sommers does not appear in any of Caidin's original Cyborg series novels.)

The series ran for three seasons from 1976 to 1978; as with The Six Million Dollar Man, it debuted midway through a season, so as a result its first season was abbreviated. Due to an unusually short period between its commissioning in the spring of 1975 and its debut in January 1976, several early episodes used scripts from Six Million Dollar Man rewritten to fit the new character.[citation needed]

During its first two seasons the series featured occasional crossover episodes featuring Steve Austin, as well as two occasions ("The Return of Bigfoot" and "Kill Oscar") in which multi-part storylines were shared between the two series. Richard Anderson and Martin E. Brooks played their SMDM roles of Oscar Goldman and Dr. Rudy Wells in the new series.

The Bionic Woman was actually cancelled by ABC after its second season (which was its first full-length season). It was picked up by NBC for a third and final season. Although there were no further crossovers with Steve Austin, both Anderson and Brooks continued to play their characters, becoming two of the first actors in TV history to play the same ongoing characters in two different television series airing on two different networks at the same time. Under the new network a new ongoing character, the bionic dog Maximillian, was added.

Despite airing on another network, The Bionic Woman was cancelled in the spring of 1978 at the same time as its parent program. Wagner later reprised her role in a trilogy of made-for-TV reunion films between 1987 and 1994 that united the two series.

Significance[]

The Bionic Woman was the first ongoing series in American prime-time network television history to feature a lead female superhero character. Although it was predated by Isis, a superhero series starring JoAnna Cameron, which debuted in the fall of 1975, Isis was produced for broadcast during the Saturday morning children's programming block. The Bionic Woman also debuted about a month after the pilot TV movie for the Wonder Woman series starring Lynda Carter first aired, however the Carter production did not actually debut as a regularly broadcast series until three months after Bionic Woman debuted.

Syndication changes[]

For syndication, the series is augmented by the addition of Part 2 of "Kill Oscar", which was originally broadcast as a Six Million Dollar Man episode, but reassigned to The Bionic Woman in order to keep their story arcs intact. Conversely, Part 2 of "The Return of Bigfoot", which originally aired as the second season premiere of The Bionic Woman, was moved to the Season 4 syndication package of The Six Million Dollar Man. When both series were released to DVD in the 2000s, the episodes were duplicated across both series' releases.

See also[]

Advertisement