Considering that a not-long-lasting but much hyped new version of "The Bionic Woman" was put on the air by NBC several years ago, it seems strange that Season 1 of the original wasn't released on DVD until a few days ago.
Before that, the best way to catch Jaime Sommers was in the episodes of ABC's "The Six Million Dollar Man" where the character made her debut. Fans will recall that Jaime was the fiancee of Steve Austin (Lee Majors), the astronaut who was made bionic after a plane crash. Jaime is made bionic after a skydiving accident.
Various actresses were considered for the role; Lindsay Wagner, previously best known for appearing in a two-part episode of "The Rockford Files," was cast. The "Six Million Dollar Man" episodes in which she was featured struck ratings gold and compelled ABC to launch a spinoff.
By series standards, "The Bionic Woman," which spent two years on ABC and a season on NBC, didn't last very long. But Wagner won an Emmy for her role. Children across America were buying bionic character dolls and lunch boxes - now collectibles - during the mid-1970s.
The year on NBC also created some trivia, with Richard Anderson, who played Steve and Jaime's boss, Oscar Goldman, and Martin E. Brooks, who played bionic doctor Rudy Wells, becoming the first actors in television history to play the same character on two networks at once.
The 2007 series, which starred British actress Michelle Ryan (one of my pet peeves: Non-American actors and actresses playing Americans) had Jaime in humorless, high-tech situations, and took out the fun that had been in the original series. That show was ultimately a victim of the 2008 writers' strike, and it was just as well.
Here's the original introduction to "The Bionic Woman":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcba-ZgtsT4
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Lamont Johnson, who died this week, directed television productions for almost half a century. Besides his work on television series such as "Peter Gunn," "Dr. Kildare" and "The Twilight Zone," there were the miniseries and televison movies based on real life that were his crowning achievements - including 1974's "The Execution of Private Slovik" with Martin Sheen; 1981's "Crisis At Central High," with Joanne Woodward; 1985's "Wallenberg: A Hero's Story," with Richard Chamberlain and 1988's "Gore Vidal's Lincoln," with Sam Waterston and Mary Tyler Moore.
According to IMDB.com, he said, "Projects about human problems, about the testing of the human experience, about the pressures which exist upon human beings in a difficult world, are what really involve me. The traps people get into and have to battle out of are the elements of drama with which I like to deal."
Most of those projects are available on DVD.
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See you next week. Until then, Happy Viewing!
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