My 50 Favorite Classic TV Characters: Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers

 

In 1977, Lindsay Wagner received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Dramatic Role, causing many eyebrows to be raised – especially among her fellow nominees. Family star Sada Thompson in particular did not hide her umbrage over the selection.

 

 

Did Wagner deserve to win? How should one answer that? Emmy categories will always be apples-to-oranges comparisons, even within the same genre.

 

On Family, Thompson’s Kate Lawrence coped with a cancer scare, an ailing parent, a daughter with a broken marriage and a son who dropped out of high school – all rich dramatic material, which she navigated brilliantly.

 

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the same network, Jaime was chasing Bigfoot, going undercover as a lady wrestler, and fighting Fembots. 

 

What’s worse, the Bionic Woman episode that won her the Emmy (“Deadly Ringer”) revived the hackneyed soap opera trope of an evil twin.

 

So if we were assessing based only on IMDB plot synopses, you can perhaps understand Thompson’s resentment. Thankfully, she would take home the Emmy in the same category the following year.

 

Personally, I’m fine with Wagner’s win. Television shows with a sci-fi or fantasy element are typically overlooked completely in the major award categories. This was the first time an actress won for a series in this genre, and would be the last time until Gillian Anderson’s win for The X-Files in 1997.

 

And if you watched and enjoyed The Bionic Woman, as I did, you know this was not a series that leaned on Jaime’s superhuman abilities to tell good stories. That was fine for Wonder Woman over on CBS – viewers (especially males) counted the minutes until Lynda Carter twirled into a costume that was super in more ways than one. But she was Diana Prince for more than half of most episodes, and let’s face it – Diana was kind of boring.

 

Not so Jaime Sommers. She was a captivating character and a woman of accomplishment even before the skydiving accident that changed her life. Her status as a top-ranked professional tennis player allowed her to travel the world, though it left little time for romance with Col. Steve Austin. But after the accident it was Austin who persuaded the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) to give her the same bionic makeover that saved his life.

 

The procedure gave Jaime two bionic legs that allowed her to run 100 miles per hour and jump hundreds of feet. Her bionic right arm had super-strength, and her right ear could pick up sounds at great distances – but only, apparently, if she first moved her hair out of the way. 

 

 

Seeking some return on its investment, the OSI sends Jaime on a mission, hoping perhaps her special abilities would compensate for her lack of espionage training. She does well – until her bionics began to fail. Surgery is attempted to repair the damage but it’s too late – Jaime dies.

 

Wait, what? That was the original plan, until audience response demanded a different outcome. When viewers spoke the networks listened, and in a subsequent episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, it was revealed that Jaime was kept alive in suspended animation until her condition could be stabilized.

 

Did she deserve the Emmy? Imagine creating a character that was so quickly embraced by millions of fans that they refused to let her die? Does that not speak to something in Lindsay Wagner’s talent and charisma? That she could put an audience on her side to the extent that they demanded to see her again and let ABC know it? 

 

 

That’s another difference between the classic TV era and whatever we’ve got now. Back then there wasn’t as big a disparity between what Emmy voters liked and viewers at home supported. Besides Wagner and Sada Thompson, other nominees in her category included Angie Dickinson in Police Woman and Kate Jackson in Charlie’s Angels. If their shows were so popular, surely they had to be doing something right, and that deserved to be recognized by those that honor television excellence.

 

Contrast that situation with the Emmys just a few days ago, in which the Best Actress – Drama winner appears on a series watched by about 500,000 people, or 0.15% of the US population.

 

So, yes, Lindsay Wagner deserved her Emmy Award. Because of the many beguiling, sympathetic and endearing qualities she brought to Jaime Sommers, she rescued the character from death and then headlined her own series for three seasons – two on ABC, one on NBC (even her original network couldn’t shut her down without a fight). The show was a global hit, and for a time even became the top-rated series in the United Kingdom.

 

Most episodes range from good to excellent, including several mentioned on this blog before: “Kill Oscar” was an epic three-part story that introduced the Fembots and their sinister creator, played by John Houseman; “Doomsday is Tomorrow,” covered in detail in my “Unshakeables” series; “A Thing of the Past,” from early in the first season that sets the tone for much that follows. This was never an action show centered on Jaime’s unique abilities, but a character study of a kind, compassionate school teacher who moonlights as a government agent. 

 

 

“The Jailing of Jaime” spotlights her resourcefulness, as well as her affectionate father-daughter-like relationship with Oscar Goldman, wonderfully played by Richard Anderson. And “Sister Jaime,” in which she goes undercover in a convent, is delightful from start to finish.

 

A few were not as good – generally any episode with a heavy focus on kids (“Beyond the Call”) or Indians (“Canyon of Death,” “The Night Demon”) ranked lower with me, but even here Lindsay Wagner maintained her capability to hold your attention, not with histrionics or heroics but with a kind of quiet gentleness and class that has almost disappeared from contemporary television.

 

There was one other issue that had to be addressed before spinning off The Bionic Woman – a side effect of Jaime’s life-saving surgery was partial amnesia that erased her memories of being in love with Steve Austin. It was another dumb soap opera cliché, but a necessary one to free up Jaime for romances on her own series.

 

She seemed to have plenty of those, though given Wagner's chemistry with costars like Ed Nelson in “Assault on the Princess” and George Maharis in “Jaime’s Shield” it would be easy to see how any of these flings and flirtations might evolve into something more permanent.  She even coaxed more than one expression out of Evel Knievel in “Motorcycle Boogie.” 

 

 

 

She did, of course, wind up with Steve Austin, but the marriage would not take place until 1994, in the TV movie Bionic Ever After.

 

 

I’ll end this piece with praise for the show’s final episode, which ventured into some darker, uncharted territory. “On the Run” begins when Jaime rescues a little girl, who recoils from her when the wiring in her bionic arm is exposed. Later, the girl refers to Jaime as “the robot lady.” Already burned out from too many missions, and questioning her own humanity, she resigns from the OSI. Easier said than done, when Oscar’s higher-ups worry that her bionics and her knowledge of OSI missions could make her a security threat. Like Number 6 in The Prisoner, their plan is to put her into a community where she can live a “normal” life, as long as she doesn’t stray too far outside the security fence. 

 

 

The story wraps a little too neatly, perhaps necessitating a return to the status quo in case the series returned for another season, but before that “On the Run” asked some challenging questions about what makes a person a person, and whether a manufactured arm, ear and two legs qualifies a woman as government property. It also pulls powerful performances from Wagner and Richard Anderson. If the series had to end, it did with remarkable grace – just like its leading lady.