[This week marks the 60th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]
On silly spinoffs that succeed, silly spinoffs that don’t, and what we can make of the difference.
The Bionic Woman, which aired its first episode on this date 50 years ago, was a spinoff from an existing hit show, The Six Million Dollar Man. In April 1975, season 2 of that show had featured a two-part episode, “The Bionic Woman,” in which superpowered protagonist Steve Austin (Lee Majors) reunites with his high school sweetheart Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), almost loses in her a tragic skydriving accident, and convinces his scientist handlers to save her by turning her into a bionic woman with the same procedures that they had used on him. He does so by promising that she will work for the same fictional top-secret office he does (the Office of Scientific Intelligence), and after some hemming and hawing on both their parts she obviously decides to do so. The new episode and character were thus as over-the-top and silly as the original, and that’s precisely the point—Six Million had been an instant hit, and the producers decided, as is so often the case, to repeat the formula in a new show.
In the fall of 1977, season 3 of The Bionic Woman opened with a very similar two-part episode, “The Bionic Dog.” In it Sommers meets Max (short for Maximillion, named for how much his procedure cost), a German Shephard who she learns had been the first bionic test subject before the later procedures on Austin and Sommers; Max is experiencing some negative side effects and is slated to be put down when they meet, but Sommers rescues him and enjoys some quality time with this appropriately powerful pet. The producers’ intent was that after this two-part introduction, Max would likewise go on to headline his own spinoff show, presumably called The Bionic Dog, in which he would live with Sommers’s forest ranger friend Roger Grette (also introduced in this two-part episode) and, I dunno, fight forest fires alongside Smokey or some such. But the network rejected this second spinoff and Max stayed with Sommers instead, periodically appearing on the show to perform his own spectacular and silly superpowered feats.
I’m not in the heads of those network executives (and let’s face it, if I were I would have greenlit a show about a superpowered little friend like Max), but I would say there are a couple ways to analyze the difference between these two cases. One is what I alluded to above: while of course there can be spinoffs that diverge from the original, it seems likely to me that when a spinoff is going to launch while the original show is still airing (and indeed, still very early in its run), the goal would often be that it replicates the formula closely enough to guarantee (the network believes, anyway) success. A superdog in the woods is different enough from these superhumans working for the OSI that it just wasn’t as sure of a bet, I’m saying. But I would also highlight a broader TV history context—while the first couple decades of TV were rife with animal-centered shows, from Lassie to Mr. Ed. to The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, that trend had largely died off by the late 1970s; and perhaps the timing was thus just wrong for a show entitled The Bionic Dog. Ruff.
Next TVStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?
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