Lindsay Wagner marked a double milestone this week: her 77th birthday and the 50th anniversary of The Bionic Woman. On Friday, she posted an Instagram video that saluted the series that made Jaime Summers a television icon and thanked the fans who kept it alive for half a century.
“Today is the day — Happy 50th Anniversary to The Bionic Woman!” Wagner said in the video, adding a note she introduced as “a heartfelt message from Lindsay (and a surprise guest!) to celebrate the moment.” The guest was Kenneth Johnson, whose appearance gave the birthday message a little extra weight for fans who still treat the series as part of the weekly rhythm of TV history.
The timing lands neatly on the calendar. The Bionic Woman premiered as its own series on January 14, 1976, after spinning off from The Six Million Dollar Man, which starred Lee Majors. Wagner played Jaime Summers, a woman who survives a tragic skydiving accident and is rebuilt with bionic limbs. The show ended in 1978, but the anniversary post made clear that its audience never fully went away.
That endurance matters because Wagner has long described Jaime as a character meant to feel real, human and relatable, not distant or superhuman. In her own remarks, she said the attempt to make her so relatable connected with viewers, especially younger ones, and she also noted that the balance between masculine and feminine in society is still changing. The contrast is hard to miss: a role designed to feel grounded now belongs to a performer who, five decades later, still looks remarkably unchanged to the people who watched her the first time around.
Wagner’s message was also a reminder that the show’s afterlife has been built less by reruns than by loyalty. “Without your support for all these years, we wouldn’t be here,” she said, making the fans the reason the celebration feels current rather than nostalgic. She later went on to appear on Grey's Anatomy as Dr. Alex Karev’s mother, but this week the focus returned to the role that first made her familiar to millions. The unanswered detail is what Johnson contributed to the video beyond the surprise itself, but the larger point is already plain: after 50 years, The Bionic Woman is still getting a live response from the person who carried it.
