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

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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.