When ABC’s live-action Green Hornet premiered on September 9, 1966, the network’s bet was on Van Williams, the square-jawed lead cast as crime-fighting publisher Britt Reid, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the series. Producers expected him to become a household-name heartthrob. Instead, audiences fixated on the guy playing the driver. Sixty years later, almost nobody remembers Van Williams was the star of the show — because the actor cast as his chauffeur and sidekick was Bruce Lee, and Lee didn’t play along with being a footnote.

A Hero, and a Sidekick Who Wasn’t Supposed to Matter

The Green Hornet ran on ABC from September 1966 through March 1967, with Williams as the title vigilante and Lee as Kato, his martial-arts-trained chauffeur and enforcer. On paper, that’s a standard hero-and-helper arrangement, and the marketing treated it that way. Per Britannica’s account of the series, producers had banked on Williams becoming the show’s breakout star. Lee’s role wasn’t written to be the draw. It became the draw anyway, almost immediately, once viewers actually saw what he could do on screen.

Lee’s path onto the show wasn’t a straight line, either. Producer William Dozier first noticed him after a celebrity hairstylist who’d watched Lee perform at a 1964 martial arts tournament in California told Dozier about him, and Dozier arranged a screen test after reviewing tournament footage, according to ScreenRant. Dozier’s original plan wasn’t Kato at all — he wanted Lee for the lead in a different series called Number One Son, about the son of the fictional detective Charlie Chan. That project fell apart before it ever aired. When Dozier moved forward with The Green Hornet instead, built to ride the wave of Batman’s success, he went back to the actor whose screen test had stuck with him and offered him the supporting role of Kato. Lee, per ScreenRant, was reportedly reluctant to take it at first.

The Fight Scenes Nobody Expected

Lee didn’t accept a watered-down American action-hero style for Kato. Wikipedia’s account notes that “it was Lee’s insistence that Kato be played as a martial artist — rather than an American-style fisticuffs fighter — that pushed the directors to rethink the character’s portrayal.” That insistence mattered because most American television audiences had simply never seen real martial arts choreography before. The show became, per Wikipedia, “the first time broad swaths of the American public saw true martial arts fighting,” and it landed hard enough that Van Williams himself started taking lessons from Lee just to keep up with the moves the show now needed from its supporting cast.

A Historic Casting, Even Before the Fight Scenes

There was another layer to why Lee’s presence stood out. Britannica notes he was one of the very few non-white actors appearing on American television at the time, which made his casting historically significant on its own, independent of how the role was ultimately received. That combination — a rare non-white lead performer, doing something visually nobody on American TV had done before — is a large part of why a supporting character ended up eclipsing the show built around someone else.

A Different Show, Depending on the Country

The imbalance became official once the show reached Hong Kong, where Lee had grown up before moving to the U.S. Wikipedia notes that overseas, the series wasn’t marketed under its American title at all — it was sold as “The Kato Show.” That’s abrupt honesty from a market that didn’t need American branding conventions to tell it who the actual star was. The Green Hornet only lasted one season on ABC, canceled after 26 episodes according to epguides’ episode guide for the series, but it kept a cult following long after cancellation specifically because of what Lee did with a role that was never supposed to carry the show.

The Part That Outlasted the Whole

Lee went on to become one of the most influential film stars of the 20th century, and The Green Hornet is remembered today almost entirely as a footnote in his career rather than the other way around. That’s a strange inversion for a network drama that was built, cast, and marketed around someone else entirely. It’s also a pattern that shows up again and again in television history: the role a studio treats as secondary is sometimes the only reason anyone still remembers the show at all.