Lindsay Wagner’s contract as Jaime Sommers on “The Bionic Woman” was dropped before the show had even finished its first run of episodes, a decision Universal reversed only after fan reaction to the character proved too strong to ignore.

What followed was one of 1970s television’s most dramatic pay renegotiations, with the studio paying roughly ten times her original rate to bring her back for the rest of the hit series.

A Breakout Role, Then a Dropped Contract

Wagner debuted as Jaime Sommers in a two-part 1975 crossover on “The Six Million Dollar Man,” playing a former tennis pro rebuilt with bionic parts after a near-fatal skydiving accident, according to Biography.com’s account of her career. The character was written to die in that original storyline. Audience response was immediate and strong enough that ABC and Universal reversed course, reviving Jaime Sommers for her own spinoff series in January 1976. Despite that quick turnaround, Wagner’s original contract terms were not renewed on favorable footing, and her deal with the studio lapsed before the spinoff had built out a full season, per Click Americana’s retrospective on the show’s early years.

The Fan Response That Changed the Math

What happened next is where the story becomes genuinely unusual for network television of the era. Viewer demand for Jaime Sommers proved strong enough that Universal returned to the negotiating table rather than recast the role or let the character quietly disappear. According to TV Insider’s account of the negotiation, the studio ultimately agreed to pay Wagner roughly ten times her original per-episode rate to secure her return for the remainder of the series. That kind of renegotiated pay jump, from a dropped contract to a tenfold increase within the same production cycle, was a rare sequence of events for 1970s network television, where studios typically held the leverage in talent disputes.

What The Bionic Woman Became

The show ran for three seasons, first on ABC and later on NBC, and made Wagner one of the defining action leads of the decade, a distinction the Television Academy’s own 40th-anniversary retrospective credits alongside contemporaries like Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman for reshaping what a female action hero could look like on American television. Wagner earned an Emmy Award for the role and remained closely identified with the character for the rest of her career, appearing in later television-movie revivals of the franchise well after the original series ended.

What the Record Actually Shows

Independent accounts of the era consistently confirm that Wagner’s contract was dropped and then renegotiated at a dramatically higher rate once the studio recognized how much of the show’s appeal rested on her specifically, rather than the bionic concept in the abstract. What none of those accounts, including Biography.com, Click Americana, and the Television Academy’s own retrospective, specify is the exact reasoning behind the original decision to let her contract lapse in the first place. What’s documented is the outcome: a rare moment of a 1970s network paying real money to correct a mistake, once it became clear the audience had already decided who Jaime Sommers was supposed to be.