The Bionic Woman/YMMV

Original series

• Adaptation Displacement: Each episode credits the show as being based upon Martin Caidin's novel Cyborg. But you'll never find Jaime Sommers in any of Caidin's books, as she was created by Kenneth Johnson. The credit for Caidin was mandated by the use of Oscar Goldman, Rudy Wells and the occasional appearance by Steve Austin, plus the fact the series continued the concept of bionics as established by Caidin in his original novel.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome (many, such as the episode in which she outruns a 100 MPH race car, and another in which she tears a phone book in half to intimidate a group of unruly students)
• Recycled Premise
• Recycled Script: As noted above, the series was guilty of this several times in its first season due to the extremely short notice given between its commissioning and its debut.
• Special Effect Failure

2007 reboot

• Adaptation Displacement: This new version is considered to be so far removed from both Martin Caidin's "Cyborg" novel and Kenneth Johnson's creation that neither are even credited.
  • Despite this, elements of Steve Austin's bionics are incorporated into Jaime, most notably her bionic eye.
• Fetish Fuel: Jaime always had her leather jacket on. Michelle Ryan kicking ass in a leather jacket began a trend of adorning Action Girls in leather jackets after noticing that some saw "hot chick in leather kicking ass" as a turn on. Not the Ur Example of this by far but clearly the Trope Codifier.
• Holy Shit Quotient: Jamie and the Corvus girls' car accidents. Also Jaime's freak-out on discovering she's been turned into a bionic woman.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Inverted bigtime for several reasons:
  • The original pilot depicted Becca, Jaime's sister, as being hearing impaired. The decision to cast a non-deaf actress in the role caused major controversy. So the producers decided to change the character to someone with regular hearing instead, which annoyed people even more.
  • The show cast Isaiah Washington in a major role. Not a big deal, except that the time he was the center of a firestorm of controversy and considered persona non grata by many after being fired from Grey's Anatomy for reportedly uttering gay slurs. This led to protests against Bionic Woman for hiring him and the promise by some to boycott the series outright (the fact his character is killed off didn't appear to help).
  • Michelle Ryan did such a good job at playing a bitch in Eastenders that And the Fandom Rejoiced ended up being inverted when it was announced that she'd been cast as Jaime.
• Nightmare Fuel: Jaime waking up and seeing her limbs in the process of being rebuilt by the anthrocytes -- unsurprisingly she freaks out. Unexplored is the question of how Will would have converted Jaime into a bionic woman if they hadn't had their 'accident'.
• Rooting for the Empire: Sarah Corvus, especially among fans of Battlestar Galactica.