Does This Make Me the Bionic Boy? (Yes. I Think It Does.)

Let’s be honest. If you had told the 9 year-old me that someday the 52 year-old me would be working with Six Million Dollar Man AND the…

Let’s be honest. If you had told the 9 year-old me that someday the 52 year-old me would be working with Six Million Dollar Man AND the Bionic Woman, I’m pretty sure my head would’ve exploded. And my monumental Jewfro would likely have landed in downtown Sherman Oaks, between the Orange Julius and the other Orange Julius.

For someone exactly my age, growing up in exactly that time, I don’t think there was anyone bigger on the planet than Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner. This the era of 3 broadcast networks. No cable. No streaming. No internet. No colossal movie franchises on multi-pic universes.

If I were five years older or five years younger, this may not have mattered quite as much as it did.

But in the days, post-Beatles and pre-Star Wars, the heroes of network TV were it. And no one was huger, then or now. Maybe Evel Knievel seconds before Snake River? Or Ali seconds before Leon Spinks I? Perhaps the Fonz? Some would say “before he jumped the shark.” I’d actually place his “jump the shark” moment at the time he crashed his motorcycle into Arnold’s chicken stand.

I’ll never forget watching the first Six Million Dollar Man movie at Kevin Riant’s slumber party in rapt silence. Or Jamie Sommers’s tragic death in a special epsiode. Or her rebirth in the Bionic Woman pilot which allowed her to indelibly etch the image of her ripping a phone book in half forever on my brain.

For someone in my specific age cohort, was there anything bigger, ever, than Steve Austin battling Andre the Giant as Sasquatch in that massive ice tunnel. If you told me it quardupled the ratings of Roots and Shogun combined, I’d believe you and keep walking.

No one had more emotional resonance at the time and in the rearview mirror of nostalgia than these folks. And that was especially true for me.

One could pretty persuasively make the case that my best friend in elementary school was our TV in the den. (And my second best friend was the black and white in the maid’s room where I watched The Little Rascals.) I’m not looking for sympathy or pity. I’m more stating an empirical fact.

In second grade, I remember taking a survey of people’s favorite TV shows and then I compiled the results in a colored bar graph. For class credit? No, silly of you. It was strictly for the joy I received from thinking more about television and aggregating results for public consumption.

I’ll confess, the shyness that leads to a boy befriending a color Zenith doesn’t usually predict an adulthood of rubbing shoulders with your childhood idols. Then again, I always say nobody becomes a comedy writer because they were TOO POPULAR on the schoolyard.

Which leads me to this week. Running a sitcom. Inadvertently casting two of my heroes who’d always been inextricably linked. And not even by design. Such are sometimes serendipitous trial and error of TV casting.

In today’s world, what would be a better picture? Me and the Obamas. Well yeah. Springsteen. Jay and Bey. Ringo and Paul. Those would all be up there. But for me and where and whence I came, you’d be hard-pressed to defeat a Lee Majors/ Lindsay Wagner combo.

And so this week, I got to approach them and ask for a photo. Okay, truth be told, I was too nervous and had someone else do most of the speaking. Because in that moment, I didn’t feel a 2018 Netflix showrunner. I felt like a 1975 boy in his jammies, watching his favorite shows with a glass of chocolate milk.

It’s not often in life that your childhood dreams coalesce with your adult realities. And when those moments happen, you take it, you count your lucky stars and you rush that picture right over to Instagram. Otherwise your 52 year-old self might not believe it any more than your 9 year-old self would have.