Martin Caidin's Steve Austin, and TV's

In adapting Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was rather more faithful to the original material than I had guessed before picking up the first of those books. Steve Austin's accident as a test pilot of a prototype shuttle; his physical reconstruction with all its mental as well as physical agonies; his promptly being packed off on missions to South America and the Middle East--we see all this in the TV movies, with most of the modifications probably understandable given censorship, budgetary constraints and the like. However, some were clearly more deliberate choices, not least the reimagining of Austin himself. Caidin, who could be very much the edgelord, had a fondness for extremely unlikeable protagonists--and while Austin is no Doug Stavers-like supervillain, the runners of the show took it on themselves to considerably humanize him. Given that the intent was a weekly TV series people could enjoy as easy viewing it seems to me that it was a sound decision--one that has probably helped to give the show its extremely long life in reruns.