I’m not gonna do some revisionist thing and try to tell anybody that “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman” were ahead of their time and were ground-breaking science fiction TV series.

But I am here to say that a recent rewatch of some pivotal episodes of the former – the latter isn’t on a streaming service I subscribe to – left me impressed about how grown-up the shows were.

Yeah, no doubt, the shows were for a family audience, including kids, and episodes had that slow-motion running effect that probably every kid in the world imitated at some point.

So there’s no question what the aim of the shows was.

But rewatching some recently, I was struck by how realistic the shows were, in two big ways:

The bionic people were damn bitter, especially early on, at what the government did to them in rebuilding them.

And the government lackeys, including everybody’s pal Oscar Goldman, were manipulative MFers.

You know the drill on these shows, and probably even watched them first-run or in eternal reruns. I was in my mid-teens when the series began, and while I rolled my eyes at the shows, I appreciated there was some small amount of science-fiction TV that wasn’t reruns of “Star Trek.”

The original series ran for more than a hundred episodes over five seasons beginning in 1973. The “Bionic Woman” was introduced a season or two in and got her own three-season spinoff. Anyway, astronaut and colonel Steve Austin loses both legs, an arm and an eye in the crash of a test plane. Later, Jaime Sommers, Steve’s longtime friend and sometime girlfriend, loses both legs, an arm and an ear in a parachute jump.

Adventures ensue, and the series – preceded by TV movies – really leaned heavily into a James Bond- or “Mission: Impossible” mood early on. Before too long, the mothership series took on a much more sci-fi vibe and featured aliens and murderous satellites returned to Earth and, of course, Bigfoot.

What struck me was how pissed Steve Austin was that Goldman and Dr. Rudy Wells took it upon themselves to replace his assorted limbs and eye with a pretty definite expectation that he would be pressed into spy service. In fact, the original pilot does not feature Goldman but has a magnificently creepy government operative played by Darren McGavin.

At some point, McGavin even wonders out loud about keeping Austin on ice between missions, but his doctor (played in the pilot by Martin Balsam) says he won’t let that happen.

They were totally gonna Winter Soldier the guy.

That’s dark, but Austin’s depression and frustration at being turned into something not quite human is even darker. It’s not a season- or series-long vibe, like it would be today, but things are not all sunshine and lollipops after the first couple of episodes.

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of silly stuff, like bending steel pipes and jumping over walls, to come in the series. And there’s star Lee Majors’ awesome track suits, leisure suits and – late in the series – porn star mustache.

And Lindsay Wagner is much more adorable and smart and funny than I remembered.

There are worse ways to fritter away your vintage TV-viewing time than watching these bionic people.