Every Version of The Fall Guy

A Stuntman Who Kept Getting Back Up

The Fall Guy began not as a novel or a comic but as a television pitch: Glen A. Larson, the prolific producer behind Battlestar Galactica and Magnum P.I., wanted to make a show about the unsung workers of Hollywood. The result was The Fall Guy (1981), a Friday-night ABC action series starring Lee Majors as Colt Seavers, a big-time Hollywood stuntman who pays his bills by moonlighting as a bounty hunter. The premise was cheerfully absurd and deliberately self-referential: a man whose job is to absorb punishment for movie stars spends his weekends absorbing punishment for money. The theme song, co-written by Larson and performed by Lee Majors himself, became its own minor cultural artifact.

The series ran five seasons and 112 episodes, never pretending to be serious, and that honesty is exactly why it lasted. It arrived at a moment when American TV action was king, slotted alongside The A-Team and Knight Rider, and it leaned hard into car chases, stunts, and good humor. Colt Seavers was not a tortured antihero. He was a guy who liked his job.

For nearly four decades the property sat dormant. Then David Leitch, the director of Bullet Train and co-director of John Wick, brought it back in 2024 as a theatrical film starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Leitch is himself a former stunt performer, which gave the project an unusual authenticity: the 2024 film is less a straightforward remake than a sustained argument for why stunt workers deserve more credit, wrapped inside a big action comedy. The result is a franchise that has now existed in two very different eras of pop culture, both times built around the same core joke: the toughest person on set is the one nobody sees.