Lee Majors stars in The Fall Guy as Colt Seavers, the Hollywood stuntman who tracks down bail jumpers, and the series is now included in a list of eight old-school action thriller shows considered unwatchable. The complaint is not aimed at the stunts; it lands on the stories around them.
MovieWeb says action thrillers from the 1970s and 1980s had a charm that is hard to replicate, but newer series on Prime Video and Netflix lean on tighter editing, more convincing fight scenes, and plots that move beyond a villain-of-the-week pattern. That contrast leaves older shows exposed when they are judged by current standards.
The Fall Guy and Colt Seavers
Lee Majors plays Colt Seavers, and that character setup still gives The Fall Guy a clean hook: a stuntman who takes on bail-jump cases for extra income. Douglas Barr as Howie Munson and Heather Thomas as Jody Banks round out the show’s core cast, but the piece says the stunt work remains the main attraction.
The problem is the material wrapped around it. The surrounding stories do not always give the series much content, so the action can feel like it is carrying more weight than the writing behind it.
Police Woman and Angie Dickinson
Angie Dickinson’s Police Woman is part of the same list, and it carried a sharper historical marker: it was among the first hour-long dramas to put a woman in the lead. Dickinson also won a Golden Globe Award for the role of Sergeant Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson.
That makes the list more than a simple nostalgia exercise. It shows how older television can still matter for what it opened up, even when the mechanics around it now feel clumsy, repetitive, or out of step with modern expectations.
Why the rewatch fails
Clumsy special effects, painfully repetitive plots, and problematic treatment of marginalized people are the three reasons the piece gives for why some of these shows feel weird to revisit now. The criticism is less about one weak element than about the way old formula TV can lose momentum when the action no longer hides the gaps.
For The Fall Guy, that leaves a split verdict: the stunt sequences still do their job, but the stories around them no longer keep pace. If you are revisiting it now, that divide is the part worth watching for first.
