The series is a spin-off from The Six Million Dollar Man, with the character Jaime Sommers first introduced in a 1975 two-part crossover episode of that show titled 'The Bionic Woman'.

Although every episode's closing credits credited Martin Caidin's 1972 novel Cyborg as the basis for the series, the novel only inspired the bionics concept and the characters of Rudy Wells and Oscar Goldman; Jaime Sommers herself never appears in any of Caidin's novels.

Jaime Sommers was originally killed off in her introductory Six Million Dollar Man episodes, but the character proved so popular with audiences that ABC asked the writers to find a way to bring her back for her own spin-off series.

Despite The Bionic Woman moving from ABC to NBC for its third season, actors Richard Anderson and Martin E. Brooks continued to play Oscar Goldman and Dr. Rudy Wells on both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman simultaneously, an unusual arrangement across competing networks.

Creator Kenneth Johnson enforced strict, specific limits on Jaime's bionic abilities to maintain plausibility, such as being able to jump up two stories but not three, or jump down three stories but not four, and these limits were sometimes directly incorporated into episode plots like 'Kill Oscar'.

A planned spin-off series centered on Max, a bionic German Shepherd nicknamed 'Maximillion' because his bionics cost a million dollars, was rejected by the network, so the character instead remained with Jaime for the show's third season.

Composer Jerry Fielding wrote the original opening and closing themes, but when Joe Harnell took over and wrote new themes for season two, the show compromised by using Fielding's opening theme alongside Harnell's closing theme to avoid disappointing Fielding.

Lindsay Wagner performed Morris Albert's song 'Feelings' in the 1976 episode 'Bionic Beauty' and recorded Joe Harnell's 'Time Changes' for the 1977 episode 'Deadly Ringer', for which she also won an Emmy Award.

The Bionic Woman became the only science fiction program to reach the No. 1 position in the UK television ratings during the 20th century, with its premiere episode watched in 7 million homes for an average of 14 million viewers.

The final episode, 'On the Run', was deliberately written and filmed as a proper series resolution (inspired by the concept of The Prisoner), unlike The Six Million Dollar Man, which ended with a standard, unresolved episode despite both shows being cancelled simultaneously in 1978.

In the German dub, the series was titled 'Die Sieben Millionen Dollar Frau' ('The Seven Million Dollar Woman'), even though within the show itself Oscar Goldman jokes that Jaime's bionic parts cost less than Steve Austin's six million dollars because they were smaller.