After The Brady Bunch was canceled in 1974, and following the demise of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour in 1977, Knight followed in the footsteps of his former Brady Bunch co-star Robbie Rist (the notorious Cousin Oliver) by appearing on The Bionic Woman. Rist had played one of former tennis pro turned schoolteacher/spy Jaime Sommers’ (Lindsay Wagner, pictured below) students on the first two seasons of the series, but by the third season (and a switch from ABC to NBC) the overhauled series saw much less of Sommers in the classroom. Season three also introduced viewers to Max the Bionic Dog in its two-part season opener. Max was a bionic test subject who’d been kept under wraps until his body started rejecting his bionic enhancements (jaw and limbs), causing concern that his condition was age related and would endanger Sommers and her OSI colleague Steve Austin (Lee Majors), a.k.a. the Six Million Dollar Man. Turns out Max was simply depressed; after his bionic meltdown he appeared in eight more episodes of the series, and his popularity fueled talk of a spin-off series.
That’s where Knight came into the picture. In one of the Max episodes he played a teenager who rescued the bionic pooch. It was a job Knight had no idea would be so fondly remembered. “Yes, I became the owner of Max,” he said with a smile when MediaVillage asked him about the role. “That [episode] was actually the pilot for the proposed spin-off. I was to play Max's owner.
“The problem with that show was the shoot days," he continued. "They were on a six- or seven-day schedule for every hour of television. I believe we went three days over on that episode. They started projecting it out and said, ‘There's no way this is going to work,’ and it was because we were working with the dog. Today you’d probably do [all the dog stuff] in post-production. But at the time they would have had to write less for Max. The less screen time Max had, the more they could've gotten done quicker.”