Before Matt Damon became synonymous with Jason Bourne, the character made his live-action debut in a 1988 ABC miniseries. Across two nights in May of that year, “The Bourne Identity” aired with the late “Shōgun” star Richard Chamberlain in the title role.
Bourne first appeared in a series of novels by author Robert Ludlum. His 1980 spy thriller, “The Bourne Identity,” introduced the character as a man being hunted by trained killers while trying to piece together his own shadowy past and his ties to a secret government program known as Treadstone.
While the 1988 miniseries exhibited a few deviations from the book — notably, Alexander Conklin and the terrorist Carlos being killed — its plot was largely unchanged from the source material. This was a major difference from the later version with Damon for which screenwriter Tony Gilroy had resolved to throw out everything from the book except its central premise of an assassin who wakes up with no memory of where his deadly skill set originated.
The Bourne Identity’s first live-action adaptation
Written as a film with a mammoth 185-minute runtime (not including commercials), ABC’s “The Bourne Identity” aired in two parts and earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Miniseries. This small-screen adaptation may have lacked the cinematic scope and the brutal action of the Matt Damon films, but it remained far more faithful to Ludlum’s Cold War-era novel. In fact, Chamberlain admitted he preferred the story of his version as Jason Bourne to that of Damon’s film.
“We had endless script meetings [and] came out with a very, very good script,” Chamberlain said in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “The first ‘Bourne Identity’ movie, I thought, didn’t work nearly as well as ours because they had to drop so much of the story to get it into an hour and a half.”
More recently, the Bourne franchise returned to television in “Treadstone,” a series that expanded the Bourne film universe across past and present timelines. The USA Network series followed the same CIA black ops program associated with Bourne. After receiving mixed reviews, though, “Treadstone” was cancelled after only ten episodes.
