B. J. and the Bear
television series
B. J. and the Bear is an American action comedy television series which aired on NBC from February 10, 1979, to May 9, 1981. Created by Glen A. Larson and Christopher Crowe, the series starred Greg Evigan. The series was produced when the CB radio and trucking craze had peaked in the United States.
The theme song, also titled "B.J. and the Bear", was written by Larson and performed by Evigan.
Premise and storylines
Greg Evigan stars as Billie Joe "B.J." McKay, a professional freelance itinerant trucker who travels the country's highways in a red and white Kenworth K-100 Aerodyne (a COE semi truck) with his pet chimpanzee Bear, named after Bear Bryant, the famed football coach for the University of Alabama. In the pilot movie, it is stated that McKay had spent two years in Vietnam as a medical helicopter pilot, had been a captain and earned the Distinguished Service Cross. He was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam at the Hanoi Hilton for four months in 1973 after his helicopter went down over the DMZ. Episodes typically deal with B.J. uncovering or getting mixed up with crime in the area he is traveling through, and a local resident—usually, a young, beautiful woman—appealing to him for help.
A frequent guest star in the first season is Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo (Claude Akins, who previously starred in the trucking series Movin' On), whose character eventually spun off onto his own show The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo along with guest character Alexander Waverly (Ben Cooper).
Two episodes in season two, "Eyes of Texas" (1979) and "The Girls on the Hollywood High" (1980), were designed as prospective pilots for a series about a pair of private detectives called Heather Fern (Rebecca Reynolds) and Caroline Capodi (Lorrie Mahaffey in the first one, Heather Thomas in the second). The latter episode has cameo appearances from John S. Ragin and Robert Ito as their characters from Quincy, M.E. (also a Glen A. Larson series).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “B. J. and the Bear” as television series. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as television series. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1987517. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1981, 1973 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “B. J. and the Bear” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.