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TV Spies of the ’60s
Fifty-three Christmas Eves ago, I first saw an episode of an exciting new show that hadn’t yet caught on with viewers, despite great reviews in TV Guide and elsewhere. Mission: Impossible was the final entry in what had been a mid-Sixties spy craze on TV and in the movies, all of them of course due to the huge success of James Bond. Spies had never been big box office before Bond, but for a few years they were as common as Star Wars rip-offs would be fifteen years later. Mission: Impossible was unusual for the new genre; no sex, very little violence, jumpy editing that was too fast for most casual TV viewers a half century ago, with complicated, half-explained plots that you had to follow closely to figure out. Above all, its main characters were quite deliberately left blank: you didn’t really know who they were, all you ever knew about them is what they did. Yet Mission: Impossible became by far the most successful and long lasting of all the TV spy shows of the ‘60s. Variety raved, “It looks like CBS finally found its U.N.C.L.E.”, referring to NBC’s hit spy show, then in its third year.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E., debuting in 1964, was the first of the TV spy bunch, boldly announced as “Ian Fleming for television!”, a claim that NBC and its producers, MGM, were forced to hastily retract after Bond’s producers and Fleming’s estate threatened to sue. That claim was a lie, or more forgivably, an awkward exaggeration, and like Mission, U.N.C.L.E. was slow to find an audience. But once it did, it was a huge, if short-lived pop culture phenomenon. Its stars, Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, were mobbed everywhere they traveled. They got bushels of fan mail every week. MGM even happily publicized hundreds of fan letters addressed simply to “The Gun”, U.N.C.L.E.’s custom-crafted handgun, accessorized with a custom stock, barrel extender, silencer, even an infrared sniper scope. Millions of plastic replicas were among the most popular ‘60s Christmas toys for American boys. Could you imagine the reaction to that today?
The third member of the top hit parade was NBC’s other spy drama, I Spy. (NBC was also the broadcast home of Get Smart, whose competing spy agencies, corporate-looking headquarters, gadgets, and auto-opening doors were far more of a parody of U.N.C.L.E. than of Bond, much to MGM’s irritation. But it’s a comedy, so I’m skipping it.)
Like U.N.C.L.E., I Spy was popular for its two leading men, their breezy banter and their friendship. The difference was visible, literally on the face of it: Bill Cosby was the first Black leading man of television, a sensation that he and the network coolly underplayed with the brusque, patriotic note that in modern America, equality and an interracial friendship was no big deal. There’s an urban legend of sorts that race never came up, was never mentioned in I Spy. That’s not quite true; the very first episode, “Goodbye, Patrick Henry”, is about a boastful, rhyming Muhammad Ali-modeled character who defects to Communist China in a worldwide wave of publicity, only to seek a rescue later. Race did come up as an issue from time to time in the series, but it was rare. Cosby, and America at the time, liked it better that way. His character, Alexander Scott, was a Rhodes scholar, an intellectual giant who became one of Black America’s most admired role models. His espionage cover was being the trainer for tennis star Kelly Robinson, played by Robert Culp, who amiably shrugged off being overshadowed by his co-star.
Kelly and Scotty may have talked jivey, like jazz club or comedy club buddies, but I Spy was the most realistic of TV’s spy shows—no whizbang gadgets, no high tech, no mythical antagonists. It was us versus the Communists, just like real life. Their few on-screen briefings took place at the Pentagon; they learned their jobs at what sure looks like the defense language institute in Monterey, California. Like the other spy shows (and like James Bond himself), in a literal sense, they were rarely spies. Kelly and Scotty were secret agents, mostly couriers and sometimes fixers. That was also realistic: actual spies were often people with professions (sports, culture, academia) that allowed them to enter foreign countries, even Iron Curtain ones, without attracting suspicion.
By 1965, NBC was billing itself as “The full-color network,” and I Spy took full advantage of it. No other show of the period, and few since, went on international locations like they did, visually making the most of the real Hong Kong, Mexico or Europe. The show’s cinematographer, Egyptian-born Fouad Said, was an outspoken advocate of getting movies and TV off the sound stages and into reality. A company he started, Cinemobile, devised and marketed trucks that were fully equipped camera and lighting departments, setting the pattern for the entire industry to this day.
If you haven’t seen I Spy, look it up on YouTube. It’s a treat, well written and acted. You’ll see why white and black America alike fell in love with Bill Cosby, and what a damn shame it is that he ended up the way he has. It was on the air for three years. Not every episode is a classic, but by and large, it was consistently good, beginning to end.
Regrettably for its fans, the same can’t be said about The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which started strong but went off course by its third year and was ignominiously canceled midway through its fourth season. Its first year was in black and white, which surprisingly helped the show’s suspension of disbelief. Unlike other spy agencies, U.N.C.L.E. was politically neutral, with the winking implication that it was part of the United Nations, right outside their window. (The UN didn’t like that, so MGM explained the acronym as “United Network Command for Law and Enforcement”.) Dashing agent Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) even had a Russian partner, Illya Kuryakin, played by Scots-born actor David McCallum. This was the height of rock and roll’s British Invasion, Beatlemania ruled the land, and the Brit, McCallum, became a heartthrob for young girls.
U.N.C.L.E.’s Manhattan headquarters looked like a modern corporate office, equipped with computers and closed-circuit TV. The men were in suits and ties. U.N.C.L.E.’s main opponent was also corporate looking, with secret branch offices all over the world, and their own custom-designed weaponry, distinct from the heroes’. Agents of the two sides often knew each other, like staffers of competing ad agencies. When a comely enemy spy coyly declines to say who she works for, Napoleon Solo helpfully reminds her. “Thrush. You know, that organization of renegades, spies, and traitors…the place you pick up your paycheck each week”. In keeping with the Thrush theme, enemies often had the names of birds—Dr. Egret, G. Emory Partridge. This gimmick got old quickly.
So did one of the show’s regular features, bringing ordinary citizens into the center of the action, usually by chance. They were usually (condescendingly silly) young women from what we’d now call Flyover Country, impatient with their allegedly humdrum lives and the dull guy they were engaged to. For an hour of television, they had international adventures, risking death in glamorous surroundings, protected by handsome men. Then they’d invariably realize that their dopey boyfriend and dishwater-plain home town weren’t so bad after all, and return home happier and wiser for the experience.
In the first two years of the show, plots were imaginative with a touch of science fiction. From the second year on, episodes were in color. Strangely, it seemed to take something away; making it look more like real life made the cardboard aspects more obvious. Then a totally unexpected thing would change the course of U.N.C.L.E., not for the better: ABC’s mid-season surprise hit, Batman. For a while, silly, joked-up superheroes were a pop culture phenomenon, called “high camp” for no discernible reason. If you look the term up, it’s called things like “Artificial, affected, effeminate”. The spirit of Batman filled other shows with envy, and by U.N.C.L.E.’s third season the show became a lame joke, with Illya riding a stink bomb, Strangelove-style, over Las Vegas and Solo dancing the Watusi with a gorilla. NBC also made the unwise move of airing a one-year spinoff, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. Stephanie Powers was actually quite good as agent April Dancer, but there was just too much U.N.C.L.E. on TV, devaluing the original show’s appeal. The producers knew they’d screwed up. Season four was a more sober, back-to-spy-basics show, but it was too late for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to pull out of its dive. Its time slot was given to a new, brief-lived sensation, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
In the meantime, Mission: Impossible just kept chugging along, protected by creator Bruce Geller’s iron insistence on avoiding “high camp”, inside jokes, or in fact just about any jokes at all. It started as a product of Lucille Ball’s Desilu Studios, as did its 1966 stablemate, Star Trek. Martin Landau, in fact, turned down the role of Spock. Years later, he admitted that financially speaking, this wasn’t a lucky move. “But who knew? Mission: Impossible was a top ten show. Star Trek could barely stay on the air”. True.
The very second episode I’d see—and the first most Americans would see—was on New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31, 1966. The show became a hit overnight. “Operation Rogosh” was so good that for years, the producers screened it as an example for new writers. An “unbreakable” enemy agent has to be tricked into revealing where germ warfare bombs are placed. Like the movie 36 Hours, they construct an elaborate ruse, convincing their subject that years have elapsed. This kind of fake location plot would later drive The Sting, and in fact they were both based on the same inspiration, a 1940 book called “The Big Con”. This confidence man trick was called “the big store”, and Mission: Impossible would return to it again and again. They’d fool a foreign traitor into thinking his plot to kill his pro-Western boss had succeeded, and while he was in the middle of gloating out loud, the Impossible Missions Forces would roll back the fake wall, and the angry prime minister, who’d heard all, would promptly place the hapless villain under arrest. The IMF were con men in a good cause.
Unlike I Spy’s Alexander Scott, who knew everything about everything, Greg Morris’s Barney Collier was strictly a technical whizkid who could rewire or reprogram anything that came his way. He was yet another role model for Black America. In real life, whenever Morris’s TV was on the blink, television repairmen were astonished that he needed their help.
Mission: Impossible was an expensive show, a tough challenge for little Desilu’s tiny backlot. It required various Iron Curtain police and military uniforms, foreign cars and signage, and credible-looking Los Angeles substitutes for overseas locations. Lucille Ball sold the studio to its vastly bigger neighbor, Paramount Pictures, and turmoil erupted that couldn’t entirely be kept behind the scenes. First, IMF leader Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) was replaced with Peter Graves when Hill started getting increasingly obstreperous about keeping the Friday sabbath. Industry veterans shook their heads. “Can you imagine getting fired from Paramount for being too Jewish?”, they laughed.
Two years later, married leads Martin Landau and Barbara Bain refused to report to work until they got massive raises, which the producers would be contractually required to extend to Graves as well. Hard-as-nails Paramount turned them down and they were gone. Landau would be replaced for two now-forgotten years by Leonard Nimoy, but it would take years of female guest stars until Linda Day George became a reasonably good choice. Show creator and co-owner Bruce Geller had one fight too many with Paramount, who banned him from the lot. He still had his ownership rights, he still got his producer fees…but he was gone.
To give the devils their due, Paramount had to do something. By the turn of the ‘70s, the spy craze was over. The studio wanted more shows in sunlit penthouses and fewer of them in frozen East European dungeons. Crime shows were in, so IMF’s complex schemes were now usually aimed at amorphous crime lords called “the syndicate”. Formerly straight-arrow Greg Morris now had a mild Afro, and often infiltrated criminal rings with a cliched, “Yeah, maaan” delivery. The show would suffer creatively for all these losses and less-than-sure creative choices, though it continued to be fairly good, professionally done and consistent right through the end, season 7. Mission: Impossible was revived for two years in the late ‘80s, with Peter Graves still the leader of the IMF team, and was rebooted as a film series by Tom Cruise in 1996. Today, it’s the only remaining part of the ‘60s spy craze that people are still familiar with.
When Mission ended in the spring of 1972, we were far removed from the innocent-but-sexy era it was created in. Anyone who thinks wokeness is strictly a modern phenomena surely wasn’t around to see feminists burn their bras for eager news cameras outside of the Miss America pageant, or doesn’t remember when even the head of the AFL-CIO, as official a Democrat as it got, declared his own party to be the home of “acid, amnesty and abortion”. Black Americans on the big screen had gone from helping the nuns in “Lilies of the Field” to the murderous pimps of “Superfly”. It was a different world. Yet whenever TV reruns brought us back to those exciting musical themes and jazzy opening graphics, we fondly remembered a not-too-distant time of miniskirts, flirtation, Cold War gunplay, and tall, handsome men in immaculate tailoring. Because saving the world never really goes out of style.
Published in General
One of the best lines on television came from the second season of NCIS…
Kate: Gibbs, what did Ducky look like when he was younger?
Gibbs: [grinning] Ilya Kuryakin
What a terrific trip down memory lane. I saw all those shows, and remembered most of the names. Even April Dancer. (Surprised that was only on for a year – I remember it well.)
In 1995 I had just finished building a hotel in Canton, NY. I got into the elevator with one of our first guests. I glanced at him, and it was Robert Vaughn! (His son had just enrolled at St. Lawrence, I found out later.)
I froze. Dammit! I so wanted to tell him what a thrill it would have been to my ten-year-old self to know that one day I would be riding in an elevator with Napoleon Solo!
But alas, I remembered his awesome karate chop, and I just kept my mouth shut.
There where a couple of British examples that you could also include. The Avengers (with Diana Riggs) ran from 1961 to 1969, for 161 episodes. The Saint which ran from 1962 to 1969, and had 118 episodes. Both series spawned movies that should have been better. The Saint is perhaps best known for staring Roger Moore.
For more contemporary spy thriller shows, I can think of “Covert Affairs” 2010-2014 only 75 episodes and “Chuck” 2007-2012 and 91 episodes. Covert Affairs is on Amazon Prime, and is quite good, Chuck seems to have fallen out of streaming, but can be bought from amazon for $2.99 per season.
The only current spy/thriller TV series I can think of is “Tread stone” and its an excellent show. Based on the Jason Borne movie franchise – and that was enough for me to be in. Trailer here:
I agree that saving the world never goes out of style, it has however become too expensive to be a TV series. I wonder have the spying scandals since Snowden, limited the spies on tv to being villains or morally ambivalent heroes?
I realize that “Secret Agent” (the American title) was a British production (Sir Lew Grade, I believe) but it did air in the States beginning in 1964 for three or four seasons. Since I like both black&white and Patrick McGoohan, I’ll give it a mention. And, of course, the song, which was top ten Billboard.
As for Bondian influence, I’ve heard McGoohan was first choice for Bond, but turned the role down. Who knows?
Today, there’s too much of an addiction to moral ambivalence to really make the concept work. There was a recent film version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and it really wasn’t bad, but one reason it barely went over is the fact that there’s little remaining trace of the show in popular culture, whereas Mission: Impossible never really left. The new U.N.C.L.E. made the shrewd choice of being set in the ’60s, evading the moral ambivalence angle.
The Avengers and The Saint are great shows, spy-ish rather than outright spies.
By some definitions, The Wild Wild West, though not a spy show, was a close relative. Amos Burke, Secret Agent took a memorable detective drama/comedy and turned it into a mediocre spy show.
Another fine British import in 1964 was Secret Agent, known in the UK as Danger Man. The 1967 sequel had the Secret Agent (Patrick McGoohan) in a very cerebral show called The Prisoner, held in “The Village” after he tries to resign.
I liked Mission Impossible and appreciated the campy nature of U.N.C.L.E., but thought the McGoohan shows were the best.
After one of my film festival events, I was in the parking lot when I ran into Peter Falk. He was one of the rare actors whose tics and gestures are exactly like the character he plays. He was waving his cigar around, slapping his forehead, clearly looking for something. “Can I help you, Mr. Falk?” (Hey, if I was hosting somebody, I took the “host” part seriously.) “Yeah, I uh, can’t find my car”. It was a sand-gold colored Cadillac, a nice retro touch in a time when everyone else seemed to be driving foreign cars. I couldn’t help myself; unintentional parody came easily to me. “You know, Mr. Falk, my wife loves your show. She just loves it, sir. When she finds out I saw you today, she is going to be delighted!” We located the Caddy. “You know”, I said, “It’s ironic, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“Television’s greatest detective”. I leaned in. “And you can’t find your car“. He lit up with a smile. “Yeah, that is something, isn’t it?” We shook hands and he was off, headed down Hollywood Boulevard towards Beverly Hills.
Thanks for yet another excellent article, Gary. Lots I didn’t know.
Spies come and spies go. Hitchcock made some great spy thrillers before, during and after WW2. There were The Saint movies before Roger Moore starring George Saunders – which were better than anything Roger Moore made.
And as already mentioned, the Avengers. Diana Riggs got my pre-teen libido going.
But your focus is on American television productions. I gave to admit though my favorite was the show that poked fun at all of them. Get Smart.
Our Man Flint
Many thanks, Hang On! Get Smart was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. Brooks left after the first year, but Henry stayed with the show. Later, with characteristic modesty, Mel Brooks said that Get Smart was the product of two minds: his and James Bond’s.
I am OK with spy-ish… In reality, spies should be interested in organized crime, like drug smugglers, as these organizations could be infiltrated or hired by terrorists and foreign intelligence. Moral Ambivalence could be the name of this era of pop culture.
There was quite a period, when the press would look into the private lives and deliberately try to knock celebrities off their pedestals. I think the moral ambivalence is a response to that – if we dont have a clear hero in the first place, when they fail to be heroic its not a ‘let down’ to the audience. They expected it.
I was concentrating on TV, but yes, Derek Flint is an honored member of the Bond Rip-Off League. With a great credits scene, BTW:
There were, needless to say, many fine “Columbo” episodes, but, in our present context, a couple featuring Patrick McGoohan were truly excellent. In fact, McGoohan played a spy in one (comedic), in addition to one of my faves in which McGoohan played a rather touching murderer as the head of a military school. Pretty sure that McGoohan also was directing at that point.
I loved the dialog in “I Spy.”
And don’t forget Dean Martin as Matt Helm! I loved this post, Gary. My sisters and I all had crushes on Ilya Kuryakin. My memories of I Spy always include Bill Cosby in a tennis sweater. I don’t remember him wearing anything else in that show.
Thanks for reading it, RightAngles! Matt Helm had a more relaxed style that, as the years have gone by, I empathize more and more with. Things that now seem only slightly risque were the height of dirtyness to us giggling teenage boys at the time.
My ringtone is the one they used for “the red phone” in those movies.
I remember that. And, in an unprecedented effulgence of relevant cultural awareness, I was prepared to drop it in the comments, but you preempted me.
I’d never thought about it before reading this post, but wonder if David McCallum’s character on NCIS, Dr. Donald Mallard (and the Ducky nickname), is yet another shout-out, this time to the villainous side of his earlier show.
Mine too.
I think that that ringtone was the first entirely electronic ringtone used in a movie.
Forrest Gump moment coming up: Barbara Feldon, who played “Agent 99” on Get Smart, is from Bethel Park, PA, and graduated the same high school as I did. From 1964-1978, my family lived in her childhood home (Barbara Hall was her name at the time). She was well-remembered by many of the older denizens of the neighborhood as a very nice, down-to-earth young lady.
ITV’s foray into American television was prompted by ABC’s desperation for programming in the 60s. Back then, pre-Fred Silverman and way before Disney, ABC was always stuck at the bottom of the ratings. If you wanted to end the Vietnam War, they said, put it on ABC and it would get canceled in 13 weeks.
But it did wonders for ITV. The first three seasons of The Avengers was shot on video – specifically the UK’s 405-line black and white version. But for American television that produced a fuzzy picture when converted to 525. So the contract with ABC gave them the budget to switch to 35mm film.
With The Saint ITV began filming in color long before the Brits had color broadcasts.
I know you only briefly mentioned it, but I just loooooved Get Smart growing up. We watched a lot of ‘60s and ‘70s TV when I was growing up in the ‘90s and 2000s, and that was one of my favorites. I was Maxwell Smart for Halloween one year, shoe phone and everything!
I was a proud owner of one. Of course what a truly pined for, and never received was a Johnny Seven One Man Army
I had a Johnny Seven – it was a pretty big chunk of plastic to haul around while playing army.
I also had a Radio Rifle and a Snap-shot: The first looked like a radio, but turned into a cap gun rifle, while the other was a camera that turned into a pistol.
And yes, that’s Kurt Russell.
I remember those.
For two years, my sisters and I went around going “Missed it by that much!”
CBS actually owned the rights to make a Bond TV show. That show ended up being The Wild, Wild West.