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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.
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Wonder if he would have signed a VHS copy of “Day of the Dolphin”?
Who is it?
It’s the Lord, Noah.
Riiiight.
A smart thing about I Spy: the banter between Scotty and Kelly was witty, but they didn’t tell enough actual jokes to make it an action comedy, and they never made fun of the job. When they heard gunshots or screams, it was strictly business.
When the show’s location was the USA, I Spy filmed its interiors at Desilu, but it was a straightforward facilities rental; it was an independent, not a Desilu production. They had no studio executives breathing down their necks.
Sheldon Leonard was still a really good Desilu customer in the fall of ’65 when the show debuted, at a time when Desilu needed all the rentals they could get, since ‘Mission: Impossible” and “Star Trek” were still a year off — their only wholly-owned series was Lucy’s own show on CBS. Leonard was using Desliu facilities for “The Andy Griffith Show”, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Gomer Pyle, USMC” at that time. (Ironically, “I Spy” was Sheldon’s only really successful show on NBC, as his sitcoms didn’t do anywhere near as well as the had on CBS or even ABC. He missed for the most part with “The Joey Bishop Show” and “The Bill Dana Show” before “I Spy” and then after it, saw “My World and Welcome To It” and “From A Bird’s Eye View” only last a season or less.)
Johnny Carson was gracious enough to invite Bill Dana on after Dana’s (very) brief-lived late night show failed. Interestingly, it was broadcast out of Las Vegas, backed by Howard Hughes and sold syndicated to independent stations. Dana made a self-depreciating joke about having rented a home from Carson (a true story). Carson laughed and said he’d rent it to Joey Bishop next; at the time Bishop was on one of ABC’s forlorn attempts to compete with The Tonight Show.
Dick Cavett was the only late night success (sort of) that ABC had until Nightline in 1979, launched as America Held Hostage, a nightly news wrapup of the Iranian hostage crisis.
Needless to say, any TV historian worth his salt should be familiar with the sacred texts: Mad Magazine’s versions, “The Man From AUNTIE”, “Why Spy?”, and “Mission: Ridiculous”.
NBC did salvage something out of Dana’s sitcom, in taking Don Adams’ hotel detective character and getting Mel Brooks and Buck Henry to transition him into Maxwell Smart (supposedly, Adams’ persona in Dana’s show was Dana’s creation, and long-term had a bigger effect on pop culture than Bill’s then very-popular, but now very-un PC Jose Jimenez character).
I remember a routine from one of Adams’ early albums called “Hitler and the MCA”.
(The Music Corporation of America was the industry’s biggest talent agency. They dominated Universal to the degree that the Justice Department made them choose between being agents and running a studio. They chose the studio, though many MCA agents stayed in the business and were extremely successful.)
The routine was fresh then; Adolph Schicklgruper needed a career boost, so Hollywood agents helped him refine his pitch, pick an effective stage name, and become successful.
Even before they fully purchased Universal, MCA’s Revue Studio arm was already one of the major players in the 1950s-early 60s TV business (I think their shows filmed at Hollywood Center Studios until 1958 or ’59, when everything moved out to Universal City).
Damn it, Jon, when are we going to get a full post out of you? You’re more than a walking encyclopedia, you’re practically the whole library at Alexandria.
Have you ever seen the pilot episode? It’s funny! Spoiler alert:
Max gets paired up with Agent 99, who poses as his chauffeur (forgot the rest of the plot). Near the end of the episode, she takes her uniform cap off and shakes her hair out. Smart looks on in amazement and says, “You’re a girl!”
Thank you, Gary. I was peripherally aware of these shows before; apparently now I have to do some youtubin’. Outstanding post.
I need to cobble together some of the tons of trivia junk into something thematic one of these days.
Not to forget, Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp!
Many thanks for your patronage, Boss.
Starring Commodore Matt Decker. I liked that one and was disappointed when it wasn’t renewed.
Ironically,
“Despite many positive reviews, moderate Nielsen ratings led NBC to cancel the series after one season. It then went on to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series.[3]”
Thanks for the nostalgic tour of TV shows I loved as a kid, Gary. Your posts are always fascinating.
I can hear the Get Smart theme in my head right now.
“From A Bird’s Eye View” a year later was an interesting, but unsuccessful hybrid, as a cooperative effort between Leonard, Ralph Levy, who produced and directed George Burns and Jack Benny’s shows back in the 1950s, and ITC. Filmed in England, NBC apparently didn’t have much faith in it, but NBC never did as well in the 1960s or 70s with sitcoms as CBS or ABC did. Like “I Spy” and “My World…” it had a nice animated opening title and theme though (Sheldon had been involved with animation since the 1950s when he was doing voices for Warner Bros., so animation was pretty common with his show titles).
There are a couple of cancellation head-scratchers, most of them forgotten by now. “Mr. Lucky”, 1960 on CBS, was doing pretty well, but the sponsor decided to quit at the end of the season anyway. In those days, individual sponsors had more power over network schedules. Usually a network looked for another major or sole sponsor, but it didn’t always work. The more broken-up sale of bits of ad time was riskier for sellers. As time went by, it was done more and more until it became the norm.
A big part of NBC’s ability to pull Walt Disney away from ABC was the guarantee of long term sponsorship, 50% from the network’s own parent company, RCA, and 50% from Eastman Kodak, the two big companies most invested in getting Americans to spend more for color pictures.
In the other direction, I know Rob Long’s former co-worker on “Cheers”, Ken Levine, has told the story about how Sheldon went over CBS president Jim Aubrey’s head in 1962, when he was preparing to cancel “The Dick Van Dyke Show” after meh Season 1 ratings, by flying to Cincinnati and getting Proctor & Gamble to commit to sponsoring Season 2. The ratings took off then, helped in part by the show following a new series “The Beverly Hillbillies” on the schedule for the 1962-63 season (hard to imagine anyone today having the nerve to try and pair a rural sitcom with the network’s most sophisticated urban-centered comedy).
Ken’s career path is amazing: some of the funniest TV scripts in history with his partner David Isaacs; major league baseball announcer; a hugely successful and entertaining blog; and now we learn he leapt over The Smiling Cobra in a single bound. A scary head to jump over.
Great thread, Gary and everyone.
In the late 1960’s, assorted political and musical distractions were drawing me away from TV for a brief period, but Mission: Impossible and Star Trek were the exceptions.
Re those two shows, someone pointed out that you could listen to an entire Star Trek episode without seeing the pictures and get the whole plot, whereas M:I told its complex stories more visually, with long sequences played without dialogue, to its signature musical score.
Mission: Impossible was frequently difficult to follow, even though they showed you the whole episode during the show opening.
Clarity error on my part — Ken was still in school when this happened (though he also has a story about going to the same school as Jan Smithers from “WKRP in Cincinnati”), and it was Sheldon Leonard to make the trek to Cincy to save his show with the sponsor.
Two adjacent Kubrick films have the same interesting pattern: Just listening to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), you’d miss what was so striking or special about a movie that would work just as well as a silent film with music. A Clockwork Orange (1971), on the other hand, though highly visual, can be followed by ear alone as if it were a radio show.
The M:I ritual of opening with the taped exposition, followed for some years by Briggs or Phelps choosing the team via dossiers and photographs, was followed by part of the team’s briefing. There’s a subtle touch here: all the cast members wear black and white clothing. “The black and white” scene was a distinct craft, explaining key props and some of the action, but not all of it. It was a tease.
The trickiness of the plots is made worse by the fact that more and more commercials have been jammed into the running time of reruns, and Mission scripts suffer more than most when you have to trim another four minutes out of the show.
Fantastic thread. Lots of good stuff in here.
I went and consulted various nerd sources to back this up, but if Landau was ever mentioned for Spock it was only as a back up in case for whatever reason Nimoy turned them down or wasn’t available. Gene Roddenberry had worked with Nimoy on his show The Lieutenant and had him in mind from the start. (Deforest Kelly was also mentioned for Spock!) Landau was almost certainly never offered the part. But it makes a terrific story so it got repeated a lot over the years.
As for McGoohan for Bond, if I remember the order, they went to Cary Grant (personal friend of Cubby Broccoli) who said he’d only do one movie. Then they went to James Mason who said he’d only do two. Then they went to McGoohan who said the character was too immoral and turned them down. I may have some of this order wrong, I’m far more current on my Star Trek trivia than my James Bond trivia.
More McGoohan: He’s a big part of why I watch Ice Station Zebra at least twice a year. His extended exposition about British German Scientists vs. Russian German Scientists vs. American German Scientists is a highlight of the movie.
There was also Ivan Dixon as Sgt. Kinchloe on Hogan’s Heroes . . .
He was not only a technical wizard but was as slick a con man as anyone on Hogan’s team.
I’m afraid to go look, but was that show as awesome as I remember it?
The show seems to have been revamped early on. The first episodes were a farce, in both senses. The POWs did things like manufacture fake guns. Later on, the comedy hadn’t changed much, but the show at least paid lip service to the idea that it wasn’t all laughs, that the Stalag 13 gang were an effective commando team behind enemy lines, hiding out where the Nazis would least expect them. In effect, it’s as if the writers of Sgt. Bilko suddenly decided to keep the jokes but make the plots closer to Mission: Impossible.