Man 1960s fashion

At first we had to hold back some of the more humorous episodes we made because the network thought it had bought a straight adventure sries. It also took the public a while to realize what we were up to. . . . There are still viewers who accept U.N.C.L.E. as straight adventure, which is all right with us.

In 1963, ABC began airing a whimsical crime show called Burke's Law. Gene Barry, late of Bat Masterson, played the title character, an unlikely Los Angeles police captain named Amos Burke, who, when not chasing criminals, was a wealthy bon vivant given to traveling by chauffeured limousine. The series aspired to English ambiance with its droll, upper crust hero investigating drawing-room murders. In 1965, however, Burke's Law abruptly transformed into Amos Burke, Secret Agent; the hero became a government operative dispatched on global assignments by a mysterious official. The change seems to have been motivated indirectly by the huge commercial success of the James Bond movies, whose first network television imitation was NBC's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968). U.N.C.L.E.'s premiere the season before Burke's transformation set off a national fad fueled by college students (Heitland 46).

The success of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. inaugurated a cycle of conspicuously mannered TV spy shows, a vogue that would last until 1970 and produced such enduring series as I Spy (NBC, 1965-1968), Get Smart (NBC, 1965-1970), Mission: Impossible (CBS, 1966-1973), and The Avengers (ABC, 1966-1969). At the crest of popularity in 1965-1966, virtually the "Year of the Spy" on network TV, there were eight espionage shows distributed among the networks; by 1970, only Mission: Impossible remained, and spies soon vanished from the airwaves, supplanted by cops and detectives (McNeil 780). Yet there was more to this evolution than several years of predictably cyclical prosperity would suggest because spy series after The Man From U.N.C.L.E. were markedly different from their many genre predecessors of the 1950s in their attitude toward the Soviet Union, the threat of domestic espionage, and the dangers of nuclear war. The categorical anti-communism of the McCarthy era was ignored by shows like U.N.C.L.E. that put style and process ahead of political harangues. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. proclaimed the Cold War espionage drama's mannerist phase, effortlessly accomplishing a certain perfection of generic form while simultaneously modifying the assumptions and styles of the past.

Although substantial renegotiation of 1950s anti-communist ideology is palpable here, traditionally, criticism of these programs has conceived them as starkly reactionary, ideologically closed texts that dictated a single, univocal response (e.g., MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace 196-98). Taking the 1960s spy shows as uncomplicated Cold War propaganda, Erik Barnouw, in The Image Empire, argued:

Each series depicted huge enemy networks for undercover warfare. Some had names like KAOS (Get Smart), or THRUSH (the U.N.C.L.E. series), or SEKOR (Amos Burke). Viewers, asked to identify these, readily said "the communists." Some series used terms like "communists," "reds," "iron curtain countries," "people's republics," or simply "the enemy" while generally avoiding names of specific countries. Mission: Impossible writers were encouraged to use specific names in early drafts; nonspecific designations could be put in later. (263)

Barnouw's point seems plausible, yet the comic distancing and irreverent parody employed by many of these programs, particularly those he cites specifically, should not be discounted. Get Smart worked to undermine the rigid Cold War mentality with broad, slapstick humor and even used the ubiquitous acronyms to satirize an imperious worldview that described all international relations in terms of foreign "KAOS" versus American "CONTROL." Summarize the plots of U.N.C.L.E. episodes and we may find traditional Cold War parables; consider the tone and performance of the material and we arrive at a more equivocal assessment.

If we had no other way to judge than by looking at popular television programs of the 1960s, we could infer that the Vietnam era was characterized by an intensifying re-evaluation and re-thinking of many domestic and foreign policy assumptions of the post-World War II period. The palpable and increasing ambivalence, contradiction, and satire of Cold War scenarios underlying the most successful movie and TV spy tales of the decade, particularly in striking contrast to genre predecessors of the 1950s, bear traces of this cultural and political debate. As the television institution was operating in and reacting to a particularly volatile historical situation, the discernible progression from ambivalence to comedic satire among movie and TV espionage dramas of the mid-1960s marks their greatest historical significance in the time of their original production. Several factors both within and beyond the television institution contributed to this major evolution in representation of the Cold War as entertainment.

By the early 1960s, even before Vietnam became a polarizing political issue, network TV was no longer representing contemporary social conflicts, including Cold War themes, in quite the same fashion as it had in the medium's first decade. At the intersection of larger political currents and the inner workings of the television industry itself in the early 1960s was the final erosion of Hollywood's anti-communist blacklist with the election of the liberal Kennedy administration and, concurrently, the networks' move to wrest control of program production from sponsors after the embarrassing quiz show scandals of 1958-1959 (Ceplair and Englund 418-21; Navasky 326-29). These factors are related because the sponsor-produced programs of the 1950s were easy targets for self-appointed anti-communist watchdog groups such as Aware, Inc., who could bring threats of economic boycott directly to the manufacturer producing a particular program or hiring performers or writers deemed "controversial" (Barnouw, The Sponsor 48-58; Boddy, Fifties Television 99-101).

Although broadcasting historian William Boddy records the bitterness of TV writers of the period who were struggling to produce stories of consequence for a medium geared to deliver mass audiences to commercial advertisers, the coincidence of the end of the blacklist and direct sponsor control of TV content at least allowed certain formerly taboo topics to be broached ("Entering 'The Twilight Zone'" 98-108). The evidence that conditions had changed somewhat, creating a bit more space for critical social commentary, or at least an acknowledgment of certain systemic social problems, appeared in various programs, most notably through the frequent incorporation of civil fights storylines into continuing series in the period 1962-1965 (Watson 71-78). In the 1950s, stories with civil rights themes were virtually forbidden, subject to both sponsor/network censorship and boycott and protest from station owners and viewers in the South (MacDonald, Blacks and White TV). While the loosening of strictures on controversy in the early 1960s occurred initially in realist prestige dramas (The Defenders, Mr. Novak, Ben Casey, et cetera), the fantasy-oriented The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and its progeny figure importantly as well in the transition in network treatment of contemporary political issues.