Citizen-Spy

The Irrelevant Expert 71
ington framed the show in terms of the legitimate threats offered by America’s
Communist adversaries. The result is a confusing, contradictory text; the anti-
Communist, civic address of the show differed very little from such “documentary
melodramas” as I Led 3 Lives and Behind Closed Doors, yet World of Giants
clearly strains the limits of believability. When in the final credits Mel turns to
the camera and says, “In the meantime, be careful—the little man could be
you!” one isn’t sure whether to wince or laugh.
World of Giants approaches, but can’t quite cross, the threshold between the
state-sponsored espionage dramas of the 1950s and the spy parodies of the
1960s. As Susan Sontag wrote of camp, “The essential element is seriousness, a
seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed
as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic,
the passionate, and the naïve.” 50 What makes World of Giants so difficult
to characterize is precisely this sort of earnestness—the palpable dramatic tension
and the passion with which it treats the political context of the Cold War.
In retrospective viewing of the program, one gets the impression that a delicate
balance is nearing collapse; the precarious combination of official state politics
with narratives of adventure and intrigue has reached the very limits of plausibility.
Within a few short years, this tension between the agent and the state
would give way, leading to increasingly referential and playful narratives. But
here, there is no parody—only earnest patriotism, spoken through an impossibly
fantastical narrative.
For different reasons, neither World of Giants nor Behind Closed Doors were
commercially successful, and they’ve largely disappeared from view in most
histories of the period. Still, they each offer particularly revealing glimpses into
a television industry in transition. Both were created at the tail end of a period
of close correspondences between narrative televisual representations and state
politics; both also invoked the narrative styles of documentarism that linked
spy programs of the early to mid-1950s to specific federal agencies. The economic
and political dependencies that generated those narrative styles, however,
were fragmenting by the end of the decade. Emerging from their first
decade as powerful institutions in their own right, the television networks were
likely less concerned about winning federal approval than they once had been.
Sponsors—once the most powerful direct influence on many kinds of programming—were
losing control, and by the late 1950s, the networks would