Citizen-Spy

Parody and the Limits of Agency 79
Accompanying these programs’ shift—from documentarist official discourses
of national truths to their own parodic inversion—is a transformation
in the mechanisms that bind these representations to the broader social sphere.
The 1950s programs are, for the most part, antiperformance. Their flat, almost
deadpan delivery, low production values, use of lesser-known actors, absence of
stars, and continual reinforcement of the authority of the designated expert
link them to discourses of public service and patriotism. But what emerges in
the shows of the mid-1960s is something entirely different—an embrace of
performance, of artifice, of stardom and its plastic pleasures. These programs’
humor—and their political potential—resides in the glance, the aside, the
intertextual moment that offer pleasures outside those of the always and already
closed ideological world of the diegesis.
Agents and Acronyms:
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
From 1959 to 1963 very few spy programs reached the American airwaves. The
Red Scare programs continued in second-run syndication, and a few shows
dealt occasionally with international espionage themes, but the resurgence of
spy programs didn’t really begin until 1964. NBC aired a short-lived 1963 program
called Espionage, for example, but it failed to capture much attention. A
British-produced anthology drama, it most often dealt with historical incidents
such as spy plots during World War II and IRA uprisings in the early twentieth
century. In September 1964, however,The Man from U.N.C.L.E. premiered as
the first significant American spy program of the decade. Eventually becoming
a highly self-referential parody—of both itself and other spy shows—the first
season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. begins where World of Giants left off. In its
earliest episodes, U.N.C.L.E. borrows heavily from the narrative conventions of
the 1950s American spy shows—direct address to the American citizen, claims
of “official” government sponsorship, and a reduction of geopolitics to gendered
struggles over the individual agent’s autonomy. Despite its increasingly
comic tone, the show continues a basic inquiry common to all of the U.S. spy
shows: a concern over the limits and possibilities of masculine agency within a
bureaucratic system.
In part, of course, the show was a direct attempt to capitalize on the popularity
of the new James Bond films. The Bond novels were already widely popular,