Citizen-Spy

xii Preface
matter of what historical traces opened up fruitful lines of inquiry about TV’s
place within American popular culture. This book explores the continuities
between television espionage programs and both official and popular discourses
of national identity. In some cases the connections between TV’s fictional representations
and state institutions were overt and intentional. In others, these
linkages are more oblique, formed not through prescriptive policy but through
common claims about national identity. The first chapter, for example, lays out
the broad discursive framework of connections between official state politics
and semidocumentary spy narratives in the 1950s, while the second is more
narrowly focused on one program’s negotiation between documentarism and
narrative. Chapter 3 explores two largely forgotten programs that scarcely can
be said to have a direct influence on what followed. Their place in this history
is not causal, but rather illustrative of what would turn out to be remarkable
transformations in the U.S. television industry, American popular culture,
and narratives of national identity in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Chapter 4
addresses how parodic espionage narratives turned inward on their own discourses
of national authority amid a cultural climate responsive to self-referentiality
and satire. The programs discussed in chapters 5 and 6 aired largely simultaneously
with the parodic programs discussed in chapter 4, and thus can’t be said
to respond to the parodies in a linear or dialectic fashion indicative of a transformation
in a genre. But even while the parodies exposed the vulnerability of
the rigidly reductive version of nationalism that was popularized in the 1950s,
other spy programs offered new realist narratives of national identity more
amenable to the cultural contexts of the mid- to late-1960s America. Chapter 5
explores this through the intertextual connections that linked I Spy to broader
debates over civil rights and its relationship to the American national body,
while chapter 6 is more industrial in focus, examining the research practices
that guided the representational decisions made by a diversifying and increasingly
globally minded television studio.
It is in the very nature of history to exclude; the historian continually balances
the equally compelling demands of breadth and depth. In navigating those demands,
I have chosen to use each program as a case study of a given issue that
reflects on the book’s larger arguments as a whole. The chapters of this book
are thus not entirely symmetrical in approach: some draw particular attention
to industrial strategies, others to matters of representation or televisual narra