Citizen-Spy

96 Parody and the Limits of Agency
Particularly during this third season, U.N.C.L.E.’s most outlandish comic
moments are often also moments of Pop-related gender subversion. Moe Meyer
has argued that though camp was quickly appropriated by the mainstream in
the mid-1960s, it nonetheless privileged queer textual reading strategies that
confounded heterosexual gender norms. 50 The dialogue in such episodes as
“The Suburbia Affair” openly encouraged queer interpretations of the Solo/
Illya couple, and mocked the gendering of domestic relations that so characterized
the suburban family sitcom. 51 Though the program is more convincingly
interpreted as an opportunistic appropriation of Pop Art—and the queer
subcultures that were central to it—than as an intentionally radical transformation
of prime-time television, it is still particularly noteworthy given the discursive
legacy of American spy programs. 52 Just a few years earlier, the spy was
unerringly, even militantly, a heterosexual patriarch; any hint of gender instability
in these shows was a marker of Communist subversion. Within such a
context, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s gender play is profoundly political, inasmuch
as it consciously foregrounds the arbitrarily constructed nature of social
norms that were in the early Cold War invested with such cultural weight. 53
The same season The Man from U.N.C.L.E. swerved headlong into camp,
MGM developed and aired The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. When NBC and MGM
executives met with Felton in the weeks following Batman’s January 1966 premiere,
they urged the producer to develop a spinoff that might compete with
Batman’s twice-weekly juggernaut. The character April Dancer was introduced
in “The Moonglow Affair” in February 1966, and preparations quickly began
for a fall premiere of what was originally to have been titled The Lady from
U.N.C.L.E. (The pilot featured former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley in the
title role, but she was replaced in the series by Stefanie Powers.) NBC was likely
seeking to compete with ABC, which had a virtual monopoly on the teen girl
market; ABC had not only aired the teen sitcoms Gidget, The Patty Duke Show,
and Tammy—as well as the female detective program Honey West—the previous
year, but had also picked up the British spy series The Avengers for its first
appearance on network television for the 1966–67 season (the show had aired
in syndication in some U.S. cities since the early 1960s). 54
Given the period’s shifting representations of women and girls—as well
as the increasingly parodic tone of spy programs, once so predominated by a
bifurcation between masculine action and feminine passivity or sexualized