Citizen-Spy

xxii Introduction
Wild Wild West (CBS, 1965–70). Also on the air were several British imports,
which were both popular and very economical purchases for the U.S. networks.
6 These included The Avengers (ABC, 1966–69), Secret Agent (CBS, 1965–
66), The Saint (ABC, 1967–69), and The Prisoner (NBC, 1968). Throughout the
mid-1960s, espionage emerged not so much as a genre unto itself, but rather as
an inversion of other, more established generic narrative forms. Whether explicitly
comic or linked to action and crime dramas, by the mid-1960s the spy was
often a mechanism for disrupting and sometimes reconfiguring assumptions
about televisual narrative, the coherence and stability of heroic protagonists,
and the relationship between individuals and institutions.
This is not to say that the figure of the spy was stripped of its ideological
pull as an ideal national citizen. In I Spy (NBC, 1965–68), this ideal is reinvigorated
by a turn toward cultural relevance, diffracting spy programs’ interrogation
of agency onto ongoing cultural debates over African American citizenship
and civic responsibility. In the program, the first dramatic series to star
an African American actor, the civil rights movement and pan-Africanism collide;
I Spy tests the geopolitical implications of black American travel and social
mobility. In Mission: Impossible (CBS, 1966–73), longest running and last of the
period’s spy dramas, the notion of individual agency is nearly completely evacuated;
its agents are anonymous mercenaries in service to the bureaucratic
state. Mission: Impossible was also one of the first American television programs
crafted specifically so as to ensure success on the international syndication
market. The result is a contradictory text that is both intensely nationalistic
and carefully circumspect about how its racial and cultural representations
might interfere with its commercial viability. Spiraling outward from domestic
postwar containment through the international “development decade,” by the
end of the 1960s these programs offered a model of American national identity
that increasingly diverged from official state institutions, and instead was articulated
alongside consumption, class privilege, and global mobility.
The shifts in these shows’ representations of American national identity
were closely tied to the changing political, cultural, and ideological landscape
of the Cold War. Popularized by journalist Walter Lippman’s 1947 book of the
same title, the term “Cold War” has since become a kind of structuring shorthand,
an endlessly expansive phrase that has come to encapsulate the zeitgeist
of an era. The term’s origins, though, lay in the postwar geographic and politi