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THESIS
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LIBRARY
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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

The Female Agen(t)cy: Gender and Nationalism in American

Ph.

Prime-time Espionage Series (1950—2006)

presented by

Tricia Anne Jenkins

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for the

degree in American Studies

 

 

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THE FEMALE AGEN(T)CY: GENDER AND NATIONALISM lN AMERICAN
PRIME-TIME ESPIONAGE SERIES (1950—2006)

By

Tricia Anne Jenkins

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY
American Studies Program

2007

ABSTRACT

THE FEMALE AGEN(T)CY: GENDER AND NATIONALISM IN AMERICAN
PRIME-TIME ESPIONAGE SERIES (1950-2006)

By

Tricia Anne Jenkins
This dissertation examines nine prime-time American spy series that aired on television
between 1950 and 2006. Through an examination of these programs‘ narratives,
characters, parent and spin-off shows, product tie-ins, and production histories, the
project seeks to uncover how notions of American nationalism, ideal citizenship, and
even the CIA have shifted during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. By
predominantly selecting programs that feature female operatives in either a protagonist or
prominent villainess role, this dissertation also traces the evolution of the female secret
agent on American television and illustrates the ways that gender has been and continues
to be connected to notions of American nationalism, feminism and ideal citizenship. The
shows selected for discussion in this project include 1 Led 3 Lives, Biff Baker USA, Get
Smart, The Girl From U.N. C .L.E., The Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man,

Scarecrow and Mrs. King, La F emme Nikita and Alias.

Copyright by
Tricia Jenkins
2007

For Celeste, who tried her damndest to thwart this mission, and for Nat, whose
operational support ensured its success.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to my dissertation chair, Dr. Gary Hoppenstand, whose support of
my graduate career well-extends this dissertation and manifested itself in numerous
letters of recommendation, opportunities at The Journal of Popular Culture, opportunites
at the Midwest and National Popular Culture Associations, job search advice and an
occasional celebratory lunch. Thank you, too, to Dr. Ann Larabee, whose critical and
insightful feedback greatly strengthened this project; to Dr. Kristie Macrakis, who took
me under her wing from the start and shared my passion for all things spy; and to Dr.
Douglas Noverr, whose kindness and constructive and timely feedback have also greatly
enhanced this dissertation and my other academic endeavors.

I would also like to give a special thanks to my husband, Nat O’Reilly, for his
unrelenting support of my graduate career. For this dissertation alone, he has read and
commented on numerous chapter drafts, watched countless hours of spy television,
emailed me relevant news articles, and looked after our daughter Celeste when I needed
writing and research time (all while working on his own Ph.D.). He also ﬁred up the hot
tub and poured another margarita on particularly stressful days, which allowed me to

rejuvenate and sit down, somewhat refreshed, at the computer the very next day.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................ vii
LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................... viii

INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1

The 19503

Reafﬁrming Gender in the Early Cold War Crisis: The Spies of Biﬂ Baker

USA. and 1 Led Three Lives ............................................................ 17

CHAPTER 2
The 19605

Pleasure, Consumption and the Slender Spies: Get Smart and The Girl
from U.N.C.L.E. ........................................................................... 46

CHAPTER 3

The 19703

Atomic-powered Cyborgs and the Quest for Technological Supremacy:

The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman ................................. 80

CHAPTER 4
The 19803
The Suburban Spy and the Rise of the New Right: Scarecrow and Mrs. King ..... 113

CHAPTER 5
The 19908 and 2000s
Female Warriors and the War on Terror: La F emme Nikita and Alias ............. 144

CONCLUSION ............................................................................. 184
APPENDIX ................................................................................. l 94
NOTES ....................................................................................... 205

EPISODES CITED ......................................................................... 207
WORKS CITED ............................................................................ 211

vi

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: List of British and American Spy Programs Airing Between 1951 and
2006 ............................................................................................. 195

Table 2: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) with an Individual
Female Lead .................................................................................... 201

Table 3: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) Featuring an
All-Female Team or Partnership ............................................................. 202

Table 4: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) with a Prominent
Male-Female Partnership ...................................................................... 202

Table 5: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) Featuring a
Co-Sexed Team of Three or More Agents .................................................. 202

Table 6: List of British and American Spy Shows {1951-2006) Centering on
a Male Lead ..................................................................................... 202

Table 7: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) Featuring an
All-Male Partnership or Team ................................................................ 203

Table 8: List of Spy Shows (1951-2006) with a Prominent, American, Female
Character (Listed by Decade) ................................................................. 204

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: A double-page advertisement for 1 Led 3 Lives appearing in the
August 24, 1953 issue of Sponsor magazine .................................................... 23

Figure 2: Herbert Philbrick appearing before the Un-American Activities
Committee of the US. House of Representatives. Photo from his autobiography

I Led 3 Lives .......................................................................................... 25
Figure 3: Richard Carlson playing Herbert Philbrick in “Dynamite” ........................ 25
Figure 4: DVD cover of BiﬂBaker, USA. Vol. 1. Released by Alpha Home

Entertainment ........................................................................................ 28
Figure 5: Comrade Rose in “Dynamite” ......................................................... 35

Figure 6: Don Adams as Maxwell Smart and Barbara Feldon as Agent 99.
Image available at the Museum of Broadcast Communications Website .................... 50

Figure 7: Stefanie Powers as April Dancer and Noel Harrison as Mark Slate.

Image available at The Museum of Broadcast Communications’ Website .................. 53
Figure 8: Agent 99 in a chauffeur’s outﬁt in the pilot, “Mr. Big” ............................ 62
Figure 9: A weedy Mark Slate in “The U.N.C.L.E. Samural Affair” ......................... 65
Figure 10: Angelique Pettyjohn as Charlie Watkins ............................................. 67
Figure 11: The Chief and Larabee dressed as women in “The Day They Raided

the Knights” .......................................................................................... 67
Figure 12: Lee Majors as Steve Austin and Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers in

“The Bionic Woman Part One” ................................................................... 81

Figure 13: Dr. Franklin and one of his fembots in “Kill Oscar Part One” ................... 95

Figure 14: Screen shot from The Bionic Woman’s opening sequence ........................ 98

Figure 15: SMK advertisement featured in TV Guide (1983). Available
on-Iine at http://www.kate-jackson.com/smktvads.htm ........................................ 1 18

Figure 16: SMK advertisement featured in TV Guide (Sept. 10, 1983).
Available on-line at http://www.kate-jackson.com/smktvads.htm.. ............................... 119

Figure 17: SMK advertisement featured in TV Guide. Available on-line at
http://www.kate-j ackson.com/smktvads.htm .................................................... 1 20

viii

Figure 18: SMK advertisement featured in TV Guide. Available on-line at
http://www.kate-j ackson.com/smktvads.htm .................................................... 1 21

Figure 19: Jennifer Garner, the star of Alias, on the cover of the February 2002
issue of Rolling Stone ............................................................................. 146

Figure 20: Peta Wilson, the star of La F emme Nikita, on the cover of the
Dec/Jan 1998/ 1999 issue of GQ Australia .................................................... 147

Figure 21: DVD cover of Alias: The Complete First Season. Released by Buena
Vista Home Entertainment in 2003 .............................................................. 171

Figure 22: DVD covers of La F emme Nikita ’3 second, third and fourth season.
Released by Warner Home Video ................................................................. 174

Figure 23: Season one promotional poster for Alias ........................................... 175

ix

Introduction

Nora Slatkin, former Executive Director of the CIA, has argued that one of the
most inaccurate stereotypes permeating the American media is that the CIA is full of
“white, male, old boys from Ivy League schools” and “that they do all of the real work”
in the intelligence community. In a speech given at the Chicago Council on Foreign
Relations in 1995, Slatkin speciﬁcally criticized the San Diego Union Tribune for calling
the CIA one of the government's last "all-white male bastions" because the statement
overlooks the very presence of women in the agency.

Slatkin is accurate in pointing out this discrepancy between perceptions of the
CIA and the actual agency, since women comprised 40% of all CIA trainees as early as
1992 (Kessler 165-166) and, by 1996, occupied one-third of the top 64 command
positions (Maclntosh 255). Despite her protests, however, the conception of the CIA as
an all-male “bastion” continues to be perpetuated by American media —a point
demonstrated by the coverage of CIA operative Johnny “Mike” Spann’s death in 2001.
As Michael Kackrnan points out, both the agency and the media emphasized Spann’s
heroism, patriotism, and “selﬂess courage” aﬁer he was killed during a prison uprising in
Afghanistan, while the media and the White House quickly molded his wife into a
national symbol of sacriﬁce. For example, Shannon Spann appeared at the 2002 State of
the Union address as President Bush’s guest and was described by the White House as
“the wife of Johnny Michael “Mike” Spann,” now “raising their three children” (qtd. in
Kackman 184). While the portrayal of Shannon as a widow struggling to recover from a
profound loss was certainly accurate, Kackman points out that most of the media

coverage overlooked the fact that Shannon was herself a CIA operative and that the

couple had met during their training at the agency. Kackman also argues that this
information was purposefully ignored in order to place the Spanns into “the prescriptive
mold of the martyred hero and his supportive family” and notes that such highly-
gendered discourse is what helps to perpetuate the idea of the CIA as male-centered and
“makes it remarkably difﬁcult to imagine a feminine agent of the nation” (184-85).

More so than the coverage of Mike Spann’s death and other news stories like it,
however, popular narratives in ﬁlm and television have contributed to the notion that men
are the real backbone of the American (and British) intelligence communities. Recent
ﬁlms such as Spy Game (2001 ), The Recruit (2003), The Bourne Identity (2002), The
Bourne Supremacy (2004) and those in the Mission: Impossible and James Bond
franchises have all positioned men in the spy-protagonist role, while most of the leading
women in these narratives function as love interests even if they also work as spies.
Additionally, out of 162 espionage television programs airing in the U.S. and Britain
between 1951 and 2006, roughly 50% feature a lone, male protagonist, while twenty-
seven shows, or roughly 17%, center on an all-male spy team or partnership. In
comparison, the shows that revolve around a lone, female protagonist total nine, or
roughly 6% of all shows, while only four series, or less than 2.5%, center on an all-
woman spy team or partnership (See appendix).

While the remaining 25% of programs feature a co-sexed partnership or a larger
co-sexed team of agents, in shows featuring a team of operatives', women fare poorly in
terms of representation since they often comprise just one of the multiple team members,
as is the case in Mission: Impossible (1966-73, 1988-90), The Champions (1968-69),

Department S (1969-70), Codename (1970), The Omega Factor (1979), Secret Agent

Man (1999-2000), Silent Force (1970-71), Three (1998), Whiz Kids (1983-84) and MI-5
(2002-present). Likewise, in shows featuring a male-female partnership, women often
take a subordinate role to their male counterparts in either professional status or in their
ability as action/adventure characters. Shows such as Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983-
87), Intrigue (1966), Biﬂ Baker U.S.A. (1952-53), and Top Secret USA. (1955), for
example, feature partnerships where the women have a lower professional status than do
the men, if they have a professional status at all. This is also true in The Avengers (1961 -
69), as neither Emma Peel nor Cathy Gale works as a professional operative, but instead
assists “the ministry’s” secret agent, John Steed, without pay. It is not until the
introduction of Tara King in the show’s ﬁnal season that Steed is even matched with a
partner who works as a professional spy, but Tara’s debut in “The Forgot-Me-Knot”
makes it clear that she is a young, inexperienced recruit while Steed is a tested and
revered operative.

What is unusual about The Avengers is that both Emma Peel and Cathy Gale are
experts in martial arts and often employ their skills against villains, while John Steed
represents a more “effete-Iooking hero” who prefers to ﬁght with a bowler hat and
umbrella (Miller, The Avengers 83). Before the appearance of La Femme Nikita (1997-
2001) and Alias (2001-2006), most shows feattuing a female spy held the show’s male
lead responsible for the ﬁghting and action sequences, while the woman possessed a
limited physical agency and primarily functioned as either a subordinate assistant or as a
spy whose main skill involved disguising herself through dress to garner information.

Also contributing to the popular notion that the CIA is an all-male, if not all-white

male bastion, is the fact that in spy television series, women of color are the least visible

in terms of sex and race. Indeed, all but four of the leading female protagonists appearing
in the genre between 1951 and 2006 can be read as being of white, European descentz.
Interestingly, those characters that can be read as women of color are all played by black
actresses: Sheryl Lee Ralph in Codename: Foxﬁre (1985), Natashia Williams in She
Spies (2002-04), Gloria Ruben in The Agency (2001-03), and Penny Johnson in 24 (2001-
present). None of these women, however, works as alone protagonist or in a male-
female partnership, suggesting that when women of color do appear within the genre,
they do not function as the leading female character. Additionally, while spy series such
as I Spy (1965-68) and Mission: Impossible featured prominent black spies as early as the
19603, the ﬁrst of the four shows to feature a black actress did not air until 1985
(Codename: F oxﬁre), and Asian, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic women continue to be
nearly invisible outside of their roles as villainesses and supporting characters3.
Women’s lack of visibility in spy television over the last sixty years has
contributed to the idea that women fail to play a prominent role in national intelligence
and security, although shows such as La F emme Nikita and Alias have begun to disrupt
this narrative. The under-representation of women in the medium also has ramiﬁcations
for popular constructs of ideal citizenship because unlike certain threads of spy ﬁction
which have depicted the secret agent as foolish, inept, shady, or ruthless, most American
television series have portrayed the spy as one of the nation’s most elite members even if
they have temporary lapses in judgment or the integrity of their agency is questionable.
For instance, Cynthia Walker points out that the average television spy is more cerebral
and of a higher class than his or her closest cousin, the television detective, and unlike

crime show heroes, the television secret agent is usually spurred into action by moral or

political ideals rather than the baser motivation of money (“Spy Programs”). Author J.
Fred MacDonald also demonstrates that American spy television has its roots ﬁrmly
planted in the idea that operatives should embody notions of U.S. political rectitude, as
seen in those shows that aired during the ﬁrst two decades of commercial television.
More speciﬁcally, MacDonald illustrates that the spy heroes of the ﬁfties and sixties,
along with military and western heroes, promoted stereotypes about American might and
presented viewers with a picture of an “honest and selﬂess” agent and nation “forced to
defend the Free World against the barbarous onslaught” of godless Communist
automatons (12).

The link between spies and notions of ideal citizenship is also heightened by the
very nature of the espionage program since its narratives are consistently grounded in
political, economic and social threats to one or more nation-states. As a result, spy
narratives construct heroes who defeat these threats using their acute mind, physical
agility and resourcefulness to assert and maintain national ideologies, and thus come to
symbolize the strength, intelligence, and values of the nation-state. This does not mean
that the genre fails to ask serious questions regarding the use of power by the agent and
his or her agency, which must use questionable means to defeat threats. (After all, if their
means were wholly ethical they wouldn’t need to be clandestine.) However, many of the
series in the television genre can be read as ultimately celebrating the agent’s ability to
maintain a moral compass in the quagmires of international unrest and intelligence
bureaucracies. This does not occur as frequently in spy ﬁction or ﬁlm, of course, which
feature numerous shady, heartless and incompetent spies; however, because television is

supported by advertisements and relies on weekly audiences, the genre’s operatives must

be ones that viewers can champion and with which advertisers are comfortable being
associated. As executive consultant Joel Surnow explains, when La F emme Nikita was
adapted from ﬁlm to television, one of the ﬁrst changes that he had to make was to
construct Nikita as an innocent with a strong moral compass because while the ﬁlm
version depicts Nikita as a drug-addicted-murderer-turned-govemment-assassin, neither
Surnow nor the USA Network believed that viewers would welcome an actual criminal
into their homes and root for her on a weekly basis (“Section One Declassiﬁed”).

Given the strong nationalist content of the spy genre as a whole, popular culture
scholars have begun to explore the ways spy narratives link race, gender, and class to
ideas of American and British nationalism. For instance, a plethora of scholars have
examined the links between these constructs and British nationalism within the James
Bond novels and ﬁlms, including Kingsley Amis (1965), Tony Bennett and Janet
Woollacott (1987), Bruce Rosenberg and Ann Harleman Stewart (1989), James Chapman
(2000), Jeremy Black (2001), and Christine Bold (2003). In general, these authors concur
that 007 has a long tradition of viewing non-British cultures as far inferior to his own,
and that these views are depicted through the viliﬁcation of and ethnic slurs against racial
“others.” Many of these authors also acknowledge that the Bond ﬁanchise employs
“inappropriate” gender performance and “deviant” sexuality to demarcate a character’s
personal and national degeneracy, while Bond’s masculinity and irresistibility to women
mark both the agent’s and Britain’s superiority and desirability.

While fewer scholars have examined the link between nationalism and the spy
genre outside of the James Bond context, a few have addressed the relationship within

television studies. In Saints & Avengers, James Chapman has examined Danger Man

(1960-61, 1964-67), The Avengers, The Champions and Department S to demonstrate
how these 19608 programs featured archetypes rooted in British culture and thus the ways
that British television exported its national values and ideologies through its
entertainment commodities. In Windows on the Sixties, Chapman speciﬁcally explains
how The Avengers consciously excluded certain social and ethnic groups from its
series—namely working class and black characters—to paint an idealized, as well as
distorted and partial, version of British national identity (49). As show writer Brian
Clemens explains in Chapman’s essay, The Avengers purposely “admitted to only one
class—and that was the upper. As a fantasy we would not show a uniformed policeman
or a coloured man. Had we introduced a coloured man or a policeman, we would have a
yardstick of social reality and that would have made the whole thing quite ridiculous.
Alongside a bus queue of ordinary men-in-the-street, Steed would have become a
caricature” (49).

Additionally, MacDonald’s Television and the Red Menace analyzes American
espionage narratives, newscasts, and military and western programs airing prior to the
Vietnam War. The work ultimately concludes that because these series often employed
“ethnic others,” especially Asians, in villains’ roles, and failed to question stereotypes
about American might, these programs encouraged viewers to believe that they could
quickly and easily defeat communism in Asia and helped lead the nation into a war
Americans neither fully understood nor wanted. Michael Kackman’s Citizen Spy also
considers the ways in which 19508 and 19608 spy programs represented and deﬁned an
ideal national identity through an “ongoing discourse of cultural, racial and gender

difference” (xxxv). In his chapter on I Spy, for instance, Kackman argues that this

American drama, the ﬁrst to star an African-American lead (Bill Cosby), made space for
a new black agency within the genre and dominant conceptions of the nation-state.
However, because the show also “leapfrogs forward past bus boycotts and ﬁrehoses,” the
show depicted a “utopian American myth custom-tailored for the tumultuous civil-rights
years” (126) through its narratives and casting choices. In other words, by casting Cosby,
in part because be avoided racial issues in his early comedy, and constructing his
character as a “post-civil rights, all-American guy,” I Spy perpetuated the idea that within
the American nation-state “lay the solution to any and all social, political or cultural ills”
and essentially erased its history of racial injustice (126).

Despite these contributions of the study of the spy genre, no scholarly book, to my
knowledge, examines the way women have been constructed over the course of spy
television history, although some book chapters and articles have examined the ways
women (and particularly the Bond women) have functioned within ﬁlm, a speciﬁc
television show, and historical accounts of spying". At the core of this dissertation, then,
is a desire to help ﬁll in this gap in scholarship and to explore the ways American spy
shows have constructed the relationship between sex, women, citizenship and American
nationalism within the contexts of the nation’s major political, military and social
movements since the 19508. In order to accomplish these primary goals, this project is
structured around two fundamental questions: 1) How have espionage television series
encoded messages regarding national values as they relate to gender and citizenship in
shows featuring prominent female spies? and 2) How have the events of the Cold War,
the America women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the war on terror

inﬂuenced those messages? Two additional but subordinate concerns include: 1) How

have television network practices shaped the construction of women in the genre? and 2)
How might audiences decode the messages embedded in these spy narratives in ways that
differ from the reading(s) encouraged by the narrative?

As one might be able to deduce from this set of questions, the theoretical
underpinnings of this dissertation primarily rest in cultural studies scholarship about
television, ideological narratives, and encoding and decoding practices. For instance, it
adopts the idea that because television is dependent on the revenue generated by
advertisements, television creators and network executives consciously avoid topics in
their series that could evoke strong controversy and lead to sponsors retracting their
advertising dollars. As a result, television show creators adopt positions in-line with
perceived mainstream ideologies, and thus television entertainment is often marked by
narrative lines that seem to present several arguments to viewers “but wind up
foregrounding and, through the actions of protagonists already identiﬁed as ‘us,’
endorsing just one of them” (Green 29). In order to identify the mainstream ideologies
promoted in select spy narratives, especially as they relate to issues of nationalism and
gender, 3 close textual analysis is conducted to examine the ways these shows encode
messages through narrative, music, wardrobe, casting, etc.

However, this dissertation also rests on the ideas ﬁrst outlined by Stuart Hall,
which posit that while television narratives may direct viewers to a preferred reading that
ﬁts within the dominant cultural order, viewers decode messages from at least three
positions: the dominant-hegemonic position (where viewers read a text as the producers
intended), the negotiated position (where viewers negotiate, by accepting and rejecting

elements of the producers’ messages), and the oppositional position (where viewers

“detotalize a message within an alternative framework” that is oppositional to the original
message) (Hall 102-103). Or, put another way, this dissertation rests on the idea that
people act on and interpret mass produced items in so many ways that, as John Fiske
notes, “popular culture items have no single deﬁned meaning and present a bank of rich
semiotics” (5).

By embracing this philosophy, this dissertation not only seeks to uncover select
spy programs’ narrative ideologies, but also the possible alternative and even subversive
readings allowed for in these series when they originally aired. In some cases, this is
accomplished through analyzing fan postings on intemet sites, interviewing fans of the
shows, drawing from critical responses and cast interviews, and/or conducting my own
analysis of subversive readings. Fan-based analyses of early programs, including I Led 3
Lives and Biﬂ' Baker USA, were nearly impossible to conduct, however, since these shows
aired over ﬁﬁy years ago, and I could not uncover any published fan sites or fan material
for the series.

Of course, before beginning a discussion of any spy television show, it is
important to outline this dissertation’s treatment of the genre, especially-since these series
often share characteristics with crime, mystery, fantasy and science ﬁction shows. In fact,
the commonality of genre crossover within spy narratives is what helps to explain why
many of its stories are denoted simply as “thrillers” or “action/adventures” (Britton,
Beyond Bond xiii) and why a single show may be read as a detective story or science
ﬁction story by one fan and a spy show by another. As Toby Miller points out in
Spyscreen, for instance, most espionage series follow a narrative structure where, at the

start of each episode, the law is violated and the state ﬁnds out about it. The show’s

10

heroes then attempt to discover who is responsible through the use of informants and
struggle with the enemy before defeating him or her and restoring order. This formula,
though, is similar to that employed by television’s investigative dramas, and thus explains
how Honey West (1965-66) and The Saint (1962-69) can be read as both detective and
espionage programs (44-45). The same concept applies to shows such as The X-Files
(1993-2002), which most fans consider to be a science-ﬁction program due to its themes
of paranormal activity and the possibility of alien life. However, the two main characters
are agents for the FBI, and the show often explores issues of government conspiracy-- a
trope popular within both the spy and science-ﬁction communities.

But regardless of its penchant for genre crossovers, the spy genre does possess its
own unique set of formulas and conventions. As aforementioned, the average spy is often
more cerebral and of a higher class than the television detective and is usually motivated
by moral or political ideals rather than money. Additionally, the genre’s villains are
usually foreign and eccentric, and their crimes have larger political consequences than do
those featured in crime shows (Walker, “Spy Programs”). Spy series also favor exotic
locales and countries (Britton, Spy Television 14), and starting with the James Bond
novels and ﬁlms, the genre has often incorporated dry humor and displayed a
preoccupation with expensive consumer goods and technological gadgetry. As John
Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg explain in The Spy Story, espionage narratives as a whole
also rest heavily on archetypes, which include the use of disguise; the secret exercise of
power, often without traditional ethical constraints; and a profound sense of belonging to

an organization. Likewise, the genre’s plots often revolve around torture, capture,

11

invisibility, secret communications, elaborate disguises, complicated alibis, a narrow
escape, and dead drops (13-14).

While many of the shows discussed in this project adhere to the above-mentioned
conventions, this project’s treatment of the spy genre rests on a more basic deﬁnition.
Namely, works are considered part of the espionage genre if they feature a protagonist
who works as a professional or semi-professional operative for either a real or imagined
agency set up to protect the interests of the nation and/or its global allies. Undoubtedly,
this is a modern deﬁnition of the genre, as early spy stories, including Riddle of the Sands
(1903) and The 39 Steps (1915), often featured protagonists who did not work for any
particular organization, even if they gave information to one later on. According to
Frederic Hitz, it is not until W. Sommerset Maugham’s Ashden (1927) that the spy
bureaucracy is featured in the genre at all, and not until the later part of WWII does it
begin to ﬁgure regularly and prominently in espionage narratives (38-39). Since this
work is only concerned with spy television programs airing during and after the Cold
War, such a modern deﬁnition works well, especially since it is broad enough to include
genre crossovers like Alias and The Bionic Woman (1976-78), but is not so broad that it
fails to eliminate television programs that do not feature a secret agent employed by the
state, such as Simon Templar of The Saint or the private-eye series, Honey West. This
distinction is important since this dissertation is concerned with the ways American
nationalism is embedded in spy narratives and those featuring characters who are
officially employed and selected by the state more explicitly address this topic than those

who are not.

12

Working within these parameters, then, the following ﬁve chapters explore eight
spy programs featuring a prominent female character that aired between 1950 and 2005.
The ﬁrst chapter, “Reafﬁrming Gender Norms in the Early Cold War Crisis: Biﬂ Baker
USA. and I Led Three Lives, ” examines the genre within the context of McCarthyism
and the Red Scare, while “Pleasure, Consumption and the Slender Spies” explores the
effects of the anti-war movement, the popularity of the James Bond ﬁlms, the youth
revolution and the burgeoning gender revolution on Get Smart and The Girl from
U.N.C.L.E. The popular 19708 program, The Bionic Woman, is discussed in the third
chapter within the context of the space race, television’s “fantasy era” and the American
Women’s Movement, but it also explores the narrative of its parent program, The Six
Million Dollar Man (1974-1978), to better understand how gender works within the
franchise. Chapter Four, “The Suburban Spy and the New Right,” discusses Scarecrow
and Mrs. King within the framework of New Right politics, Republican motherhood,
post-feminism and the Cold War of the Reagan-era, while the ﬁfth chapter investigates
two recent shows, La F emme Nikita and Alias, within the framework of global terrorism
and the growing popularity of the female warrior on television. The work then concludes
with a chapter highlighting the project’s main ideas and the spy genre’s relationship to
American hero-making, CIA recruitment levels, and public support for intelligence
agencies in general.

The shows selected for discussion in this dissertation were the product of an
involved deductive process. Each show, for instance, appeared on the list of spy
narratives printed in the appendix and featured a female lead, an all-female spy team, a

male-female partnership, or a co-sexed spy team of three or more agents (except The Six

13

Million Dollar Man.) Since this dissertation is interested in the link between gender and
American nationalism, programs whose main character(s) were depicted as ﬁghting for
the U.S. and its allies were heavily favored. (Fans of La F emme Nikita will know that the
spy agency featured in the program, Section One, is an international organization and the
show’s protagonist spoke with a slight Australian accent. However, it was included in
this project because the show was originally created for an American television network,
depicted Section One as a pro-Westem, North American alliance, and worked to explore
speciﬁc types of globalization occurring in the mid-19908.)

Out of the thirty-six programs left to consider (See appendix, Table 8), six criteria
were then employed to narrow the shows selected for a detailed discussion. The ﬁrst
criteria was the longevity of a series since it is reasonable to assume that more people
viewed longer-running programs than shorter ones and thus these shows had a greater
affect upon the culture and are therefore more deserving of critical attention. As a result,
any show running for less than twenty episodes was eliminated. For the same reasons,
any show that aired on a paid-subscription channel not included in most basic cable or
satellite packages was eliminated, but this only affected the program Jane Doe (2005-
present), which currently airs on Hallmark.

Two of the remaining criteria were more subjective in nature and included the
prominence of the female character(s) on the show and the proximity of the show to a
traditional spy program. More speciﬁcally, programs that featured a female lead, an all
female spy team, and a prominent male-female partnership were favored over shows that
featured a single female character operating on a team of men. This decision was derived

from the simple conclusion that a work investigating female spies should focus on those

14

shows which contain the most images of female operatives to analyze. Issues of genre led
to the elimination of shows such as Honey West, The Net (1998-99), and Dark Skies
(1996-97) because these programs do not feature women as professional operatives
employed by a state-sponsored intelligence agency and Dark Skies and The X-Files were
also eliminated since fans consider these programs to fall more into the science-ﬁction
realm than the spy one.

Altogether, these choices leﬁ ﬁfteen programs and two ﬁnal criteria to consider:
1) the availability of the show in my personal archive, on DVD, VHS, or in university
and museum archives and 2) the decade the program ran. Obviously those shows
unavailable for review could not be considered and since this project is interested in
tracing the evolution of gender and nationalism on spy television, it was important to
select programs that aired in multiple decades. Thus, one to two programs from each
decade between the 19508 and the present were selected for exploration and, again, the
ﬁnal shows selected are: Biﬂ Baker USA, I Led 3 Lives, Get Smart, The Girl From
(IN. C. L. E., The Bionic Woman (and The Six Million Dollar Man), Scarecrow and Mrs.
King, La F emme Nikita and Alias. Readers familiar with Biff Baker USA. and 1 Led 3
Lives may be surprised by these shows inclusion since they are primarily centered on a
male lead; however, American spy shows airing during the 19508 did not feature
professional female spies in a protagonist role. 1 Led 3 Lives was thus selected because it
features powerful communist women in roughly half of its episodes, while Biﬂ Baker
USA. is unusual in that it centers on an amateur husband-and-wife-“spy”-team that

works to thwart criminal and political threats abroad.

15

Ultimately, it is my hope that a close examination of each of these shows will
demonstrate how notions of ideal citizenship, American nationalism and gender
performance have changed over time and how the events of the Cold War, the space race,
the women’s movements, the civil rights movement, the New Right, and the war on terror
have inﬂuenced spy television content and perceptions of covert intelligence agencies. I
also hope, more simply, that fans of these shows will gain new insights into their favorite
spy programs through this project’s discussion of show production, product tie-ins, fan

responses and narrative analysis.

16

The 19508
Reafﬁrming Gender in the Early Cold War Crisis: The Spies of
Biff Baker U.S.A. and I Led Three Lives

“Since when do the comics make any distinction between men and women? As long as
their rotten, ﬁlthy work gets done, they don’t care who does it or even what happens to those who
do it.”

-—Herbert Philbrick in “Comrade Eva.”

“Look, beautiful. One thing we don’t have in common is a favorite color. I’m not very partial
to pink.” — Biff Baker to a Viet Minh leader in “Saigon Incident.”

Early Television and the 19508 Spy Program

The introduction of television at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City
generated excitement about the medium, but its development was hindered by the
outbreak of World War II, which required both human and ﬁnancial resources to be
directed elsewhere. The conﬂict’s end, however, signaled a period of intense growth for
the technology, as the years between 1945 and 1948 saw the number of commercial
television stations rise from nine to forty-eight and the sale of television sets increase by
500% (“Golden Age”). By the end of the 19508, close to 85% of all U.S. households
contained at least one TV set, which exceeded the number of homes with washing
machines, vacuum cleaners or electronic toasters, and by 1961, families were averaging
ﬁve hours and twenty-two minutes of television viewing each day (MacDonald 147).

Television’s increasing popularity led many Americans to become concerned
about its ramiﬁcations for children, families, and adults. Moral critics of the medium
complained that mystery and crime dramas, which constituted roughly half of all prime-
time programming in 1950, encouraged violence and juvenile delinquency (Boddy 102).
Critics were also concerned about offensive comedy routines and the sexualized clothing

appearing on variety shows, while others complained that programs favored large urban

17

settings and lifestyles and ignored rural and suburban ones. Author Carroll O’Meara

speciﬁcally complained in 1955 that

What is acceptable to broad-minded night club audiences in Manhattan,
Hollywood or Las Vegas is rarely apt to be fare for admission in homes in any
city or town. . .Our nation consists of 160 million citizens, most of whom live in
small towns, go to church on Sunday, attempt to bring their children up decently,
and do not regard burlesque shows as the ultimate in theatre (qtd. in Boddy 101-

102).

Fears about television content and its effects on viewers were also augmented by
the burgeoning Cold War. As Russia and China obtained the nuclear bomb and the Soviet
Union more aggressively sought territories, Americans grew fearﬁil about communists’
ability to disrupt the nation’s own economic, social and political systems, especially since
Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover publicly insisted that large numbers of
communist spies had inﬁltrated the country. This “Red Scare” speciﬁcally affected the
entertainment industry as anti-communist privateers worked to expose the party’s
Hollywood sympathizers, fearing their access to millions of Americans via ﬁlm and
television and, thus, their potential to change the political leanings of the nation. In order
to expose these “commies” in Hollywood, identify the party’s front organizations, and
call for the blacklisting of “traitorous” actors, producers, directors, announcers and
writers, three former FBI agents published a four-page tabloid called Counterattack: The
Newsletter of F acts to Combat Communism in 1947. Three years later, a much thicker

publication, Red Channels: The Report of Communist Inﬂuence in Radio and Television,

18

cited 151 celebrities as being involved in pro-communist activities, and many whose
names appeared in the publication were ﬁred or simply not re-hired for work.

The well-publicized hunt for subversives and the concerns about television’s
power to negatively inﬂuence viewers affected program content. For instance, several
espionage programs aired on television during the 19508, and even though many adopted
an overtly patriotic tone, writers, directors, actors and producers still worried about being
suspected of political subversion. As a result, many went out of their way to associate
their series with government agencies and/or popular anti-communist ofﬁcials. Several
programs’ characters were based on the actual lives of former spy masters who
documented their careers in memoirs in the late 19408 and early 19508, and directors
often employed a quasi-documentary style to enhance their programs’ links with factual
people, places and events. To cite just two examples, The Man Called X was based on
Ladislas Farago’s memoir, War of Wits: The Anatomy of Espionage and Intelligence,
while Behind Closed Doors was based on the ﬁles of former head of Naval Intelligence,
Rear Admiral Ellis Zacharias, who served as a technical consultant on the series.
Additionally, espionage show creators sought to avert suspicion by using their programs
to encourage viewers to become active in their local governments and maintain a lookout
for communist subversives. As Michael Kackman notes in Citizen Spy, both network and
independent producers of 19508 spy series sought to “bumish their public service
credentials” in a tumultuous time for the medium by showing that television viewing
could be “a responsible civic activity” (3).

In order to communicate their political messages, most of the nearly thirty spy

series created by Americans during the decade5 featured white, male protagonists that

19

individually thwarted evil. A few of these shows featured amateur spies who accidentally
got caught up in foreign intrigue, but most others, including Doorway to Danger, The
USS, Secret File U.S.A., and Dangerous Assignment centered around professional
operatives with direct links to the American government. This chapter, however, explores
two shows that varied slightly from the era’s common espionage formula -- Biﬂ Baker
U.S.A. and 1 Led 3 Lives -- in order to better investigate notions of masculinity and
femininity within the contexts of American nationalism and the 19508 spy program. Biff
Baker U.S.A. is unusual in that it centers on a husband-and-wife-“spy”-team that works to
thwart criminal and political threats abroad, while the latter is unique in that it partially
positions its male protagonist in the domestic sphere and focuses on communism’s threat
to families as much as it does the nation at large. I Led 3 Lives also represents an unusual
narrative by featuring powerful communist women in roughly half of its episodes and
uses subversive gender roles to mark these women as political threats. Before exploring
the issues of gender and nationalism embodied by these shows’ male protagonists, female
leads, and villainesses, however, a brief background of each show follows.
A Brief History of Biff Baker U.S.A. and I Led 3 Lives

Biff Baker U.S.A. debuted during the McCarthy era in the fall of 1952, seven years
after the end of World War II and several months after a cease-ﬁre had unofﬁcially ended
the Korean War. As a result of the historical transition taking place in the United States
at the time, plot lines of Biff Baker U.S.A. revolve around both the aftermath of the
Second World War and the developing communist threat abroad. The episode “Mona

Lisa,” for example, focuses on a scheme by former Nazis to sell paintings stolen from the

20

Louvre during the war, while “Alpine Assignment” features Biff defeating a group of
communists blocking the broadcasts of the Voice of America in Vienna.

The series, which ran as a thirty-minute espionage/adventure program, starred
Alan Hale, Jr. (better known as the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island) in the title role. Hale’s
character works as an American entrepreneur who travels to exotic locales with his wife
Louise (Randy Stuart) in order to buy goods for his import/export company. According to
text-based summaries of the pilot episode “Koblen,” the couple uses Biff’s occupation to
serve as undercover agents for U.S. Army Intelligence while on a buying trip behind the
Iron Curtain; however, most other episodes depict the two as mere business or leisure
travellers who accidentally get caught up in espionage or crime solving, but nonetheless
bring the wrong-doers to justice.

Like many spy programs of the time, Biff Baker U.S.A. worked to associate its
protagonists with American ideals, as the title of the program suggests. The Bakers’
travels to exotic locales, for instance, helped to promote the wealth, mobility, and leisure
democratic-capitalism could afford its citizens. The narratives also worked to mark the
Bakers as representatives of American political rectitude, as they lauded the couple for
thwarting communist inﬂuence abroad, bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, and
ﬁghting government and ﬁnancial corruption, primarily in European, Asian and African
nations. In fact, the effort to promote American politics and ideals through Biff Baker
U.S.A. was so deliberate that when the series’ story supervisor, Fenton Earnshaw, learned
that some businesses were publicly criticizing the show for suggesting entrepreneurs
really worked as government spies when overseas, he immediately retaliated in TV

Writer. Earnshaw reminded viewers in this trade journal that the series’ scripts were

21

approved by the State Department, the FBI and the Commerce Department and therefore
could not be considered un-American. He also touted the show as “attempting to create a
positive, constructive kind of propaganda to encourage the American people along the
road to worldwide democracy” and claimed that any attack upon the show was “an attack
upon democracy” itself (qtd. in MacDonald 108).

Despite its attempts at “constructive propaganda,” however, Biff Baker U.S.A.,
like many other programs, enjoyed only a single season’s run. Airing on Thursday nights
at nine on CBS, the show was sponsored by the American Tobacco Company, which
bought twenty-six episodes from the Music Corp. of America, aired twenty-one of them
during the 1952-53 television season, and used the remaining ﬁve as a summer
replacement in 1954 after the series was cancelled and replaced by Lux Video Theatre
(“Biff Exits” 22). While it is unclear what ultimately led to the show’s cancellation, Biff
Baker U.S.A. helped many television writers and directors gain valuable experience in the
medium and genre. The series was one of the ﬁrst directed by Herschel Daughtery, who
later directed on the sets of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,
Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and The Six Million Dollar Man, and Fenton Earnshaw
used his experience on the show to secure work on the series Mike Hammer and Behind
Closed Doors.

Unlike Biﬂ Baker U.S.A., which set its episodes in exotic locales, 1 Led 3 Lives
focused solely on the communist threat at home. Starring Richard Carlson as “Comrade
Herb,” the series was based on the 1952 best-selling‘5 memoir of Herbert Philbrick, who
worked as a FBI counterspy from 1940-1949. According to the memoir, Philbrick’s

espionage career began when he joined the Cambridge Youth Council in Massachusetts

22

but came to suspect it as a communist front group and contacted the FBI. The Bureau

then encouraged Philbrick to become more actively involved in the party in order to

 

Figure l: A double-page advertisement for I Led 3 Lives appearing in the
August 24, 1953 issue of Sponsor magazine:

Ziv’s new show is TV Dynamite! From the Secret Files of a counterspy for the
F .B.I.! TREASON on our door step. ...this man slammed the door! Starring
Hollywood’s Brilliant Actor RICHARD CARLSON in the true life story of a
patriotic young American who led 3 lives in the service of our country! 1.
Citizen! 2. Communist! 3. Counterspy for the FBI! ‘1 LED 3 LIVES.’ Tense
because it’s Factual! Gripping because it’s Real! Frightening because it’s
True! Each half hour a true-life adventure! Your opportunity to have the most
timely and important TV program in your city! Not just a script writer’s
fantasy—but the authentic story of the Commie’s attempt to overthrow our
government! You’ll thrill to the actual on-the-scene photography. . .factual
from-the-records dialogue. Taken from the secret ﬁles of a counterspy for the
F .B.I. Authentic sets and scripts personally supervised by Herbert Philbrick the
man who, for 9 agonizing years lived in constant danger as a supposed
Communist who reported daily to the FBI! Never before has such a dramatic
document appeared on TV!

 

 

 

garner information about it, and he obliged for almost an entire decade before being
called as a surprise witness in the Smith Act prosecutions of 1949, where he testiﬁed
about the training he received in the party, suggested that communists were intent on
overthrowing the U.S. government, and ultimately helped secure the imprisonment of
almost a dozen communist leaders.

When Ziv Television decided to create a syndicated series based on Philbrick’s
experiences, it hired the author to edit the show’s scripts and ﬁll in the details of plots
writers developed from the book in order to ensure some level of historical accuracy.
Additionally, the show’s association with Philbrick allowed the production company to
pitch the show as “true” and “real” in press releases (see ﬁg. 1), and the show’s title

sequence likewise emphasized the series’ relationship to actual people and events. More

23

speciﬁcally, each episode opens with an image of Philbrick’s memoir (also titled 1 Led 3
Lives) while a voiceover informs viewers that:
This is the story, the fantastically true story, of Herbert A. Philbrick, who
for nine ﬁightening years did lead three lives—average citizen, high level
member of the Communist Party, and counterspy of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. For obvious reasons, the names, dates and places have been
changed, but the story is based on fact.7
The show also employed a minimalist, documentary production style and an interior
monologue common to B-grade ﬁlm noirs, in order to give the program a sense of
“historical truthfulness.” Part of the show’s visual style was achieved through its ﬁlm
locations, as almost all episodes feature Philbrick on the move, meeting with the FBI in
laundries, service stations, lumberyards and pet stores, and by the fact that almost no
makeup was used on the series. However, Morleen Getz Rouse notes that the show’s
minimalist approach was partially due to Ziv Television’s budget, which could not afford
a weekly “makeup man” and shot “on Hollywood and Vine” because it “was cheaper
than trying to build a set of something” (168-69).

Of course, the show’s emphasis on historical accuracy does not mean the program
was unbiased in its portrayals of communists. Many opening sequences feature the
show’s narrator heavy-handedly introducing the upcoming episode. Such is the case in
“Comrade Eva,” when the narrator informs viewers that they are about to witness the
“communists’ complete disregard for human rights as they affect [a] plan of sabotage,”

and in general, communists on the series are depicted as omni-present fanatics bent on

24

Fig. 2. Herbert Philbrick appearing
before the Un-American Activities
Committee of the U.S. House of
Representatives. Photo from his Fig. 3. Richard Carlson playing Herbert
autobiography 1 Led 3 Lives. Philbrick in “Dynamite.”

 

creating familial, political, and religious unrest in America. In fact, the possibilities for
communist penetration on the show seem endless, as no regular communist characters
appear—a move that perhaps stemmed from a desire to prevent viewers from forming a
“perverse identiﬁcation with the villains” (Doherty 143), and storylines ranged anywhere
from a young girl being brainwashed by a local artist, causing her to suddenly embrace
anti-war ideals, to a group of communists plotting to pose as new church members in
order to spread enough gossip about the real members to create tension and discourage
attendance.

Regardless of the type of threat featured during any given week, I Led 3 Lives
episodes end with Philbrick and the FBI temporarily defeating the communists and

overtly reafﬁrming American values. Indeed, watching the show today, I Led 3 Lives

25

seems like an overly-patriotic and paranoid series, but during its time, the series enjoyed
immense popularity. In August 1953, one week before I Led 3 Lives was sent to air, the
syndicated program had been scheduled in more markets than carried any of television’s
top-ten rated shows, and just one month later, the series had been sold to ninety-four
markets—ﬁfteen more than carried either I Love Lucy or Groucho Marx (Rouse 170).
Sales of I Led 3 Lives continued to increase over the following year, reaching 178
markets by late August 1954, with 97% of all markets carrying the series in 1953
renewing for 1954 (170). Interestingly, I Led 3 Lives is also reported to have been Lee
Harvey Oswald’s favorite program of all time (“Interview”), and oil and brewery
companies continued sponsoring re-runs of the program into the 19608 due to audience
demand (Britton 24).
Masculinity in Crisis: The Reassuring Figures of Biff Baker and Herbert Philbrick
In order to understand how gender is connected to issues of nationalism in both
Biff Baker U.S.A. and I Led 3 Lives, it is important to remember that during the 19508
many felt that middle-class women had been emancipated by their return to domesticity
and the availability of “time-saving” appliances, such as dishwashers and washing
machines. Middle class men, however, were thought to be oppressed because of
employment shifts in post-war America as small, self-owned enterprises disappeared and
large corporations emerged. This shift meant that the mobility and autonomy afforded by
self-employment faded, while bureaucratic, “other-directed,” white-collar jobs
exponentially increased. When white-collar workers began reporting a sense of

alienation in their post-war employment, sociologists worried about a feminization

26

occurring in the work place as men became service-orientated subordinates to
supervisors, colleagues and customerss.

In his work Men in the Middle, James Gilbert argues that sociologists also feared
the decline of American masculinity in the 19508 due to the rise of suburban culture and
mass consumption. Gilbert posits that these aspects of American life speciﬁcally
challenged the rugged individualism connected with notions of white masculinity, since
both suburban life and mass consumption encouraged conformity, leisure, and comfort
(4-5). In terms of the Cold War, this perceived weakening of American masculinity was
of signiﬁcant concern since many reasoned that the country’s prowess depended upon the
ability of “strong, manly men” to stand up against communist tactics. As Elaine Tyler
May points out in Homeward Bound, many contemporaries “believed that the Russians
could destroy the United States not only by atomic energy but through internal
subversion” (94), and thus some believed that “soft men” would be soft on national
defense, while others concluded that weak men would be unable to resist communist
seductresses or party blackmailers eager to exploit those engaging in homosexual acts or
extra-marital affairs. In response to these concerns, national policy demanded that known
homosexuals be ﬁred from their government jobs, and the country’s dominant culture
came to represent monogamous, heterosexual behavior culminating in marriage as mature
and responsible while “deviants” were considered irresponsible, weak and a threat to
security (94).

This climate helps to explain why both Biff Baker and Herbert Philbrick emerged
in the early to mid 19508 as married protagonists, even though spies in literature,

television and ﬁlm are typically portrayed as single men whose jobs do not afford the

27

Fig. 4. DVD Cover of Biff
Baker, U.S.A. Vol. 1. Released
by Alpha Home Entertainment.

luxury of long-term, personal relationships. In other
words, by positioning these men in committed
M AN "Al r ' ‘m' heterosexual relationships, Biﬂ Baker U.S.A. and I

BIFE.BA1(ER Led 3 Lives were able to present viewers with
7.. ‘ I
ll. S.‘A.

N , heroes “responsible and mature” enough to ward off
I

Al‘llglml‘ ‘ .
/ . .. ,_ .. ' . . communist tactics, and indeed episodes from both
series feature the protagonists resisting the charms
of female enemies out of love for their wives (and

country). Perhaps what is surprising, then, is that

these protagonists are also constructed as white-

\1)l1\|| 1

 

collar, organization men. Biff Baker, for example, is
employed as a buyer for an import-export company
while Herbert Philbrick works for an advertising agency. Both professions were ones that
Americans feared were feminizing middle-class men; however, both shows worked to
challenge dominant notions of the white-collar worker by featuring characters who
employed their individual agency, both on and off the job, in order to ensure the
continuation of American prowess.

As Erica Arthur demonstrates in “The Organisation Strikes Back,” the effort to
reconstruct ideas about white-collar masculinity was not just undertaken by television
during the era; American companies also used their training manuals and prescriptive
literature to stridently oppose “cultural representations that envisaged the white-collar
male as a weak-willed, insigniﬁcant creature” and to instead cast him as “a heroic,

robust,” and “self-reliant ﬁgure” (37). Biff Baker U.S.A. can be read as attempting to

28

accomplish this precise goal, as its protagonist is a physically robust man, who
accomplishes heroic feats while independently conducting business deals internationally.
For instance, many episodes depict Biff having the autonomy to conduct transactions
without contacting his home ofﬁce for permission or advice, and Biff’s company plays
such an insigniﬁcant role in the series that none of the episodes currently available for
review feature his boss or co-workers at all. Rather, the protagonist is only shown making
and receiving telephone calls and telegrams in order to communicate with his colleagues
back home, and thus the show can be read as a counterpoint to the many domestic
comedies of the decade that presented fatherhood as the new center of the middle-class
man’s identity since the home, these shows assumed, was the only place he was still able
to exercise authorityg.

Additionally, Alan Hale Jr. appears to be a hulking man on camera. The actor,
who stood at 6’2” and weighed well over 200 lbs., is often the tallest and broadest person
in an episode and therefore encourages viewers to read his character as strong and
masculine before they even get to know him. The actor’s frame also allows Biff to
convincingly overtake villains in physical confrontations, and he is responsible for all of
the show’s action sequences. Biff’s physical feats on the show work to emphasize the
traditional links between masculinity, physical agency, and subjectivity, as it is his
interactions with the series’ criminals that also lead to Biff unravelling illegal plots and
discovering guilty parties. Biff’ 8 physical and often violent engagement with overseas
villains, however, also works to promote American and Western imperialism on the
show. In “Saigon Incident,” for instance, a group of Viet Minh rebels tries to (re)claim a

rubber plantation from French colonials with whom Biff is friends and business partners.

29

When the rebels rush the colonials’ home with weapons, they are slaughtered by Biff and
his ﬁ'iends’ gunﬁre—an act that is justiﬁed in the program by the Viet Minh’s association
with communism and the rebels’ ethnic “otherness.” More speciﬁcally, the episode
constructs the rebels a8 primitive, yelping, shirtless commandos led by an exotic,
sexualized female who encourages the killing of women and children in order to advance
the group’s political agendas.

Episodes such as this may have helped garner support for the nation’s foreign
policy in Korea and Vietnam by depicting America’s enemies as barbarous savages, but
the show also fails to explain the group’s motivations for trying to reclaim the land or the
injustices they’ve suffered under French colonialism, and, thus, the rebels’ embrace of
the communist political and economic system is left unexplored in the narrative. As J.
Fred McDonald argues, such shallow depictions of communists-- which were common to
almost all genres during the era-- were dangerous because they led Americans to believe
that they could easily defeat communism in Asia and presented viewers with a one-
dimensional picture of an “honest and selﬂess United States” forced to defend the Free
World against a “barbarous onslaught” (12).

Almost equally one-dimensional in its portrayal of communists is I Led 3 Lives.
This series, like Biﬂ Baker U.S.A., revolves around a middle-class protagonist, but unlike
the travelling Bakers, Philbrick and his family reside in a suburban home complete with
many of the decade’s latest consmner goods. The emphasis on the domestic realm in this
show helped the Philbricks represent the “ideal” 19508 family that symbolized the
promise of American capitalism during the era. Between 1945 and 1950, for example,

the country’s gross national product jumped 250 percent, and by end of the 19508, 60%

30

of all Americans owned homes; 75% owned a car; 87% owned a TV, and 75% owned a
washing machine (Breines 3). Likewise, per capita income had risen 35% between 1945
and 1960 (Breines 3), and thus, the 19508 signalled the emergence of a new middle-class
that, in turn, served as a symbol of the prosperity and upward mobility afforded by
American economics and government.

Importantly, however, Philbrick resists the risk of feminization presented by
suburban conformity and creature comforts since he leads a unique and dangerous life
defeating communists in America. Additionally, the series depicts communism—not the
suburbs or the rise in white-collar jobs-- as the real threat to American masculinity. One
of the ways the party is depicted as emasculating on the show is that men in the
communist party must often answer to women who are able to serve in leadership
positions. As Kackman notes in Citizen Spy, at least half of I Led 3 Lives’ 117 episodes
feature powerful communist women, and many times these females are depicted as
emotionless authoritarians who wear severely cut suits and possess both rigid postures
and brusque voices (32). Because no women serve as agents in the FBI, Kackman also
argues that 1 Led 3 Lives “pits two dramatically different bureaucracies against each
other. . .On the side of American virtue is the men’s club of the FBI, an efﬁcient
organization of terse agents who work quietly but thoroughly,” and on the other side is
“the organization’s evil twin, the Communist party” which represents a “perversion of
state power, staffed by ineffectual men and aggressive women” (32).

However, communism is also depicted as threatening to American masculinity in
the series because the party demands unquestioning loyalty from its members and strictly

forbids them from acting without instruction or oversight. In other words, it expects its

31

“company men” to be so dependent on “management” that they cease to employ their
own critical thinking and agency. A good illustration of this occurs in “Legation,” where
Philbrick is forced to carry out a series of tasks aimed at discrediting the local police
chief. In this episode, Philbrick is not allowed to know the party’s end game, to complete
any of his tasks without heavy surveillance, and the party refuses to answer Philbrick’s
questions regarding the mission or even tell him about the next task until the present one
is complete. Given that Philbrick is believed to be a loyal party member with mid-level
rank, these precautions seem unnecessary and emasculating, and indeed, if the show
merely depicted Philbrick’s activities in the Communist Party, he would represent an
emasculated ﬁgure. However, the show is not really about Philbrick’s work in the party;
it is about his work as a counterspy. Therefore each episode depicts Philbrick taking
serious risks, such as stealing party ﬁles, making emergency contacts with the Bureau,
and using his quick thinking to come up with satisfying lies to evade suspicion. In his
efforts to betray the party and ensure the continuance of American ideals, then, Philbrick
is able to embody the “masculine” traits of risk-taking heroics and self-reliance, much
like Biff Baker.

But before claiming too much for Philbrick, it must be remembered that the
protagonist also follows the orders of the FBI unquestioningly, which, like the
communists, sends him on assignments without always telling him why. In fact, while
the spy shows of the 19608 would go on to spoof the efﬁciency of government agencies, 1
Led 3 Lives encourages Americans to have unquestioning faith in the FBI and its agents
rarely make mistakes in the series. However, Philbrick’s unquestioning loyalty to the FBI

does not undercut the protagonist’s patriotism or suggest emasculation in the narrative,

32

rather it works to bolster Philbrick’s link to American nationalism and ideals. As Paul
Cantor notes in “Not Your Father’s FBI,” overwhelmingly positive portrayals of the FBI
were common to both ﬁlm and television programs of the 19308, 408 and 508, and
perhaps served as an attempt to counter the concerns of Americans regarding the
formation of a federal police force, which many thought was an unjustiﬁed extension of
the govemment’s power. Regardless of the motive behind these depictions of the bureau,
however, Cantor posits that “probably no branch of the federal government has gotten
more of a free ride from the mass media than the FBI” (5), and he argues that the popular
culture of the era worked to persuade Americans to view the bureau as “a symbol of the
integrity of their government” (7) and the FBI agent as the “very image of the all-
American hero” (8). I Led 3 Lives certainly operates in the vein, and so even though
Philbrick acts blindly for the FBI, his actions link him to integrity and national loyalty.
Because both Biff Baker U.S.A. and I Led 3 Lives feature middle-class
protagonists who serve structured organizations through their individual agency, the
programs suggest that “company men” can still be masculine and serve a valuable part in
national defense. However, the programs really only address issues of white masculinity
and national service since neither series features people of color in regular roles and both
virtually ignore the racial unrest prominent in the United States during the era. While it is
unclear why these programs ignored the topic, Mary Dudziak’s ideas outlined in Cold
War Civil Rights suggest that the move may have stemmed from communists’ attacks on
the United States in regards to race relations. More speciﬁcally, Dudziak points out that
America’s victory in WWII allowed the nation to proclaim its defeat of fascist racism and

to claim moral and political superiority. However, because America could not end racial

33

strife on its own soil, communist propaganda, both inside and outside of the United
States, charged the country with hypocrisy and political inferiority. While such attacks
eventually forced federal policymakers to pass meaningful civil rights reform, it also
forced the American government to control the ways in which the civil rights movement
unfolded in the media in order to wage its own war of ideas in the global media. In terms
of 19508 spy programs, such control would not have been difﬁcult for the government to
manage since scripts were often approved by various government agencies or anti-
communist ofﬁcials, but at least in regards to Biff Baker U.S.A. and I Led 3 Lives, the
creators basically chose to ignore domestic, racial unrest altogether, suggesting that to
even admit that race relations were a problem in the United States would weaken these
shows’ ability to project American democracy and capitalism as the superior form of
government.
The Communist Temptress and the Contained American Wife: The Women of Biff
Baker U.S.A. and I Led 3 Lives

As aforementioned, most 19508 spy programs featured single male protagonists,
and thus women rarely served as regularly-appearing characters in heroine roles. Biff
Baker U.S.A. represents one of the notable exceptions, but as the title of the series
suggests, it primarily focuses on Biff’s heroics rather than on Louise’s contributions to
crime solving, and while a few episodes of I Led 3 Lives feature Eva Philbrick helping
her husband defeat the latest communist threat, the show is unquestionably about
Herbert’s adventures, and Eva fails to appear at all in many of the series’ episodes.

Nevertheless, both Biﬂ Baker U.S.A. and I Led 3 Lives provide interesting commentaries

34

on women and gender during the early Cold War, especially as they relate to issues of
American nationalism and political subversiveness.

Take, for example, I Led 3 Lives ' portrayal of communist women. When they are
not depicted as masculine
women leading a staff of
ineffectual men, they are
constructed as sexually
manipulative women who use
their sensuality to advance their
own political and personal
agendas. An example of one

such woman is found in “The

 

Fiance’,” which features Comrade

Figure 5: Comrade Rose in “Dynamite.”

Susan manipulating an American
weapons designer and accepting his marriage proposal so that she can ultimately steal his
blueprints and pass them along to the communist party. Episodes such as this linked
feminine manipulation with issues of national security, but others, such as “Dynamite,”
went one step further to suggest that sexually uncontained women not only posed a threat
to American defense but to patriarchal order in general. More speciﬁcally, “Dynamite”
features Comrade Rose using her feminine charms to convince another party member,
Comrade Barrigan, to frame their local leader for embezzlement, thus allowing the pair to
move up in the party. The episode begins with a meeting during which cell members

confront Barrigan about his attempts to frame the leader, and during this meeting,

35

viewers are led to think Rose is an innocent and loyal party member because she presents
herself as a self-effacing woman interested in the communist cause, rather than the power
it affords. But starting in the middle of the episode, when Rose’s true involvement is
revealed, the character is depicted much differently. She vacillates between speaking in
sensual, manipulative tones and shrill, belittling ones when convincing Barrigan to carry
out the crimes she designs, and by the end of the episode, viewers learn that Rose not
only wants to use Barrigan to frame their leader but that she also wishes to kill all of the
local party members, including Barrigan, to obtain even more power for herself. Upon
this revelation, the camera begins to ﬁlm Rose from low-level positions that emphasize
the swell of her breasts, suggesting that her overly sexualized nature is inextricably linked
to her treachery of both America and patriarchal order.

As Julie Wheelwright’s “Poisoned Honey: The Myth of Women in Espionage”
explains, such portrayals of women in the spy genre are not unique to 19508 television.
Popular accounts of spying circulated by male ofﬁcials, journalists and historians have
often depicted female spies as seductresses who value sexual and material power over
patriotism and prize the overthrow of men above the call of duty. In fact, Wheelwright
suggests that this is probably the most popular depiction of women in the spy genre, as is
partly evidenced by the Mata Hari myth. As aforementioned, however, the early Cold
War in America also encouraged a rhetoric that linked unrestrained sexuality with
communist subversiveness since “morally weak” men were thought to be easy targets for
the communist party, which was thought to employ sexual seductresses in order to

blackmail men into joining or providing information for the organization.

36

As David Lewis’ Sexpionage details, the link between uncontained female
sexuality and communism was not purely imagined since the KGB had used sexual
temptation against the West since at least the 19408. These “sexpionage” plots typically
involved a “raven” (male operative) or “swallow” (female operative) seducing a
Westemer visiting the Eastern bloc who had access to valuable information. The
couple’s sexual encounter would be recorded by the KGB using a hidden video camera,
still camera, or microphone and the evidence would then be used to blackmail the target
into providing information for the outﬁt since the target often feared imprisonment, or
losing a job, spouse, family, or public reputation. While educated guesses in 1976 placed
the number of sexpionage targets actively spying for the East near 10,000 (17), Lewis
notes that these traps were really only carried out in the Eastern bloc and were rarely, if
ever, employed by the KGB on American soil. Nonetheless, American entertainment and
political rhetoric during the 19508 worked to depict politically subversive women in
general as sexualized threats to both the nation and patriarchal order.

What is disappointing about these depictions of highly-sexualized villainesses is
not just the fact that these shows linked political subversiveness with women’s failure to
ascribe to traditional gender norms, thereby limiting the range of acceptable gender
performances available to women. It is also disappointing that series like I Led 3 Lives
and Biﬁr Baker U.S.A. (which likewise employed hyper-sexualized females in its few
storylines that feature female villains) offer viewers few depictions of women using a
position of power justly or for the betterment of others, and the series also masked several
of the reasons why many American women joined the Communist Party USA in the

preceding decades. Both Ethel Rosenberg and Elizabeth Bentley, for instance, were

37

primarily drawn to the organization in the 19308 and 408 because it was the only political
party taking an ofﬁcial stand against fascism, sexism, racism, and poverty, and reports
had still not reached the U.S. of Stalin’s purges or his murderous efforts to create
communal land"). The desire to end these injustices, especially during the depression and
WWII, is what motivated many men and women to join the CPUSA, but because shows
like I Led 3 Lives and Biﬂ fail to explore these aspects of the party, it suggests that
communists were little more than heartless, rude atheists who failed to value honesty,
free-thought, and human life to the extent that even Richard Carlson was afraid that the
show would be accused of red-baiting given the temper of the times. Such one-
dimensional portraits of communists did not serve the American public well as they
encouraged uncritical, fear-based reactions to the communist movement both at home and
abroad and may have even helped lead the nation into Vietnam, a war which the general
public failed to totally comprehend.

Of course, if 1 Led 3 Lives and Biff Baker U.S.A. depicted sexually unrestrained
women as political subversives intent on gaining power in the public and political
spheres, it is only logical that the same narratives would construct “desirable” American
women as sexually and economically contained through marriage. As Susan Douglas
explains in Where the Girls Are, this rhetoric, which encouraged American women to
embrace their roles as wives and mother during the Red Scare, rested on the idea that if
the United States was going to ﬁght off communist contamination, “then our women had
to be very different from their women.” “Their women,” she writes, “worked in
masculine jobs and had their kids raised outside the home in state-run child-care centers

that brainwashed kids to become good little comrades. Therefore our kids had to be

38

raised at home by their moms if we were going to remain democratic and free,” and she
notes that there actually were “politicians and newspapers that proclaimed daycare a
communist plot” (47). Also embedded in this rhetoric was the issue of Western
economic superiority, as it suggested that Soviet women had to work to keep the
commtmist economy running, but American capitalism had emancipated its women by
allowing them to leave paid-labor in order to tend to their families and use a host of
affordable home appliances that signalled the technological superiority of the West.
Such notions regarding “the ideal American woman” are best displayed in I Led 3
Lives, as the series primarily features Eva Philbrick in the home tending to her husband
and children’s needs—work that proves invaluable to Philbrick and, thus by extension,
the FBI. In fact, while many television programs suggested the 1950’s male identity
rested in the home since it was the one place he could still exercise his authority, this spy
program suggests that if Philbrick had to live the “fourth and ﬁfth lives” of father and
husband, his already complicated life would be completely overloaded. As a result, the
narrative suggests that by Eva tending to her “womanly” roles as wife and mother, she
also serves her country by freeing up her husband’s time in order to directly defeat
communist threats. Put another way, the show suggests that if Herb had to father his
children, buy his clothes, and make his own dinners, it would be impossible for him to
also serve as the family breadwinner and the FBI’s counterspy. By Eva doing these tasks
for him, she gives Philbrick the time, nourishment and emotional support he needs to
serve their family by defending the nation from communist subversives, and she also
provides the valuable guidance her daughters need when they, too, are subjected to

communist ideas.

39

Indeed, traditional gender roles are so important to the series that some I Led 3
Lives episodes warn viewers about the dangers of Americans transgressing these norms.
One such episode, “Comrade Eva,” features the communist party’s district headquarters
recruiting Philbrick’s wife for a basic assignment just as she is about to attend the
“thrilling” once-a-year-sale at a local department store. While Herb is afraid that this
assignment is the start of the party trying to get its “sticky little ﬁngers” on his wife,
neither Eva nor Herb can protest, lest they be suspected of disloyalty. The party’s
recruitment of Eva into affairs that take her outside the conﬁnes of the home turns Herb
into an emotional wreck. For instance, one of the ﬁrst things he does is contact Jerry
Dressler of the FBI and ask that they raid the district headquarters to free his wife, who is
only being asked to pass out propaganda ﬂiers. When Dressler reminds Herb that only a
few people know about the party’s location and that the move would blow his cover as a
counterspy, Philbrick insists that he doesn’t care; he just wants Eva out of the building.
As Dressler goes on to insist that the act would be of no use to Eva, Herb or the nation
and urges Herb to think more rationally, the protagonist merely storms off to visit the
headquarters himself, but when his visit fails to help him make contact with his wife, the
worried Herb has no choice but to head home where he literally sits by the phone,
wondering if it is out of order as he waits for his wife to call.

By placing Eva in the political and public sphere and Herb in the private one, this
episode warns viewers that gender transgressions can weaken both national security and
the family unit. Because Herb becomes an emotional wreck operating out of fear for his
wife’s safety, he becomes a threat to himself, Eva, the FBI, and thus the nation as he is

willing to blow his cover to rescue his wife. Likewise, Eva is furious about the role

40

reversals because she has missed the once-a-year sale and the opportunity it affords to
care for her family on a budget and, as a result, the stability and comfort of her family is
likewise threatened. Of course, the division of women as caretakers and men as
providers and protectors becomes disrupted by the Communist Party, which is depicted
as failing to “make any distinction between men and women.” “As long as their rotten,
ﬁlthy work gets done,” Philbrick reﬂects in this episode, “they don’t care who does it or
even what happens to those who do it.” And this disregard for “human rights,” as the
narrator at the start of the episode informs viewers, threatens to pervert the nation by
weakening the family unit, turning caring wives into absent ones and competent husbands
and workers into ineffectual, emotional wrecks.

Like Eva, Louise Baker also adheres to many traditional gender norms, but
because Louise is not positioned as either a mother or housewife in Biff Baker U.S.A. , the
character serves a different function within the series than does Philbrick’s wife.
Essentially, Louise, like Biff, works to emphasize the wealth, mobility and consumption
democratic-capitalism can afford its citizens. Louise, after all, does not need to work
since her husband’s job as an entrepreneur supports them both, and her economic
emancipation allows her to travel with Biff, taking in the world’s sites and retail goods.
She and Biff often stay in posh hotels, dress in stylish evening attire, and enjoy cocktails
and meals with new ﬁiends.

Interestingly, however, Louise is also depicted as playfully sassy and
independently- minded, and she seems to prefer international travel to the comforts of
suburban living and the role of motherhood. As a result, her role on television marks a

departure from the happily contained housewife popularized by many other 19508

41

television series such as I Led 3 Lives, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It To Beaver, and
Father Knows Best and provides audiences with an alternative and even celebrated vision
of white, middle-class femininity. Because of Louise’s “ﬁerceness,” though, Biff Baker
U.S.A. might also be read as a show that expressed America’s anxieties over who would
wear the pants in post-war America, and the series ultimately worked to resolve these
anxieties by punishing Louise for employing her individual agency.

To be more speciﬁc, Louise is petite, blonde, and, when compared to Biff, almost
child-like in stature. But while she may have embodied a feminine ideal that stood in
stark contrast to images of masculine Soviet women or full-breasted communist
temptresses, Louise’ build does not prevent her from employing her own agency in
dangerous arenas, often against Biff’s wishes or instructions. For instance, in
“Counterfeit Plates,” Louise realizes that she has left her new camera at an old Nazi
hideout the couple had visited earlier that day as tourists. When Louise tells her husband
of her mistake, Biff, who is already in bed and half asleep, tells her to wait until
tomorrow morning when the two of them can retrieve the apparatus together. However,
Louise is set on recovering the camera immediately and heads out on foot in the dark
countryside. Soon thereafter, the narrative punishes her for her agency, as when she
arrives at the location, she accidentally discovers an ex-Nazi attempting to recover hidden
German money plates, and he attempts to strangle her to death. A similar occurrence
happens in “Blue Mosque,” when a group of terrorists steals one of Biff’s company’s
trucks to transport munitions, and Biff, upon discovering its location, leaves during the
night in order to reclaim it. Before his departure, Biff clearly tells Louise to stay at the

hotel and wait for his return. However, Louise cannot stand merely waiting and worrying,

42

so she calls an Egyptian ofﬁcial and the two decide to meet up with Biff in order to
ensure his safety and the trucks’ recovery. Of course, the government ofﬁcial Louise
telephones turns out to be involved in the terrorist cell, so she inadvertently reveals Biff’s
activities, which leads to both of their captures and near deaths. These episodes, which
usually resolve by Biff rescuing Louise, position men as the only ones suited to employ
their own agency and, like I Led 3 Lives, suggest that women best serve men and, by
extension, their country by adhering to traditional gender roles that ﬁrmly place the male
as the head of the family unit.
Conclusion

19508’ spy programs were quite conservative in their approach to both politics
and gender. However, as Ella Taylor argues in Prime Time Families, this conservatism
was common to all genres since “the deﬁning tone of prime-time television during [the
19508] was consensual and mediated by the internal dynamics of an industry
addressing itself to a massive, largely unknown audience” and was “therefore committed
to holding the middle ground and avoiding controversy in its construction of the social
world” (39). But if the introduction of television into people’s home caused shows to be
cautious in regards to content, so did the political climate of the time. Due to
McCarthyism and the Red Scare, numerous employees of the television industry feared
that they would be suspected of political subversion if they failed to produce narratives
that overtly embraced American ideals, and as a result, many 19508 spy programs
associated themselves with government agencies or former spy masters to reassure

ofﬁcials and viewers of their loyalty.

43

In a time when subversive gender performances also led to one’s political loyalty
being questioned, spy programs, including Biff Baker U.S.A. and I Led 3 Lives, depicted
“good Americans” as subscribing to traditional gender norms, which were prescribed as
necessary to defeat the communist threat. More speciﬁcally, Biff Baker and Hebert
Philbrick represent middle-class heroes who eschew suburban and white-collar
feminization and instead employ their individual agency to protect the nation from
subversives both at home and abroad. Because the political rhetoric at the time also
suggested that uncontained sexuality was linked to subversiveness, both I Led 3 Lives and
Biﬁ’ Baker U.S.A. feature married protagonists and depict female subversives as hyper-
sexualized Vixens who dupe men in order to gain political and personal power. In
contrast, the female leads of these programs, Eva Philbrick and Louise Baker, represent
desirable, sexually contained women, whose “emancipation” from paid-labor helped
mark the superiority of American capitalism. Additionally, Eva Philbrick’s role as wife
and mother helped represent American social and political ideals as her service to her
husband and family helped defeat communist threats both in and outside of their home.

Just one decade later, however, the strict adherence to gender norms by spy
heroes would dissipate, as the 19608 ushered in an era of male and female protagonists
who played with camp and androgyny. These spy narratives would also begin to question
the motives and effectiveness of government agencies, whereas Biff Baker U.S.A. and,
especially, 1 Led 3 Lives displayed an absolute faith in government to protect its citizens
and the world from harmful threats. In order to better understand the historical and social

factors that led to this transition in television’s spy narratives, the next chapter examines

44

two popular 19608 shows featuring heroic female male-female partnerships: Get Smart

and The Girl ﬁ'om U.N.C.L.E.

45

The 19608
Pleasure, Consumption and the Slender Spies: Get Smart and The Girl from

U.N.C.L.E.

“How would it look? A princess saving a princess? It would destroy all the kiddies’ faith in fairytales.”
-—Mark Slate to April Dancer, “The Prisoner of Zalamar Affair.”

Agent 99: “I’d like to know exactly where you were when the professor was abducted.”
Max: “If you don’t mind 99, I’d like to handle this myself.”
Agent 99: “Right.”
Max: “I’d like to know exactly where you were when Professor Dante was abducted.”
--“Mr. Big” (Pilot)

Viewers were introduced to both Get Smart and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. during
what media critics have dubbed “The Year of the Spy.” This time period, which ran from
1965-66, earned its name because of the numerous espionage series that debuted on
American television, including 1 Spy; The Wild, Wild West; Secret Agent; The F. 8.1., The
Avengers; The Man Who Never Was; Mission: Impossible; Amos Burke—Secret Agent;
Blue Light; and The Double Liﬁz of Henry Phyfe. Flanking either side of “The Year of the
Spy” were NBC’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E, which debuted in 1964, and BBC ’8 The
Prisoner, which aired in Britain in 1967 and in 1968 in the U.S.

The unusual number of spy shows emerging dtu'ing this period is a result of
networks’ attempts to capitalize on the massive success of the James Bond ﬁlms, which
hit cinemas in 1962 and broke box office records throughout the decade”. However, the
spy craze also reﬂected a retread trend occurring in American television during the early
and mid-19608, as networks consistently created “new” shows that ﬂagrantly copied
previous successes-- a trend that irritated, if not infuriated, industry critics. In fact, the
prestigious Peabody Awards Committee declared in 1965 that it was unable to ﬁnd a

single entertainment offering in the 1964-65 season worthy of a citation, and as a result,

46

the committee only gave awards to public affair shows GVIcCrohan 43). Roughly four
years earlier, Newton Minow, John F. Kennedy’s newly appointed chairperson of the
Federal Communications Commission, also commented on the retread trend by labeling
television “a vast wastelan ” that offered little more than violence and mind-numbing
formula shows.

Peabody and Minow aside, the espionage series of the 19608 did hold important
entertaimnent and cultural value for audiences in the midst of tumultuous times. If shows
such as 1 Led 3 Lives and Biff Baker U.S.A. played on fears of wide-spread Communist
penetration and encouraged Americans to have unquestioning faith in their government,
the sixties were marked by a growing cynicism in regards to the govemment’s
trustworthiness and effectiveness. Many Americans, for instance, had come to view
Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for communist subversives as an infringement on citizens’ civil
liberties, as evidenced by both the Supreme Court’s late 19508 rulings that weakened the
senator’s momentum and the entertainment industry’s decision to ignore many of the
blacklists McCarthyism had produced. Additionally, Americans’ trust in its intelligence
agencies eroded with the CIA’s cover-up of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the New
York Times’ 1966 uncovering of the agency’s efforts to start a Burmese war against
China, and the surfacing of further reports regarding the organization’s attempts at
upheaval in Cuba, Laos, the Congo, and Taiwan. As memoirs of former spies began to
surface in the 19608, which portrayed the United States unfavorably, the luster of covert
operations continued to fade. Soon critics of the CIA were charging that the agency could

no longer be considered a symbol of American valor but was rather an intolerable

47

bureaucracy led by a series of inept directors who failed to provide the agency with a
clear moral compass (Kackman 106-107).

Given this national climate, many of the era’s spy shows sought to criticize or
parody the government and its intelligence agencies. Both The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.
and later seasons of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. used camp and dry wit to undermine the
reverence afforded to intelligence organizations in the past, while Get Smart parodied the
CIA through over-the-top humor in order to capitalize on Americans’ growing distrust of
the government and its handling of overseas affairs. Mel Brooks, one of the Get Smart
creators, even believes that the main message of his series is to “never trust a government
agency that uses the word covert,” adding that the “CIA always—because of the word
covert—allowed themselves to do things without Congress or the administration,”
making them “very dangerous people” (qtd. in Green 9). Likewise, William Schallert,
who played the Admiral on the show, notes that Get Smart often works as “a nifty satire
on government cover-ups that seems remarkably prescient in light of what we know
today” (141), and the actor has a special afﬁnity for “A Man Called Smart, Part Two,”
which features the Admiral going on television to tell the country everything is okay
when, in reality, it is headed for disaster.

However, the spy shows of the 19608 were not only campy or comedic outlets for
Americans’ frustrations with their government; many of the espionage series that aired
during the decade worked to actively reconstruct ideas about American citizenship within
the culture’s changing climate. Much attention has been paid to I Spy and Mission:
Impossible, for instance, since both shows featured Aﬁ'ican—American operatives who

carved out a place for a new black subject within dominant conceptions of American

48

citizenship and reﬂected the gains made by the civil rights movement. Likewise, women,
such as Agent 99 (Get Smart), April Dancer (The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.) and Cinnamon
Carter (Mission: Impossible) emerged as professional spies, encouraging a greater
continuity between women and the public sphere while simultaneously disrupting the
dichotomy between masculine action and feminine passivity.

Because Agent 99 and April Dancer are more prominently positioned as lead
characters than is Cinnamon Carter, this chapter explores how Get Smart and The Girl
From U.N.C.L.E. construct the female operative within their narratives. These series are
particularly important to the genre because they are among the ﬁrst to feature
professional female spies and thus explore new facets of the relationship between gender
and nationalism in espionage series, especially as it relates to the loosening of rigid
gender roles during the Cold War in the 19608 and the rise in consumer culture. Before
delving into a discussion of the ways these shows’ characters and narratives work to
depict the relationship between nationalism and gender, however, a brief description of
each show follows:

A Brief History of Get Smart and The Girl From U.N. C.L.E.

Indeed a satire about government operations, Get Smart constantly poked fun at
intelligence agencies by depicting a half-wit operative working for an under-funded
agency called CONTROL. The show debuted in the United States on September 18,
1965, and for its ﬁrst four seasons ran in either the 8:30 or 8:00 time slot on Saturday
evenings on NBC. When the network cancelled the show due to a drop in ratings, Get
Smart found one more year of life with CBS, where it aired on Fridays at 7:30 pm.

before ending for good on May 15, 1970.

49

Figure 6: Don Adams as Maxwell During its ﬁve year fun, Get Smart satirized
Smart and Barbara Feldon as Agent

99- Image available a! the Museum government spying, as well as the spy-craze itself.
of Broadcast Communications’

website.

In fact, the series was partially dreamed up by Dan
Melnick, who decided it was time to create a
television show spooﬁng James Bond and the
19608’ spy-mania. To realize his dream, Melnick
asked Leonard Stern to join the series as executive
producer, and Mel Brooks and Buck Henry served
the creative team as writers. Their work was picked

up by NBC’s Grant Tinker, who commissioned the

 

Get Smart pilot after ABC rejected the script-- a
move ABC would later regret. Over the course of the show, Get Smart was nominated for
fourteen Emmy Awards and won seven: Outstanding Comedy Series (1967-68 and 1968-
69), Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series (1966-67, 67-68, and 68-69), Outstanding
Writing in Comedy (1966-67), and Outstanding Directing in Comedy (1967-68). Barbara
Feldon was also nominated twice for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series for her
work as Agent 99 (1967-68 and 1968-69) but lost to Lucille Ball and Hope Lange
respectively.

Essentially, Get Smart revolves around three characters: Maxwell Smart (Don
Adams), the Chief (Edward Platt) and Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), all of whom work for
the covert branch of the U.S. government known as CONTROL. Most episodes feature
these three foiling the plots of KAOS, an international organization of evil, but Smart is

undoubtedly the star of the series and usually defeats KAOS through a series of mishaps.

50

Indeed, Smart is clearly depicted as a bumbling, but loveable idiot, who believes he is
James Bond because he fails to recognize his own limitations. As Don Adams relays,
“Maxwell Smart is what every ordinary guy—your taxi driver, your bellboy, the guy
behind the counter, a soda jerk or whatever he is—would be if he were James Bond” (qtd.
in Green 28), and, undoubtedly, the divide between 007 and Smart is great. While Bond
is tall, suave, and both physically and mentally acute, Max is short, speaks with a
grinding, nasally voice, and is easily distracted and accident-prone. When Bond employs
inventive, top-of-the-line gadgets, they help him accomplish his missions and make the
British government appear technologically superior to others; Smart, however, uses
devices that often fail to work or make him look ridiculous, such as the Cone of Silence
or his shoe phone which often goes off in a quiet restaurant or theater, thereby blowing
his cover. But despite all of his ﬂaws, Smart always manages to get the job done, and
like 007, he is considered one of his agency’s top operatives.

If Maxwell Smart is a spoof of James Bond, his partner, Agent 99, represents a
mix of the sexy Bond villainess and the “steadier comforts of the only lady who could
ever really be good for Bond, his eternal co-worker Miss Moneypenny” McCrohan 64).
A former fashion model turned spy, 99 is a demure woman who speaks English, German,
French and Chinese; plays the violin and harp; and is trained in marital arts. While she
comes up with many of the ideas that save her and Max in dangerous situations, she is
sensitive to 86’s ego and often allows him to take credit for her thoughts. Like Miss
Moneypenny, 99 is also hopelessly in love with the star agent, even though Max is

oblivious to the fact before the start of season four, when the writers, in an effort to boost

51

ratings, married the two characters and, later, during season ﬁve’s sweeps week, gave
them twins.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. never received the critical acclaim bestowed upon Get
Smart, and due to an unsatisfactory audience share, it was cancelled after just one season.
Regardless of its brief run, however, the show marked a departure from traditional
television narratives by featuring the ﬁrst female lead in an hour-long drama—an
especially notable feat since the entire decade favored male-centered westerns, military
and crime shows and featured few female protagonists even in domestic comedies and
dramas. In fact, the 19608 averaged just 8.5 shows with a female lead per year, and many
of these centered on young protagonists positioned inside the home, including The Patty
Duke Show (1963-66), Peck ’s Bad Girl (1959-60), Margie (1961-62), Fair Exchange
(1962-63), Karen (1964-65), and Gidget (1965-66) (Luckett 278).

Precisely because Girl was taking a risk by featuring a female lead in an action series,
network executives were never certain that the spin-off would be a success despite the
popularity of its parent show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. In fact, the show’s creator,
Norman Felton, was so worried about whether a woman could carry a lead role in an
action-adventure drama that he wrote to NBC President Grant Tinker suggesting that the
network either do two hours each week under the U.N.C.L.E. title, featuring episodes
with both Man and Girl characters “in any combination that seemed best” (R. Anderson
99), or restrict the Girl series to thirty minute episodes.

NBC ultimately rejected both of Felton’s pleas, and the series ran independently
every Tuesday at 7:30 pm. during the 1966-67 season. However, the uncertainty

regarding the show’s direction did not disappear by the time Girl went into production, as

52

evidenced by early casting choices and character constructions. For instance, The Girl

From U.N.C.L.E originally starred Mary Ann Mobley, the 1959 Miss America winner, as

April Dancer and actor Norman Fell as her partner, Mark Slate. In the pilot episode, “The

Figure 7: Stefanie Powers as April
Dancer and Noel Harrison as Mark
Slate. Image available at The Museum
of Broadcast Communications’
website.

 

Moonglow Affair,” Mobley plays an
inexperienced, twenty-four-year—old agent
teamed with the elder Slate who leaves
retirement to mentor her on missions. But
while the pilot, which was introduced to
viewers under The Man From U.N.C.L.E. title,
earned NBC a satisfying forty-ﬁve share
(Walker, “The Gun” 209), the network
nonetheless demanded that the actors be recast
by the time the series independently debuted

in the fall of 1966. Ronald Smith suggests

that NBC may have wanted to recast the actors in order to construct hipper and “more

British” characters that would appeal to a younger audience (157-158) and help the

network compete with ABC, which held a virtual monopoly on the female, teen

demographic. (In the previous year, ABC had aired Gidget, The Patty Duke Show,

Tammy, and Honey West, and it had just picked up the British spy series, The Avengers,

for its 1966-67 season). Regardless of the reason, however, the Southern and

conservative Mobley was replaced with the edgier Stefanie Powers, who spoke with a

slight European accent12 and played a stronger, more experienced Dancer with a penchant

for go-go boots and miniskirts. Likewise, Noel Harrison, the young, British actor-singer,

53

replaced Norman Fell as Mark Slate, who was re-written to function as April’s partner
and equal, rather than as her mentor and elder.

While “The Dog-gone Affair” suggests that these revised versions of April and
Mark were once romantically involved, the series primarily depicts the two as platonic
partners who use complimentary sets of skills to defeat the villains of THRUSH. April,
for instance, speaks a dozen languages ﬂuently (“The UFO Affair”) and is particularly
skilled at conducting surveillance and garnering information while in disguise, while
Slate is primarily responsible for physically ﬁghting off the pair’s enemies. Perhaps out
of concern for its younger viewers and contemporary criticisms that television had
become too violent, The Girl From (IN. C. LE. narratives also border on the absurd and
make the dangerous seem silly, although the series stays away from the over-the-top
humor employed by Get Smart. Examples of such plots include "The Carpathian Caper
Affair," which features April and a civilian, Herbie Fummer, about to cook to death in a
giant toaster before being rescued by a stray, bouncing ball which puts pressure on the
toaster’s lever, popping the two into the air. “The Garden of Evil Affair” features Mark
trying to out-cycle his adversaries who are riding tandems and unicycles, and “The Little
John Doe Affair” depicts April trying to dismantle a bomb embedded in a chicken with a
carver’s fork and knife. Such silly and even surreal narratives have often been cited as
one of the main reasons that The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. failed to emerge as a powerful
action-adventure drama, and even Stefanie Powers admits that she and Noel Harrison
were forced to play characters as “hopefully real” as they could be given the ludicrous

situations in which they found themselves (qtd. in Britton 48).

54

Queering Patriotism?: Reading the Body in Get Smart and The Girl From
U.N. C.L.E.

As discussed in the preceding chapter, the 19508’ dominant culture feared
American men’s ability to stand up against communists’ attempts at internal subversion.
More speciﬁcally, it feared that suburban conformity, along with the rise in material
comforts and white-collar service jobs were “softening” American men and that these
men would thus grow soft on national defense and lack the strength to resist aggressive
communist seducers eager to blackmail those engaging in homosexual or inappropriate
heterosexual affairs. In response to these concerns, the country encouraged men to
embrace the traits of rugged individualism and enter into early marriage, which provided
a safe and contained outlet for sexual desires (May 94).

Traditional gender roles were also prescribed for American women, as the culture
reasoned that women’s fulﬁllment of their roles as wives and mothers would protect the
nation’s families from internal subversion and help mark the U.S. as the superior “other”
to the Soviet Union. The American media, for example, commonly depicted Eastem-bloc
women as working in de-feminizing jobs and allowing state-run, childcare centers to
raise and indoctrinate their children with communist propaganda. Subsequently, the
media suggested that in order to remain democratic and free, American children would
need to be raised at home by their mothers, whose “emancipation” from paid labor also
signaled the economic superiority of the West (Douglas 47).

Several 19508 espionage programs reﬂected these ideas as they often featured
heterosexual patriarchs battling political threats in the public sphere; lauded American

women for embracing traditional femininity and their roles as wives and mothers; and

55

depicted women who employed an uncontained sexual agency as threatening subversives.
By the 19608, however, many young women had come to understand the 19508’ domestic
ideology, which championed restrained sexuality and the “cult of motherhood,” as
restrictive and repressive. This shift can be partially explained by the FDA’s approval of
the birth control pill in 1960, which offered women a new sexual freedom, as well as the
1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which encouraged millions
of women to question the assumption that they could “ﬁnd fulﬁllment only in sexual
passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love” (Friedan 43)”. However, the
events of the Cold War and the civil rights movement also encouraged women to rethink
the idea that their primary service to the nation rested in their roles as wives and mothers.
For example, the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957 led the dominant culture to
encourage greater access to higher education for both sexes in order to ensure Western
technological prowess, while JFK’s 1961 inaugural address passed the torch of ﬁghting
communist inﬂuence on “to a new generation of Americans” and inspired ﬂocks of both
men and women to join the Peace Corps when it was founded just two months later
(Douglas 22-23). As Schulamith Firestone argues, the civil rights movement also helped
encourage the gender revolution not just because many women got their activist starts in
the pursuit of black causes, but because “Just as the issue of slavery spurred on the
radical feminist of the nineteenth century, so the issue of racism stimulated the new
feminism: the analogy with racism and sexism had to be made eventually” (33).

In order to reﬂect the nation’s shift towards greater inclusivity, many popular
19608’ spy series featured multi-racial and/or co-sexed teams of spies. These programs,

which include Mission: Impossible, 1 Spy, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E, and Get Smart,

56

worked to account for racial and gender difference previously ignored in the genre and
even played with camp and androgyny to “consciously foreground the arbitrarily
constructed nature of social norms that were in the early Cold War invested with such a
cultural weight” (Kackman 96). As Agent 99 and April Dancer rank amongst television’s
very ﬁrst professional, female spies, it is important to examine how these women are
constructed if one is to understand the development of the female operative in the genre,
as well as the new ways gender often functioned in the 19608 spy program, especially in
regards to American nationalism.

A logical place to begin such an examination rests in issues of the body since
Yvonne Tasker argues that the bodies of action-adventure characters are vital to the
narrative because these protagonists “are cinematically constructed almost exclusively
through their physicality” (35). Of course, Tasker is speciﬁcally referring to ﬁlm stars in
this statement, but her argument is nonetheless relevant to television, and scholars such as
Sherrie Inness have built upon her work to suggest that, like cinema, contemporary
television has primarily depicted its heroines’ “toughness” through well-deﬁned or
unusually heavy musculature, as well as stylized clothing since a “pair of khakis has a
higher tough quotient than a pink tutu” (25).

While latter day spies such as Nikita and Sydney Bristow possess deﬁned muscles
and supreme physical agility, it is important to acknowledge that neither Agent 99 nor
April Dancer possesses a “ripped” body or wears “tough” clothing. Rather, 99 is a tall,
lanky spy with little body fat or muscle, and Dancer represents a slender, if slightly
shorter, operative. More speciﬁcally, Barbara Feldon, who played Agent 99 on Get

Smart, stood at 5’9 and weighed roughly 110 pounds while shooting the series, and the

57

model-actress was so slim that she was forced to wear long sleeves throughout the show’s
run because she looked “unhealthy” on camera if her “thin, long arms were showing”

(F eldon qtd. in McCrohan 64). MGM’s original promotional booklet for The Girl From
U.N.C.L.E. describes April Dancer as “ﬁve-feet, ﬁve inches and 108 pounds of raven-
haired danger” (reprinted in R. Anderson 104), and while this description undoubtedly
refers to Mary Ann Mobley’s embodiment of Dancer, Stefanie Powers was similar in
build. In 1983, the actress revealed her height as 5’6 and marked her weight at 117 lbs
(Wallace). Given most humans’ tendency to put on weight as they get older, it is likely
that Powers was nearer to Mobley’s 108 pounds in 1965, but either way, Powers, like
Feldon, possessed a very slender, almost boyish body.

The casting of these feminine, if boyish, looking actresses worked to distance 99
and Dancer from the images of the overly sexualized and curvaceous communist
seductress, as well as ﬁ'om the “masculine” Soviet woman who enjoyed emasculating
men in her position of power. But while these actresses may have embodied a new type
of American ideal and played two of the ﬁrst professional, female spies on television,
precisely because of their slendemess, their characters possessed a limited physical
agency that failed to effectively challenge notions of the female body as passive and
weak and limited their service to national defense. For instance, even though the pilot
episode features 99 ﬁghting a female combatant, throughout the rest of Get Smart, 99 is
rarely shown using her marital arts skills, although viewers are told she possesses them,
and rarely is she shown shooting a gun at someone, let alone hitting her target. These
roles are primarily delegated to Smart, who engages in ﬁstﬁghts and shootouts, while 99

aids the mission by feeding Max ideas, employing an occasional karate chop or

58

technological device, or merely pointing a gun menacingly. Part of the fault for 99’s lack
of physical agency was admittedly Feldon’s, who laments that the scenes in which she
was to karate-chop an enemy were eventually taken away from her because while the
move started out ﬁerce, she would soften the blow upon contact, which looked ridiculous
on camera. “I have no strength whatsoever,” she said, “and it was practically ostentatious
of me to think I was a danger to anyone. But I couldn’t do it. The only time I did it at all
well was when I had to hit a dummy” (McCrohan 139). But even when not ﬁghting
adversaries, 99 is still depicted as physically weaker than Max on the show as evidenced
in “Island of the Damed.” Here, the operative cannot keep up with 86 when trekking
through the jungle, and her limited physical stamina forces the two of them to rest, which
leads to their capture.

While it is tempting to criticize Get Smart for constructing 99 as a “liability”
physically, the show was somewhat in tune with the roles real women played within
American intelligence at the time. Jeanne Vertefeuille, tasked with discovering CIA mole
Aldrich Ames in the 19908, has remarked that in 1954, women were automatically
assigned to the secretarial pool if they joined the CIA regardless of their talents and that it
was not until the 19608 that women were allowed to attend “The Farm” for career
training. Vertefeuille, who was one of the ﬁrst women admitted to The Farm during the
decade, also recalls that out of the 66 trainees that attended during her year, only seven
were women, and they were not allowed to take all of the same courses as men, were not
taught to use weapons, and were subjected to the CIA’s belief that women were not

capable of enduring the physical training The Farm required (P. Early 224-225).

59

Additionally, the success of Get Smart as an entertainment offering did not suffer
much for 99’s restricted physical agency since she was able to relinquish the role of
ﬁghting and killing adversaries to Max. However, given that April Dancer was the star
of her show, she should have been primarily responsible for defeating her enemies, but
like 99, she does not represent a physical threat, and many critics claim that this was an
additional factor that led to the downfall of the show. According to Cynthia Walker, the
problem primarily lay with the NBC Broadcast Standards Department, which was
especially vigilant about action scenes involving female characters. The board often sent
explicit directives to Girl ’s parent show about women guest stars, restricting what they
physically could do and have done to them on screen, and Girl had to cope with these
same restrictions. In fact, the series ran into trouble as soon as the pilot episode aired
because it featured April being dangled over a pool of ﬂesh-eating ﬁsh by her enemies.
According to Norman Felton, scenes such as this caused several New York reviewers to
comment adversely in terms of the show’s violence and “sadism,” and as a result, Felton
requested that the show’s producer, Douglas Benton, review all episodes to "make sure
we don’t have any offensive actions" (N. Felton qtd. in Walker, “The Gun” 209).

Given these network constraints and reviewers’ criticisms, the majority of action
sequences, including the wrestling, ﬁghting and shooting of adversaries, befall Mark
Slate, leaving April to merely watch or assist in some minor way. In “The Prisoner of
Zalamar Affair,” for example, a large ﬁght scene ensues in which everyone participates
except Dancer, who simply crouches underneath a wheel hub and sprays an “atomatizer”
into her enemies’ eyes after they have been knocked to the ground in front of her.

Likewise, in “The Little John Doe Affair,” April hides underneath a food service cart

60

while the man she is sent to protect is forced to defend himself against another character
trying to kill him. Perhaps in an attempt by the show’s writers to mock the fact that
Dancer cannot physically participate in the ﬁght scene, this episode also features Mark
Slate telling April via radio to let the men “take care of the rough stuff” and bidding her
to play “the lady.”

While restricting Dancer’s physical agency may have helped the show gain more
favorable press reviews, inevitably, the move weakened Dancer’s believability as an
action-adventure heroine. After all, it is hard to admire or even champion a lead character
who rarely saves herself or others when trouble arises, and instead, screams or simply
waits until help arrives. However, while Dancer and Agent 99 possessed a restricted
physical agency, their bodies may have nonetheless held subversive power for female
viewers, especially since they can be read as challenging the dominant culture’s emphasis
on marriage and the family. As Susan Bordo argues in Unbearable Weight, the ultra-slim
body can hold disruptive powers since it often symbolizes liberation from domestic
destiny (206). More speciﬁcally, she writes that if full, voluptuous breasts, hips and
waists signify maternal femininity, then “disidentiﬁcation with the maternal body, far
from symbolizing reduced power, may symbolize freedom from a reproductive destiny
and a construction of femininity seen as constraining and suffocating” (209). Susan
Douglas remarks that such a reading of the ultra-slim body ﬁts well within the 19608
popular culture landscape, as most of the female archetypes offered up by the decade
represented a compromise between obeying gender norms and challenging them. Often
these women, but most famously Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly, were wide-eyed

and small-breasted yet were still depicted as girlish and sexually attractive, helping young

61

women “imagine and emulate a new kind of agency that blurred the lines of what it
meant to be a boy and what it meant to be a girl” (105). Douglas also writes that after
“the mammary mania of the 19508,” ﬂat-chestedness became fashionable and soon came
to “signify ipso facto the special exception to all those negative stereotypes about female
irrationality, incompetence and stupidity” (105).

This “new kind of agency” which blurred the lines between men and women is
indeed present in Get Smart, as evidenced by its pilot episode which introduces viewers
to 99 disguised as a male chauffer. In this episode, CONTROL sends Max on an
assignment and gives him a code phrase to help him locate Agent 99 for the ﬁrst time.
When she makes contact, viewers and Max hear her sultry, feminine voice before the
camera pans her body from bottom to top, coding her as the sexual object described by
Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.” Despite the fact that she is
dressed in pants, a
suit jacket and tie, and
despite the fact that
her hair is tucked into

her hat, it is clear to

iii:

id
‘ _ viewers that she is a
W4

woman. The very fact

,, tam-pv-

that the camera pans

 

A.

Figure 8: Agent 99 in a chauffeur’s outﬁt in the pilot, “Mr. Big.”

her body to seductive
music tips viewers

off, as does the fact that she possesses thick, long eyelashes and speaks in a whispery,

62

sensuous voice. Max, however, doesn’t realize until two-thirds of the way through the
episode that 99 is “a girl,” after she takes off her hat to reveal a chin length bob. The
humor in this scene, then, is based on Max’s failure to pick up on the signiﬁers of 99’s
femininity before she lets down her hair (the only signiﬁer he recognizes) even though
audiences know 99 is a woman as soon as they hear her speak. But the scene also works
to suggest that 99 represents a new kind of woman that indeed blurs gender lines through
her boyish body, dress, and even her role as a professional spy, which, as the scene also
suggests, is expected to be male. Similar types of gender-bending occur throughout the
series, as well, as 99 often goes undercover as a man during assignments (including a
Charlie Chaplin impersonator).

While April Dancer does not blur gender lines through her dress as much as 99,
who disguises herself as a man in many Get Smart episodes, both she and 99 challenge
femininity’s association with irrationality and stupidity. For instance, while Dancer and
99 are undoubtedly given a less active role when compared to Slate and Smart, they
nonetheless act in dangerous situations and are depicted as skilled, rational, and quick-
thinking operatives. In fact, Dancer’s handler, Waverly, notes that April has “an uncanny
knack for survival” and in “The Mother Mufﬁn Affair,” the narrative even suggests that
Dancer is a more competent agent than Napoleon Solo in some realms of tradecraft. At
the start of this episode, viewers learn that Solo is followed from the airport by Mother’s
cronies, which leads to the two agents being trapped, while Dancer, who arrived
separately, was able to move undetected. Agent 99, throughout the entire Get Smart
series, is also depicted as the most rational and quick-thinking operative on the series,

although she does allow Max to believe that he has come up with many of her ideas.

63

Additionally, both characters represent the “freedom from reproductive destiny
and a construction of femininity seen as constraining and suffocating” to which Bordo
refers (209). After all, Dancer represents a jet-setting woman who enjoys engaging in
romantic ﬂings with numerous men and does not express a desire to settle down, marry,
or have children, while 99 continues to work as a spy even after delivering twins in
season ﬁve. Interestingly, “The UFO. Affair” even comments on the ways April’s slim
body suggests a new type of sexual liberation. This episode features a captured Dancer
being prepared to join a Moroccan villain’s harem. When the villain comes to check on
her progress, the harem’s mother-ﬁgure, who clearly resembles an older version of
Marilyn Monroe, complains that Dancer has the body of a “scraggly” tiger and lacks a
“fullness” to which a man can “grab solidly.” However, the villain challenges the
woman’s reading of April, calling her body appropriate for a “stream-lined age” and
notes that her body is more suitable for his purposes, which entail Dancer providing him
with physical pleasure rather than reproduction.

It should also be noted that as spies, April and 99’s traditionally feminine traits
often belie their true agendas and thus upset femininity’s association with passivity,
objectiﬁcation, and weakness. In “Kisses for KAOS,” for instance, 99 vamps a KAOS
saboteur in order to get his ﬁngerprints at dinner and employs various other ID devices
from the CONTROL lab to aid her mission. Likewise, both 99 and Dancer’s wardrobes
serve to mark them as desirable and feminine but also mask the contraptions they employ
on assignment. One of Dancer’s dress hems works in conjunction with her bracelet to
form a powerful explosive, one of her necklaces conceals a tape recorder, and one of her

shoe heels hides both a communication device that allows her to alert Slate of danger and

64

a pill that, when combined with liquid, emits a noxious gas. 99 also possesses dual
functioning jewelry, including a ring that conceals a stainless—steel blade and a charm
bracelet that can play both a woman’s scream and a woman’s laughter. All of these
devices help to suggest that even under the most feminine of trappings lies a dangerous
power.

Of course, it is not just females’ bodies that helped subvert dominant notions of

gender in both Get Smart and The Girl From U.N. C.L.E.; these shows also blurred the

Fig 9. A weedy Mark Slate in “The U.N.C.L.E. Samural Affair.”

 

lines between masculine and feminine through the casting choices for Maxwell Smart and
Mark Slate. Noel Harrison, the actor chosen to play Slate, for instance, possessed a very
lanky and slight build that showed no signs of the hyper-masculinity common to most
action-adventure heroes. In fact, Associate Producer George Lehr remarks that Harrison

was so small in stature that he was uncomfortable handling the parent show’s famous gun

65

-the U.N.C.L.E. Special-- because his hands, which were smaller than Stefanie’s, could
not agilely wield the large and bulky weapon (Lehr qtd. in Walker, “The Gun” 209).
Additionally, Slate often looks “weedier” than his female partner, and while he is often
responsible for the show’s action sequences, he also engages in non-traditional activities
for action heroes such as quieting a brawling bar by playing music (“The Dog-gone
Affair”) and (wisely) trying to evade a ﬁght with a much bigger man before getting
tossed around like a rag doll in “The Paradise Lost Affair.”

Part of the decision to cast Harrison may have stemmed from the choices made on
The Man From U.N. C.L.E., which also worked to re-conceptualize the action-adventure
hero. According to Walker, Norman F elton once met a woman at the BBC who
complained that leads in American series were all big, tall, muscular and American, so he
decided to vary the formula by featuring the less than physically impressive American-
Soviet duo played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum (“The Man From”). These
actors stood at 5’9 and 5’8 respectively and also possessed slender builds with little
deﬁned musculature. On the set of Get Smart, Don Adams was also less than physically
formidable, and the actor actually stood two inches shorter than Barbara F eldon, who
performed many of her scenes in slippers or socks in order to reduce her height. When
necessary, Adams even stood on an apple box in order to gain extra inches during scenes,
while Barbara would slouch, cock her head, or roll her ankles to appear shorter
(McCrohan 64). As aforementioned, Max also speaks in a whinny, nasalized voice
Adams exaggerated for the character, and this, along with his short and thin build, helped

the actor successfully depict Max as a spy with both mental and physical limitations.

66

Additionally, several episodes in both Girl and Get Smart privileged a queer
reading that suggested gender play was not only in vogue but acceptable for television’s
national heroes, a move which poked fun at the staunch adherence to gender roles
common in 19508 spy programs. For instance, in Get Smart ’s “The Day They Raided the
Knights,” both the Chief and Larabee go undercover as women in order to discover a
KAOS plot. While the Chief must borrow clothes from wardrobe, Larabee reveals that he
has used his own dress ——a souvenir he kept from playing “Charlie’s aunt” in a college
play. Besides suggesting that Larabee has a propensity for cross-dressing, this episode
suggests that the Chief views cross-gendered performances as legitimate, even patriotic
tactics, to employ in order to thwart KAOS.

One of the more famous supporting characters on Get Smart is Charlie Watkins, a

CONTROL agent who has perfected the art of disguising himself as a woman in order to

Figures 10 and 11: (Left) Angelique Pettyjohn as Charlie Watkins. (Right) The
Chief and Larabee dressed as women in “The Day They Raided the Knights.”

 

67

garner valuable information while on assignment. Watkins, of course, was played by an
actress, Angelique Pettyjohn, but the producers used voiceovers to give her a deep voice
to denote when Watkins was being “himself” as opposed to when he was acting as a
woman. In the episode “Pussycats Galore,” much of the humor stems from the fact that
Watkins is dressed like the feline version of the Playboy Bunny and passes so effectively
as a woman that Max cannot help but sexually objectify the agent even though he knows
Watkins is just in disguise. In fact, at the end of “Pussycats Galore,” 86 asks 99 out after
work but whispers to Watkins that he/she can come too if he likes.

Like “Pussycats Galore” and other Get Smart episodes, Girl narratives could also
privilege a queer reading. To cite just one example, in “The Mother Mufﬁn Affair,” a
Man-Girl crossover episode, the horror actor Boris Karloff plays an elderly, female
assassin who has a clear sexual attraction to Napoleon Solo and explicitly objectiﬁes him
throughout the episode. While Mother is read as a woman by the other characters in the
show, it is clear to audiences from the starting credits and from Mother’s physical
appearance that she is really a man dressed in drag, encouraging audiences to read a
homosexual subtext behind each of Mother’s ﬂirtatious comments targeted at Solo.

The types of gender play mentioned above are profound given that just a few
years earlier, the television spy was “unerringly, even militantly, a heterosexual
patriarch,” and “any hint of gender instability” in these shows marked one as a subversive
communist (Kackman 96). Within such a context, then, both Get Smart and The Girl
From U.N.C.L.E. can be read as actively challenging the idea that one cannot be a good
citizen-subject if one does not rigidly conform to gender norms. After all, the Chief, Max

and Agent 99 work for the most covert branch in the United States on whom the

68

government relies in the most secretive and dangerous of situations, and all three dress in
drag numerous times without their authority being compromised or loyalty being
questioned. In fact, these episodes suggest that going undercover as the opposite sex is
actually required for effective national service. Likewise, both Girl and Get Smart
challenged previous spy series’ linkages between essentialist gender norms and
patriotism by suggesting those on the “right side of the Cold War” could be marked by
more androgynous bodies and queer gender performance, and both series disrupted the
idea that women could best serve the nation as wives and mothers since both shows
feature single, professional, female spies dedicating their lives to national defense.

Both shows also reﬂected a new attitude towards the Cold War in that they
suggested citizens possessed a lack of faith in and reverence for their government, and
suggested that the Cold War was, on many levels, absurd. After all, characters such as
Charlie Watkins or narratives like those featuring April trapped in a toaster make the
situations in which intelligence operatives ﬁnd themselves seem surreal and illogical,
especially when viewed against the backdrop of something as serious as national defense.
The idea that a “cold war” was absurd was also present in the shows’ dialogue. In one
Get Smart episode, for example, Max suggests that China, Russia and France should
outlaw all nuclear weapons, and when 99 asks what the U.S. should do if they don’t
comply, the spy simply replies that it would “have to blast them” because “It’s the only
way to keep peace in the world.” As a result, Get Smart can be read as helping to set the
stage for the anti-war movement which, as Robert Daniels points out, was aided by other
mid-19608 popular culture works which emphasized the war’s absurdity, including

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Seven Days in May (1964) (98).

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Pleasure, Consumption, Feminism, and Ideal Citizenship

While reading the bodies of select spy protagonists can help uncover the ways
many 19608 espionage narratives rejected the strict adherence to gender roles that the
early Cold War promoted, it is also important to acknowledge that Get Smart and The
Girl From U.N.C.L.E. emphasized material consumption and personal pleasure as a way
to redeﬁne notions of ideal citizenship during the decade. As Hilary Radner points out,
much of the 19608 social fabric was fueled by consumer industries’ need for new
markets, and thus popular culture encouraged the “emergence of discourses that
formulated an individual whose major preoccupation was the fulﬁllment of his or her
needs and desires” (2). Such individual fulﬁllment, which was primarily deﬁned in sexual
as well as material terms, soon came to signify one of the most important aspects of
American and even Western citizenship during the sixties, as it served as the “ﬁnal
expression of the citizen’s inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness” (2).

One of the largest proponents of this new rhetoric was undoubtedly the spy genre,
which featured prosperous protagonists enjoying high-end consumer goods and engaging
in romantic affairs with numerous characters. The most famous of these spies is James
Bond, but television shows such as The Man From UNCLE, The Wild, Wild West, I
Spy, Get Smart and The Girl From U.N. C.L. E. also featured protagonists as purveyors of
ﬁne goods and/or sexually successful with members of the opposite sex. Part of the
genre’s celebration of individual pleasure and fulﬁllment served to mark the array of
consumer goods Western capitalism produced as key to personal happiness and thus
suggested that the limited consumer consumption that communism afforded was

indicative of the “misery” experienced by its citizens. As a result, 19608 spy narratives

70

often conﬂated consumer consumption with national supremacy. In the Bond series, for
instance, Jeremy Black points out that the focus on 007’s consumption of high-end goods
came at time of rising disposable income in both Britain and the United States and set
new standards as to what was stylish and desirable (211)—both materially and politically.
Bond also showed how afﬂuence and consumerism could be stylish and noble rather than
vulgarly materialistic, and because he exuded a class unconnected with money or birth
(211), he offered up a version of British supremacy that was neither stuffy nor alienating
to the average viewer or reader.

The emphasis on personal fulﬁllment, especially through sex, as a way to
embrace one’s right to the pursuit of happiness was also inﬂuenced by the burgeoning
sexual revolution that produced two of the decade’s most popular cultural icons: The
Playboy and The Single Girl. Both of these archetypes, but especially The Single Girl,
underlined the younger generation’s dissatisfaction with the previous decade’s emphasis
on early marriage and family and marked a new consumer ideology of singleness that
was not synonymous with either gay culture or spinsterhood (Radner 3). While images of
The Single Girl varied in popular culture, Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl
(1962) is probably one of the most representative. As Julie D’Acci argues, this best-
selling book “laid out a step-by-step plan for the single woman to forestall marriage,
enjoy many sexual partners, have a job, and spend money on an apartment, furnishings,
attractive clothes, and other goods to enhance her appeal” (76). Additionally, while
Gurley Brown’s single girl is not anti-marriage, she does recognize that the institution

fails to offer her security, and thus, she is encouraged to be economically self-sufﬁcient

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and to ﬁnd personal fulﬁllment in a career, sex, and material consumption in addition to,
or instead of, marriage.

Given this popular culture landscape, it is important to note that Agent 99 and
April Dancer debuted on television just three and four years after the publication of
Gurley Brown’s inﬂuential book and that they clearly reﬂect many of the basic tenets
articulated in it. Both women, for instance, derive pleasure from cultivating their
personal appearance through makeup and high-end clothes and the sexual attention such
efforts earn them. In terms of wardrobe alone, 99 often dressed in classy, feminine
fashions, as the original costumer for Get Smart favored velvets and chiffons for the spy
and preferred loose skirts or pants from Capriotti, a high-end boutique in Beverly Hills
(McCrohan 64). While 99’s outﬁts undoubtedly earned her a low mark on the
“toughness” scale, they marked the operative as an extremely glamorous woman who ﬁt
the age’s modish ideas of beauty as embodied by both Audrey Hepburn and Twiggy. The
Girl From U.N. C.L. E. likewise constructed April Dancer as modish through her
wardrobe, as the series spent nearly $1,000 an episode to dress Powers in the latest
youthful, fashions (Smith 158), including several clear plastic and midriff bearing
ensembles. April’s wardrobe was also more sexualized than 99’s. Throughout the series,
for instance, April performs a mission in a black leotard and high heels, delivers a
civilian to safety in a soaking wet dress, conducts surveillance in a bikini, and treks
through the jungle in nothing but shoes and a man’s safari shirt. More so than Agent 99,
then, Dancer’s wardrobe codes her as a desirable sex-object, a position that is reinforced
by many of the series’ guest stars who comment on Dancer’s beauty and try to engage her

in sexual activity within the show’s narratives.

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Both Agent 99 and Dancer also derive signiﬁcant personal fulﬁllment from their
careers. April does not express a desire to marry, have children, or even establish an
exclusive, long-term relationship with anyone during her show’s twenty-nine episodes.
Rather, the spy-protagonist thrives on the life of a jet-setting, single woman and embraces
the mobility, sexual and ﬁnancial independence, and the consumer goods her job affords.
Dancer is also not jealous of other women who show affection to her partner, nor is she
afraid to take credit for her own ideas and actions. April, in total, then, represents the
links between “‘femininity, speed, public life, youth, and mobility’ that came to deﬁne
the new modern single girl of the mid to late 19608” (Luckett 281).

While a need to boost ratings forced Get Smart to marry Max and 99, it is
important to remember that 99 refuses to give up her career after marriage and having
twins, and 99’s real name is never revealed throughout the entire run of Get Smart,
suggesting that her professional identity deﬁnes her more than does her role as a wife and
mother. Of course, the show does not address, even comically, the problems working
mothers face while having newborns at home, and Feldon has remarked that because the
show is both a fantasy and a comedy, “we’re not going to see 99 neglecting the kids
because she’s out on a case or anything like that” (qtd. in Green 40). However, by
playing the roles of career woman, wife and mother simultaneously, Feldon asserts that
99 can be read as pre-feminist icon:

A lot of women have said 99 was a role model for them. Because she was smart

and she always got the right answer. And that was one of the ﬁrst roles on

television that showed women that way. As sweetly self-effacing as 99 could be,

she knew she was smart and she was not afraid to show it, although she didn’t

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want to defeat Max with it. I think that Buck Henry and Mel Brooks wrote a real

early feminist role. And it’s a role I am not embarrassed to have played. She

fulﬁlled herself both in her career and then she married Max and had children.

I suppose she was one of the ﬁrst women to have it all, and did it with a kind of

élan, a kind of ease that I think women have not found so comfortable to do.

(Green 40)

And indeed, by constructing both Dancer and 99 as fulﬁlled career women, Get Smart
and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. did create a type of pre-feminist icon before second-wave
feminism gained its full momentum. After all, the debut of Agent 99 preceded the
establishment of The National Organization of Women (NOW) by one year; April
Dancer preceded the 1967 formation of The Chicago Women’s Liberation Group and the
New York Radical Women by the same time span; and both characters appeared ﬁve
whole years before the debut of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which many media scholars
consider to be the ﬁrst feminist text on television”.

The Femme Fatale and Unmarried Shrew: Villainesses of Get Smart and The Girl
From U.N.C.L.E.

However, while 99 and Dancer’s positive associations with material consmnption,
career, and even sexual liberation helped them embody 19608 principles regarding ideal
citizenship and early feminist agendas, both series also revealed a cultural uneasiness
regarding women’s economic fortitude and sexual freedom, as evidenced by the types of
women cast as villains in both narratives. In Get Smart, women rarely appear as villains,
but the very few female villains who do appear in the series fall under the category of

femme fatale. To cite just two examples, in “Kiss of Death,” Tracy Dunhill attempts to

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avenge her father’s death by kissing and thus killing Maxwell Smart while wearing a
poisonous lipstick. Dunhill informs her KAOS colleagues that it will be easy to lure Max
to her apartment by preying upon his weakness for women, and indeed, Max ﬁnds Tracy
“fascinating” and “beautiful” and almost falls for her trap. In “The Laser Blazer,” 99
hires a voluptuous maid named Ingrid to clean the couple’s apartment, not knowing that
Ingrid is really a KAOS plant sent to search the ﬂat for a secret weapon. Throughout the
episode, Ingrid uses her sexuality to evade Max’s suspicion and even to search Max’s
upper body for information. In fact, she is so successful at using her sexuality to evade
suspicion that when he’s told Ingrid is an enemy agent, Max still struggles to believe it,
asking whether those are “the legs of a KAOS agent?”

By depicting women who aggressively use their sexuality to advance their own
political agenda, Get Smart suggests that the fear of communist seductresses had not yet
subsided and that both the sexual emancipation of women and men’s cultural license to
act as playboys may unravel the fabric of the West. In the case of “The Laser Blazer”
affair, KAOS is searching for a high-powered laser hidden within Max’s suit jacket and
can destroy human and inorganic life with case. In the case of Tracy Dunhill, Max’s
susceptibility to feminine wiles threatens his life and CONTROL, which stands to lose
one of its top agents. Of course, the femme fatale archetype was not new to visual
narratives and had been frequently featured in WWII and post-war cinema, where it is
most often connected to a “deep-seated unease in the shifting gender roles in that society”
(Pidduck 65). Elaine Tyler May argues that, during the Cold War, ﬁgures like the femme
fatale continued to be powerful because many Americans feared women’s increasing

sexual emancipation, which was furthered by the pill, since it threatened to disrupt the

75

family system so important to warding off communist inﬂuence. “So pervasive and
lasting was the connection between taming fears of the atomic age and taming women,”
she states, “that as late as 1972, a civil defense pamphlet personiﬁed dangerous
radioactive rays as sexy women” that can cause “silent damage” and even “kill you”
(109).

Because Maxwell Smart is the show’s lead character, the femme fatale approach
was easy to employ when constructing KAOS villains. However, because April Dancer
carried Girl, the show’s creators had to ﬁnd some other relationship to use in regards to
the female villains’ interactions with the heroine. As a result, female THRUSH agents are
not usually depicted as young and irresistible to men; rather, they are constructed as
unmarried shrews who range between forty and seventy-years old and possess
independent wealth but are extremely power hungry nonetheless. Additionally, while
these villainesses mastermind their own evil plots, they often get men to carry out their
dirty work either through emotional manipulation or ﬁgurative emasculation. “The
Drublegratz Affair,” for example, features Princess Rapunzel, a middle-aged THRUSH
agent, who is plotting to kill her two nephews, so that she may take the throne after her
brother’s death. As one of the nephews is a rock musician about to host a music festival
at the palace, Rapunzel makes use of Dr. Igor Gork’s talents, which entail him writing a
song for the festival and subjecting it to an “intensiﬁed vibration” in order to cause an
avalanche that will kill everyone present. In this episode, Rapunzel is depicted as a
demanding “barracuda,” who constantly nags, criticizes and bosses Gork around. When
she realizes that Gork can help her successfully take the throne of Drublegatz, she

remains unsatisﬁed and envisions the two of them marrying so that they can take over

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“Moscow” and then “the moon.” “The Lethal Eagle Affair” follows a similar pattern by
featuring Gita Volander, a sixty to seventy-year-old woman who once reigned as the head
of THRUSH Baltic but was retired for “no reason,”except “jealousy, backbiting and envy
of [her] accomplishments.” In order to regain her powerful position, Gita employs Franz-
Joseph to develop a weapon capable of “transporting anything to anywhere,” but she puts
too many demands on his work in terms of capability and time frame. Franz cannot stand
up to Gita, for fear of her wrath and in an attempt to please the critical woman, he
pretends that the device works, when in actuality its success is a hoax.

Unlike the femme fatale, then, THRUSH women are not usually threatening
because they employ their sexuality to advance their own aims. Rather, they represent
The Single Girl gone awry since their lack of spousal companionship turns them into
bitter shrews, who invest too much of their personal identity in their work and political
power. In other words, these villainesses serve as a warning to young women about what
could happen to them if they remain single career women for too long. Additionally,
these episodes also warn viewers about the potential ramiﬁcations of women’s economic
emancipation on a national scale by suggesting that powerful women mostly spell
disaster for men and even democratic societies. The “The Fountain of Youth Affair”
speciﬁcally gets at this latter point as it features the Baroness Ingrid Blangsted creating a
highly successful product that reverses the aging process. Described as a woman only
loyal to “her lust for power,” the Baroness sells these injections to the wives of world
leaders in exchange for state secrets and political power, including Madame Dow who
forces her husband, the premier of “Syranesia,” to cancel his nation’s upcoming free

elections in exchange for her youth.

77

Conclusion

Get Smart and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. reﬂect a stark departure from the
conventions and rhetoric employed by many spy programs airing in the 19508. Not only
do they suggest that Americans had lost faith in the government’s effectiveness and
trustworthiness, they also reﬂect the growing inclusivity of the American republic
encouraged by the burgeoning gender revolution, as they feature two of television’s ﬁrst
professional, female spies. While these characters, Agent 99 and April Dancer, possessed
a limited physical agency and failed to effectively challenge the idea that women are
passive and weak, they nonetheless spoke to many baby boomers that had come to view
the 19508’ domestic ideology as repressive and restrictive. More speciﬁcally, the casting
of the slender and almost boyishly-built Barbara Feldon and Stefanie Powers in these
show’s title roles marked the appearance of a new heroine who represented a
disidentiﬁcation with the maternal body that “far from symbolizing reduced power,”
symbolized freedom from a reproductive destiny (Bordo 209). These shows, which cast
short and slender men in lead roles and often privileged a queer reading, also challenged
previous spy series’ linkages between essentialist gender norms and patriotism by
suggesting those on the “right side of the Cold War” could be marked by more
androgynous bodies and queer gender performance.

Additionally, both series marked a shift in appropriate expressions of citizenship
as they championed individual fulﬁllment, namely through material consumption,
careers, and sex, as the ultimate embodiment of a citizen’s inalienable right to the pursuit
of happiness. Agent 99 and April Dancer clearly embody these new principles of ideal

citizenship and underline the younger generation’s dissatisfaction with the previous

78

decade’s emphasis on early marriage and family, as they represent independent career
women who enjoy the challenges, disposable income and romantic interludes their spy
work affords. However, as represented in each show’s employment of women in
villainous roles, the culture was still uneasy regarding women’s sexual liberation and
economic fortitude and warned young viewers about the negative ramiﬁcations of women
remaining single and career-driven for too long. This negotiation of feminism and anti-
feminism would continue into the 19708 spy series, The Bionic Woman, which featured
the ﬁrst professional, female spy to work alone on assignments. But this show did not
just address issues of second-wave feminism. As the spin-off from The Six Million Dollar
Man, this series also addressed issues of technological proliferation during the Cold War
space race and, as a result, is one of the ﬁrst popular “spy-ﬁ” (spy/science ﬁction) series

to air on American network television.

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The 19708
Atomic-powered Cyborgs and the Quest for Technological Supremacy: The Six

Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman

“Steve Austin: Astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.
We have the capability to build the world’s ﬁrst bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he
was before. Better, stronger, faster.” -Opening narration of The Six Million Dollar Man

“I need some time to have a life of my own That may mean marriage, children. I don’t know.
But it does mean some work that I feel good about. My teaching, helping kids. But something positive.
Because you see 1 experience the OSI as negative activity. lt’s fending off disaster; it’s survival time, and 1
must have some things in my life that give me perspective so my work for you will mean something.

—Jaime Sommers in “On the Run,” The Bionic Woman.

Based on Martin Caidin’s novel Cyborg (1972) and originally introduced to
television viewers as a made-for-TV-movie, The Six Million Dollar Man (1974-78)
starred Lee Majors as Col. Steve Austin, a government spy and former astronaut who had
walked on the moon. During the show’s pilot episode, Austin tests an experimental “lift
body” that sends him and his jet crashing into the desert ﬂoor, damaging his legs, arms
and eye almost beyond repair. Believing that they have the technology to rebuild him,
the U.S. government spends six million dollars to have a team of aero-medical surgeons
outﬁt the colonel with atomic-powered limbs and an eye, which afford Steve superhuman
strength, speed and sight. All of his bionics are comprised of elaborate wire circuitry and
rubber skin, but they appear human, and thus very few people know Austin possesses
superhuman powers. This aspect of Steve’s identity serves him especially well in his role
as a covert operative for the Ofﬁce of Strategic Intelligence, which he adopts in order to
repay the U.S. government for the cost of rebuilding him.

Though extremely popular with 12-14 years olds (Phillips and Garcia 343), The

Six Million Dollar Man (SMDM) proved only moderately successﬁrl with ABC viewers

80

overall during its ﬁrst season, and during its second, the series faced falling ratings and a
shortage of scripts (Stowe). As a result, show writer Kenny Johnson suggested giving
Austin a love interest and female bionic counterpart to boost interest in the show,
especially amongst adult viewers. Stephanie Powers was considered for the part, but
Lindsay Wagner was ultimately cast to play Jaime Sommers, a top-ranking professional
tennis player and Steve’s childhood love. During the two-part episode entitled “The
Bionic Woman,” Jaime and Steve rekindle their romantic relationship and become
engaged, but before the two actually wed, Jaime is involved in a sky diving accident that
threatens her life. In order to save his ﬁance, Steve convinces the 081 to provide her
with the same cybemetics he possesses, and the covert organization reluctantly agrees,
outﬁtting Jaime with a bionic arm, ear and pair of legs, which allow her to crush steel,
run 60 mph, and crack safes
using her supersonic
hearing. Like Austin, Jaime
agrees to work for the 081
as a government spy in
order to repay the outﬁt for

saving her life.

 

While Jaime’s
Figure 12: Lee Majors as Steve Austin and Lindsay character was meant to
Wagner as Jaime Sommers in “The Bionic Woman Part
One-” attract a larger adult

audience, neither ABC nor the show’s creators wanted Austin to be tied down with a

marriage (presumably because it would limit the types of action-adventure plots available

81

to Austin), so they decided to kill Sommers at the end of the two-part episode by having
Jaime’s body reject her bionics. The move, however, proved to be a signiﬁcant mistake
for the network, as “The Bionic Woman” not only delivered a sharp hike in ratings, but
over 200,000 letters from viewers ﬂooded into the network, protesting Jaime’s death and
begging ABC to somehow bring the character back to life. “When she died, Universal
was inundated with a tidal wave of telegrams and phone calls,” recalls Caidin. “People
were bitching, ‘You can’t kill her off.’ Picketers outside the studio were raising all kinds
of hell” (qtd. in Philips and Garcia 43). Eventually, viewer pressure became too strong to
ignore, so Fred Silverrnan, the head of ABC Programming, decided to resurrect the
character, and, thus, through the use of “revolutionary new cryogenic technology,”
Wagner returned to the airwaves on September 14, 1975 in “The Return of the Bionic
Woman.” Also a two-part story on The Six Million Dollar Man, this third season opener
featured Jaime’s cybemetics intact, but the character suffered from a partial memory loss
that prevented her from remembering her feelings for Steve, thereby creating a new
dramatic situation. The episode helped launch the SMDM into the television top ten for
the ﬁrst time since its debut, and ABC, recognizing the bionic woman’s mass appeal,
ordered Wagner’s own spin-off series, which independently aired on January 11, 1976,
during the 8 pm. time slot on Wednesdays.

As spy series, both The Bionic Woman (1976-1978) and the SMDM addressed
Americans’ concerns regarding their national supremacy during a low-point in American
Cold War history, especially as it related to Vietnam, Watergate, and the U.S. space
program. More speciﬁcally, the tide of the Vietnam War had forced the United States in

1975 to unofﬁcially declare defeat and to admit that its technological supremacy and

82

military might had failed to deter communism in a region the size of New Mexico. Due
to the huge budget deﬁcit the U.S. incurred from its efforts in Vietnam, Richard Nixon
had also scaled back federal support of the U.S. space program in the early 19708,
abandoning its plans for a manned mission to Mars, canceling the last three Apollo
launches, suspending Saturn V production and testing, and reducing the Apollo
Applications Program to a single Skylab -- all before resigning as President due to the
Watergate scandal that left the international community questioning the integrity and
even desirability of American democracy. Much to the U.S.’s chagrin, during the same
time period, the Soviet space program was accomplishing a number of ﬁrsts, including
the development and launch of the ﬁrst robotic space rover, the ﬁrst space station, the
ﬁrst probe to orbit Mars, the ﬁrst probe to reach the surface of Mars, and the ﬁrst probe to
orbit and photograph Venus. The USSR. was also making a concerted effort to close
the military distance between itself and the U.S. through the development of strategic
weapons and an anti-satellite program, not to mention celebrating a communist win in
Southeast Asia.

By the time the SMDM ﬁnished its third season and The Bionic Woman debuted
in 1976, American political and military leaders had already begun to call for a
comprehensive rearmarnent to be expressed most clearly though the expansion and
modernization of American military resources via the space program (Carter 242-243).
The government’s new emphasis on military and defense applications (rather than on
civilian space interests) would eventually culminate in Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars”
program in the 19808, but as early as 1977, Gerald Ford had authorized the development

of a new anti-satellite program to counter the Russian’s program, and thus the late 19708

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marked a transitional period in the U.S. space program in its attempts to reclaim national
supremacy on the world stage after a series of embarrassing defeats and scandals.

In this historical climate, it is ﬁtting that Jaime Sommers and Steve Austin
emerged as popular heroes who represented “products” of the U.S. military and space
program, which had designed and outﬁtted them with bionic limbs. It is also
unsurprising that both spy series adopted a science-ﬁction approach in order to explore
the contemporary culture’s fantasies about space and techno-bodies, in addition to its
attempts at reclaiming the supremacy and even integrity of American agency in the
international political arena. However, the SMDM and The Bionic Woman were not just
invested in contemporary concerns regarding the United States’ role in the Cold War, as
both programs debuted during the height of second-wave feminism, and The Bionic
Woman especially worked to negotiate feminist and anti-feminist concerns in its
narratives. As a result, this chapter examines the speciﬁc ways that the SMDM and The
Bionic Woman imagined America’s supremacy on the world stage by featuring reluctant
spies who embodied U.S. technological, ethical and political superiority, in addition to
the ways The Bionic Woman imagined the cybemetic-spy in speciﬁcally gendered terms
at a time when second-wave feminism had reached its zenith.

Analyzing Issues of Nationalism and Technological Supremacy in the SMDM and
The Bionic Woman

As the show’s basic premise reveals, The Six Million Dollar Man and Steve
Austin were carefully constructed as a hybrid of other genres and their heroes. As one of
the show’s producers commented, “We needed a superhuman to take over where

Superman left off. We needed the violent action and derring-do of Batman. We needed

84

the science ﬁction of Star Trek, [and] we needed the intrigue that goes with James Bond”
(qtd. in Cohen 26). However, the series’ producers were opposed to creating an
espionage-based series that would remind people of Watergate-- the 1972 political-spy
scandal which had ended in Nixon’s resignation two years later-- so they worked to
create a spy different from “the adventure-loving and ruthless James Bond” while
simultaneously retaining the intrigue of the spy series. “In this era of public scandal and
cynicism,” said executive producer Harve Bennett, “I felt the time was right for the old-
fashioned idealistic hero—like the Lone Ranger or Gary Cooper—who comes along to
ﬁght evil” (qtd in Cohen 26). Elaborating further, Lee Majors described the difference
between Austin and Bond this way: James Bond wants to spy; Steve Austin hates it. He
hates “the very nature of espionage. He ﬁnds it repugnant, degrading. If he’s a James
Bond, he’s the most reluctant one we’ve ha ” (qtd. in Cohen 27).

Austin’s emergence as a reluctant spy helped distance the SMDM’s hero from the
Watergate scandal and reposition the secret agent within the realm of integrity and
respect during the 19708. However, the producers’ decision to retain Austin’s career as
an astronaut also helped the show address some of the speciﬁc insecurities about the
United States’ supremacy prevalent since the Kennedy administration. As Dale Carter
illustrates in The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State, during
the early 19608 Americans grew increasingly concerned about their primacy on the world
stage as the Soviets seemed to outpace the U.S. in both missile and space technology.
During his campaign, Kennedy suggested that the emerging space gap and missile gap
could be attributed to the lack of national initiative and vitality under the Eisenhower

administration, and argued that Soviet primacy in space sent the world the message that

85

the US had passed “its high noon” and that “the long, slow afternoon” of decline had
already begun (qtd. in Carter 154). To dispel this impression, the presidential-hopeful
insisted that the nation must prove itself on the “great new frontier.” Since space was the
“symbol of the 20th century,” he argued, the US could not afford to “run second in this
vital race” (qtd. in Carter 154).

Kennedy’s vision proved difﬁcult to obtain in the early part of his administration,
as just a few months after his election, the Soviets launched the ﬁrst human into space,
Yuri Gagarin. The Soviets used Gagarin’s ﬂight, in addition to the previous Sputnik
launches, as worldwide advertisements promoting communism as the wave of the future
and the vanguard for universal progress. As Carter explains, the propaganda surrounding
the Soviets’ space achievements was designed to “vindicate not only Soviet society and
technology but also Soviet history, particularly in the third world which both Kennedy
and Khrushchev viewed as the main battleﬁeld in the latest part of the Cold War” (155).
More speciﬁcally, leaders of the USSR. argued that in 1917, Russia had been
underdeveloped during its subjection to international capitalism, and only after the
Bolshevik Revolution and the abolishment of private enterprise, had the state been
allowed to develop a planned economy that now provided its citizens with a just
industrial society, presently capable of leading the way both on earth and in space. (This
sentiment was succinctly expressed in Khrushchev’s remark to Gagarin after the
cosmonaut’s return from space: “Let the capitalist countries catch up with our country!” )

Fueled by a desire to reinstate the U.S. and its free enterprise system as the
recognized instrument of liberation, Kennedy threw his support behind the Apollo space

program, designed to “beat” the Russians in a long-term space race aimed at putting men

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on the moon. Kennedy also worked hard to promote the astronauts as national, and even
international, celebrities, breaking with the military’s tradition of treating its greatest
pilots as an unpublicized elite. (When Chuck Yeager ﬁrst broke the sound barrier in
October of 1947, the US Air Force kept it secret for eight months). As Carter writes,
these astronauts, who were depicted as “cool under pressure and skillful at the edge of
disaster” acted as bearers and protectors of those all-absorbing, ostensibly supra-
political American values of discipline and family, deity and ﬂag By electing to
become astronauts, these men, like their Soviet counterparts, also became the bearers of
societal and historical values” (160).

Although Kennedy did not live to see it, the Apollo project, and indeed, the space
program as a whole, reached its crowing achievement in 1969, when Buzz Aldrin and
Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, while Michael Collins orbited above. The event
attracted nearly 600 million viewers worldwide, or roughly one-ﬁfth of the planet’s
population at the time (Grinter 2), but more importantly, it sent the international
community the message that the capitalistic and democratic United States was not a
waning nation. In this climate, it is ﬁtting that the creators of the SMDM chose to endow
their hero with all of the cultural connotations of American strength, ingenuity, and
bravado of the Apollo program by making Col. Steve Austin an astronaut who had
walked on the moon and by consulting Edwards Air Force Base, NASA and Caidin, who
lived near Cape Canaveral and its space-medicine scientists, on the technical aspects of
the series.

By featuring a spy bureaucracy that specialized in high-tech research and

development, the show was also able to play with notions of U.S. technological and

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political supremacy since 081 scientists had “created” a protagonist whose ability to
defeat national threats largely stemmed from his bionic powers—themselves an OSI
achievement. In many ways, the show’s emphasis on American technology and its
relationship to covert intelligence operations reﬂected the primary strength of the CIA
when compared with other international outﬁts. For instance, the KGB, the STASI, the
Mossad, and even MI-6, were renowned for their HUMINT (intelligence gathered from
humans) during the Cold War, but the CIA primarily invested its budget into technology
that would allow it to compile and analyze information gathered from sophisticated
bugging devices, computer databases and satellite imagery with which poorer and smaller
intelligence outﬁts could not compete.

Likewise, Steve’s position as a bionic astronaut allowed the covert agency to send
Steve on missions where he played out fantasies of overpowering Russian space-aged
technology and used his bionics and astronaut training to “save the world.” In “The
Rescue of Athena One,” for instance, Steve rescues a female astronaut stranded in space,
while in “Dark Side of the Moon,” he returns to the moon to stop mining operations
which have shifted the moon’s orbit and created havoc on Earth. A two-part episode
airing in season four, “Death Probe” features a Russian Venus probe that crashes in
Wyoming and threatens to destroy a small town. When weapons and Steve’s bionics have
no effect on the probe’s destructive rampage, Steve simply outsmarts the probe, and thus
the episode features the triumph of American ingenuity over Russian space technology,
already constructed as inferior by the probe’s unintentional descent from space.

Both the SMDM and The Bionic Woman helped to champion American

technological prowess through the protagonists’ bionic bodies more generally, as well.

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“Bionics” refers to the replacement or enhancement of organs or other body parts by
mechanical versions and differ from prostheses in that they mimic the original body
part’s ﬁmction very closely, or even surpass it. In the case of Jaime and Steve, bionics
not only afford them superhuman strength, speed, hearing, and vision, but more
importantly, bionics are able to save their lives when ordinary medicine has failed. In this
respect, then, the techno-science embedded in both series offered viewers the fantasy of
replacement body parts and the dream of control over life and death—all made possible
by the American government and its scientists’ ingenuity.

It is important to point out, however, that while both series depicted the techno-
body as healthy, enhanced, and fully functional and portrayed the government’s use of
bionics as benevolent and lifesaving, the shows were not one-dimensional about the role
of technology in American society. As Anne Balsamo notes, within pOpular culture, the
popularization of new body technologies “disseminates new hopes and dreams of
corporeal reconstruction and physical immortality,” but it also signals a repressed
“awareness of strain on and threats to the material body” (2). This is certainly true of the
SMDM and The Bionic Woman, for both Jaime and Steve’s bodies are threatened by freak
accidents. More importantly, though, their bodies are powered by atomic-energy,
suggesting that the series might best be read as articulating the promise of American
science to tame the power of the atom in order to improve human life, while
simultaneously expressing cultural fears about atomic weapons and nuclear energy. This
reading seems particularly plausible given that the arms race was starting to gain renewed
momentum in the late 19708, and many feared that it would culminate in a nuclear war

between the Soviet Union and the United States. Likewise, episodes on both the SMDM

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and The Bionic Woman revolved around nuclear concerns, including “Doomsday and
Counting,” in which Steve burrows into an underground Russian installment in order to
save the ﬁancee of a Russian colonel from a nuclear blast; “Nuclear Alert!,” which
focuses on Steve’s attempts to stop terrorists from dropping an atomic bomb while
aboard an enemy plane; and “The Last Kamikaze,” which explores the possibility of an
atomic bomb falling into the hands of a Japanese WWII pilot who is still ﬁghting the war
on a Paciﬁc island. Some Bionic Woman episodes also address the fears of atomic
energy, including “Assault on the Princess,” which revolves around unstable energy cells
hidden aboard a casino ship that will explode unless Jaime can locate the double agent
who stole them, and “Fembots in Las Vegas,” which features Jaime trying to save a
scientist whose “energy weapon” has been stolen and launched into space.

Additionally, many of the show’s plots explored the potential for government
technology to be used for ill-motivated, militaristic purposes rather than for the beneﬁt of
humankind, and both series often ask whether humans are in danger of losing their
humanity, especially when corporeal technology threatens people’s shared, physical
vulnerability. In fact, this last question seems to have played heavily into the
development of both shows’ concepts. As Bennett says of the development of the
SMDM, “Our guy couldn’t be invincible like Superman. With all his powers, he had to be
questioning, vulnerable, and in jeopardy every so often—so that the audience would root
for him and empathize with the human part of him” (Cohen 26). Additionally, when the
creators of The Bionic Woman were looking to cast the role of Jaime Sommers, Bennett
championed Wagner because she had the one quality that he was looking for:

Vulnerability” (Cohen 78).

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Despite this similarity in construction, the SMDM and The Bionic Woman treated
the threat of technological proliferation in different ways, as the SMDM was more apt to
revolve around plots that focused on space-aged technology’s relationship to American
domination, while The Bionic Woman preferred to explore the ways in which
technological developments affected people’s personal lives. This difference in approach
was partially the result of the shows’ audience make-up and of the different acting
abilities of Majors and Wagner. The SMDM was most watched by pre-teen and teen-
aged males, which, according to Sims Bainbridge, were the population segment most apt
to show support of the space program throughout the seventies and eighties (1 1-12). The
Bionic Woman, whose protagonist was originally created to attract a larger adult
audience, appealed more to the teen-aged, young adult, and female demographic when it
aired on ABC (which has always attracted younger viewers) and on NBC (which has
traditionally catered to a slightly older one.) As unit production manager Ralph Sariego
also notes, “The Bionic Woman had greater [emotional] depth because of Lindsay. She
was a ﬁne actress and wanted more of a dramatic show than action-adventure. On Six
Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors didn’t care. He just grunted, moved his eyebrow and
took the money. Lindsay fought hard for better stories and character relationships” (qtd in
Phillips and Garcia 45). James Parriot seconds Sariego by noting that the actors’ abilities
and investment in their craft inﬂuenced show content. Speciﬁcally, he remarks that
Lindsay was “best when she had a good character conﬂict.” “I liked putting her in more
emotional situations and in the best shows, it was Jaime who had the emotional and

moral dilemmas” [rather than the guest stars] (46).

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The shows’ different foci also meant that Steve and Jaime represented American
nationalism in different ways. The SMDM’s emphasis on Steve’s brawn allowed him to
literally embody notions of American strength while The Bionic Woman’s exploration of
technology’s inﬂuence on personal identities often meant that she, as a government agent,
demonstrated and enforced the highest level of ethical standards and humanity (which
was especially important in light of Watergate). Sometimes this operated on a simplistic
level, such as when Jaime saves Max, the bionic dog, from being put down just because
his body appears to be rejecting his bionics (when in reality, hi8 bizarre behavior stems
from a fear of ﬁre.) Other times, Jaime’s “nationalism” operates on a more political
level. In “On the Run,” for instance, U.S. senators capture Jaime to try to force her to live
in a resort for ex-spies when she attempts to retire from the OSI. Only later do the
senators realize that while Jaime has often feared she is becoming more robot than
human, actions such as the senators’ attempts to lock Jaime in a type of 200 suggest that
politicians and intelligence workers operating out of their own “fears” run the real risk of
losing their compassion and humanity for others, and they thank Jaime for reminding
them of this and redirecting their moral compass.

This does not mean that The Bionic Woman failed to address the relationship
between technology and national domination, however. Throughout the series, Jaime
plays two roles primary roles as a bionic spy. One involves her using her bionic strength
to protect or extract important government ﬁgures, including ambassadors, OSI scientists
and missing OSI agents. The second involves her ensuring that technological devices and
plans do not fall into the wrong hands and weaken American prowess. In the ﬁrst two

seasons alone, for instance, Jaime helps protect a secret formula designed by Dr. Welles,

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stops a Doomsday Device activated by a supercomputer, st0ps a secret decoder from
being sold on the black market, prevents an American industrialist from selling
government weapons plan to the highest bidder, recovers two energy cells that can be
used as bombs, and investigates an unarmed missile launch while the U.S. missile
warning system is jammed. In this sense, Jaime is both representative and the protector
of American technological supremacy, although the show undoubtedly emphasized “the
human element” of technological proliferation.

Additionally, because they originally aired on the same network, Lee Majors and
Lindsay Wagner often made appearances on one another’s shows, and in these cross-
overs, episodes often explored issues of technological proliferation on both the national
and personal level. A good case in point is a three-part SMDM-Bionic Woman storyline
entitled “Kill Oscar.” This fan favorite opens with Dr. Franklin (a barely-disguised
allusion to Dr. Frankenstein), working on his latest invention—female robots, or
“fembots,” as he calls them. Franklin’s plan is to send his fembots, who are made to look
like the secretaries of prominent OSI scientists and spy handlers, into the organization in
order to capture a weather machine on which Steve Austin and engineers are working.
As the OSI describes it, the machine is meant to create weather patterns programmed by a
computer in order to bring rain to areas of drought and sun to areas of bitter cold,
ultimately helping societies all over the globe sustain life through agriculture. However,
viewers learn that Dr. Franklin worked on the OSI project ten years ago, and he pushed
for the machine to be used for militaristic purposes—sending hurricanes to enemy
territories or causing drought to weaken enemy food supplies. Almost immediately, then,

the episode pits “evil” on the side of those who would abuse technology for power and

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“good” on the side of those who would use technology benevolently. Importantly, the
episode also suggests that the OSI — a semi-secret branch of the US government — can be
trusted to use technology for beneﬁcent purposes and to purge itself of any
megalomaniacs eager to use its developments to enhance the nation’s prowess under the
cover of clandestineness since Franklin, viewers learn, was ﬁred for his “grandiose ideas”
by the OSI chief, Oscar Goldman.

Goldman, played by Richard Anderson, was the primary character responsible
throughout both series’ run for guiding the OSI through its ethical quandaries, and
Anderson often promoted his character as a government-patriot in the media, as well. In a
1974 interview, Anderson describes Oscar Goldman as “an ethical man who genuinely
believes we [presumably, intelligence agencies] are the last great hope of America today”
(qtd. in Cohen 40-41) and remarks that he viewed his role as important to preserving the
government’s image of integrity. “1 play a public servant,” the actor remarked, “and I’m
trying to depict all government servants in key positions around the world. . . .the ones you
never read about or hear about, the ones who speak six languages and are professionals.
The ones who often exercise diplomacy, who have to follow orders, orders they don’t
always like, but who uphold the government and are heroes themselves in that sense”
(40).

Given Anderson’s role on both series, it is no wonder that Franklin’s attempts to
gain personal control of world power through the weather machine require him to “kill
Oscar.” However, the episode did not just explore technology’s relationship to the
government and global domination; the story also explored technology’s relationship to

human identity through Jaime’s interactions with Franklin’s fembots. As David Greven

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notes, “Kill Oscar” asks Jaime to explore her “intermittent fears of becoming more robot
than human” (144) since she, like the fembots, appears completely human on the outside
but is composed of machinery on the inside. What is fascinating about this three-part
episode is that Franklin’s robots are repeatedly exposed as “un-human” when they engage
in ﬁghts with Jaime,
who accidentally rips
off their faces and
exposes a circuit
board and microphone
where ﬂesh and blood
should be. This

exposure of the

 

fembots’ mechanical

Figure 13: Dr. Franklin and one of his fembots in “Kill Oscar
Part 000-” nature horriﬁes Jaime

in a way that does not horrify other 081 workers, presumably because they do not share
Jaime’s concerns over how much the human body can be comprised of machinery before
that person becomes more robotic than human.

Predictably, the narrative assuages Jaime’s fears by focusing on the element of
thought and “free will,” for the fembots derive their strength from their machinery and
cannot act without instruction from Franklin. (In fact, Franklin describes his fembots as
the perfect woman: “fully programmable, obedient, and as beautiful or as deadly as I
choose to make them,” thus completely subjecting them to patriarchal power and

control.) Even though the fembots possess greater strength than Jaime, she is able to

95

defeat them by outsmarting them and is saved several times when the control system
Franklin uses to direct his fembots malfunctions. Even more telling, however, is the
conclusion of the story which features Steve and Jaime capturing Franklin, who wishes to
die a “hero’s death” by allowing himself to drown in his compound. Despite the fact that
Franklin has used his fembots to try to destroy Jaime numerous times, the bionic woman
refuses to let Franklin die and threatens to carry him out of the compound if he will not
go willingly. While Franklin snips that Jaime is clearly “a determined woman with a
mind of [her] own—something I’ve always found ﬂawed about women,” he is eventually
grateful and reﬂects on Jaime’s humanity, concluding that contrary to his original belief,
“humans are superior to machines.” He also reassures viewers that “some of the most
wonderﬁil things in life are the ones that cannot be controlled,” a sentiment which works
to reassure viewers of Jaime’s humanness but also serves as a symbol of J aime’s triumph

over patriarchy and the men who consciously aim to perpetuate it.
Gender, Feminism and Nationalism

While the STEM approached issues of technology from the angle of national-
interest and The Bionic Woman primarily approached issues of technology on a personal
and emotional level, the series also differed in their depictions of espionage and
technology based on the gender of the protagonists. Both Steve and Jaime work for Oscar
Goldman at the OSI, but Goldman is more than just a boss to his bionic employees. He is
a friend to Austin and a father-ﬁgure to the orphaned Jaime (her parents died in a car
crash when she was a child). This means that Goldman’s relationship to Steve is one of

an equal, while his relationship to Jaime is one of protector and mentor. This relationship

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helps to explain why Steve gets away with constantly disobeying Oscar’s orders on his
spy missions and caused media writer Glen Larson to note that Austin values individual
human rights over the group goals of the OSI. “When that conﬂict exists,” he writes, “the
department will have to go along with Austin and allow him to have things his way
because he is the only six million dollar man” (Cohen 36). Jaime, as the only bionic
woman, however, is more apt to happily defer to Oscar and Steve’s directions when
engaging in her own spy work and is thus coded in traditionally gendered ways.

Also important is the fact that Jaime operates as a woman in the OSI’s male
economy of science and political power, which helped shape her destiny a8 a spy in the
ﬁrst place. It is Steve’s pleading in “The Bionic Woman” that persuades the OSI to make
Jaime bionic, as he argues that Jaime would be granted access to places Austin would
have no chance of entering as a male spy. While Oscar recognizes this as an emotional
plea, he still allows himself to be swayed, and he and Austin proceed to talk about putting
Jaime back together, making explicit the extent to which Jaime and her body are
subjected to patriarchal power, especially since Jaime’s actions and body are soon
controlled, literally and metaphorically, by Goldman and OSI scientist, Rudy Welles.

Jaime’s inability to free herself from the masculine economy of politics and
science factors heavily into the show’s ﬁnal episode. As aforementioned, “On the Run”
revolves around Jaime’s attempts to retire from the OSI. As she explains to Oscar, she is
grateful for the agency saving her life through bionics, but she now feels that her life is
consumed by “that one-hundredth of one percent of the world that deals with espionage,

security, paranoia and secrets.”

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This minor piece of life has become my whole life. Almost everything I
do everyday relates to it. I didn’t ask for this arm. . .this army called the
OSI. I didn’t even really enlist. I was drafted. .. I am tired of answering the
bugle. I am tired of looking in the mirror and seeing an OSI agent
instead of a woman.
While Goldman respects Jaime’s decision to retire, Goldman’s superiors in the
U.S. Senate will not let Jaime leave the agency, even though, as Oscar points out, she has
no contractual obligations to the OS1 and poses no security threat upon her retirement.
Goldman’s superiors
offerthe IlFlIllE Sllll'll'lEE'S
counterargument that ‘-g ,fFEHHLE

her body is in many l‘llJE 28 ‘.,' . :

PRST Pilla’llrlil TENNIS lit
PR’ESEN {tariff}! .,

ways government
property. As one

senator says, “Sommers

 

is a walking library of

our state secrets. Not Figure 14: Screen shot from The Bionic Woman’s opening
sequence.

just the ones in her

head; the ones in her bionics. Sommers is a prize that an enemy could snatch up and

examine at their leisure. How can you possibly justify putting her out on the street?” And

later, he argues, “Suppose she were kidnapped by an enemy. Do you think their

exploration of her bionics would be very pleasant for her, to say nothing of the effect that

would have on our national security?” Much like Jaime’s entrance in the spy business

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was controlled by Oscar and Steve deciding her bionic future for her, then, her attempt to
exit spying is controlled by Oscar’s male superiors.

The ways in which gender is inscribed on the bionic woman and the six million
dollar man is also signiﬁcant given the plethora of scholarship addressing the image of
the cyborg. As Anne Balsamo argues in Technologies of the Gendered Body, the human
body has traditionally been thought to belong to the realm of nature and that nature has
traditionally been conceptualized as inferior to culture and technology. With the
development of cosmetic surgery, cavity ﬁllings, pacemakers, in vitro fertilization, and as
of 2006, bionic arms, the human body has since been re-conceptualized as a “techno-
body” or a boundary ﬁgure “belonging to at least two previously incompatible systems of
meaning—the organic/natural and the technological/cultural” (5). Because gender
construction has heavily relied on the cultural reading of the “natural” body, some
feminist scholars have adopted the image of the cyborg, which blurs the boundaries of
nature and culture, in order to demonstrate its potential to usurp essentialist gender
identities rooted in the material body.

For instance, Balsamo notes that the dominant culture has consistently coded the
female body and thus women as “natural” and “reproductive,” so that “the womb
continues to signify female gender in a way that reinforces an essentialist identity for the
female body as the maternal body” (9) With the advent of technological developments
that may decouple the uterus from reproduction and even allow men, with the help of
machines, to carry babies to term, the cyborg, as the representative of such developments,
blurs not only the boundaries between nature and culture but also what it means to be

male and female. For this reason, scholars such as Donna Haraway have championed the

99

cyborg as a ﬁgure that would allow women to effectively initiate political action without
falling into the trap of identity politics, which rests on hierarchical dualisms of
naturalized identities. For Haraway, in other words, the cyborg has the potential to allow
women to bridge the divisions that exists between them, and she even goes as far as to
claim the cyborg as a post-gendered ﬁgure (150). However, as Gill Kirkup points out,
while Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto has proven useful for the cultural deconstruction of
gender, its usefulness as a tool for material change has yet to be proven (5). Scholars such
as Sue Short have also challenged Haraway’s conception of the cyborg as a post-gender
ﬁgure by demonstrating the ways in which gender identity is ﬁrmly inscribed upon it in
the popular arts. “These representations,” Short argues, “play upon familiar stereotypes of
either approved or reproved female behavior and may consequently be evaluated as
feminist cyborg stories” that “foreground a dichotomous and inherently patriarchal view
of femininity” (83). She goes on to demonstrate that science ﬁction cinema has
speciﬁcally punished (usually by death) the “synthetic female” for any demonstration of
assertiveness deemed a threat to the dominant order. In order to survive as an artiﬁcial
woman in SF cinema, Short posits, it is necessary that the cyborg conforms to approved
standards of behavior and generally defers to male authority (83).

Short’s assertion that SF cinema has ﬁrmly inscribed gender identity on the ﬁgure
of the cyborg is relevant to both the SMDM and The Bionic Woman since both Jaime
Sommers and Steve Austin were created in traditionally feminine and masculine molds
despite their bionics. Harve Bennett has said that Steve Austin was envisioned as a
traditionally masculine hero that preferred “brawn” over “brains” and notes that he found

Steve’s bionics particularly useful since they enhanced the brawn element tremendously

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(Cohen 344). Bennett has also described Steve as a “mono-syllabic, shy-with-the-ladies,
aw- shucks kind of hero,” and “a modest kind of western man amidst all of this
technology, which he used well” (344). Jaime Sommers, however, was not envisioned in
the same “mono-syllabic,” brawn-over-brains fashion even though she possessed the
same bionic powers as Steve. As Bennett notes, “We picked up tremendous things with
Lindsay that we didn’t have with Lee Majors. . .Lee’s character was quiet and reserved.
But here we had a bionic person—a woman—who could cry and tell us how she feels. So
we were able to develop much more feeling in the show” (emphasis mine) (qtd. in
Phillips and Garcia 46)

Show creators also worked to gender Jaime by diffusing her super-human
strength. Philip De Guere, a writer on the series, notes that the production team “decided
that the non-super hero approach was the way to go [on the show].” We wanted Jaime to
be “ladylike and operate her bionics discreetly,” he says, because “the conventional
wisdom at the time was that an audience wouldn’t buy a real strong, aggressive female
character” (qtd. in Phillips and Garcia 45). Kenny Johnson, the character’s creator and
show’s director, writer and executive producer, also remarks that Sommers physical
prowess was purposely tempered so as not to alienate certain sections of the viewing
public:

We wanted to create a woman who was obviously physically powerful and
yet not threatening to some guy who might want to sit down and have a
cup of tea with her So we carefully crafted it so that she never actually

hit anybody. She would pull a rug out from under them or cause

101

something to fall on them but [she] never actually slugged anyone.
(Stowe)

As these comments reveal, Jaime’s bionics complicated her existence as a woman
precisely because a woman is rarely conceived of as feminine, appealing and physically
powerful. This is also revealed in the episode that introduced Jaime, for when Steve
informs her after her surgery that her limbs and ear are now bionic, she protests: “What
did you let them do to me? I don’t want to be a freak! Why didn’t you just let me
die?” Such comments are indicative of the fear and loathing such a cyborg identity
entails when set against conventional notions of gender, as Sommers is clearly disturbed
by her bionic identity and the “manner in which its undercuts her femininity and
desirability” (White 181). In fact, in one segment of “The Bionic Woman,” Jaime tells
Steve that she understands if he no longer ﬁnds her sexually attractive since he knows her
legs are not “really her legs” at all. Of course, Steve turns the table on Jaime saying that
his legs are not really his legs either, but while his response succeeds in abating Jaime’s
worries, his remark fails to understand the ways in which Jaime’s bionics complicate her
gendered identity precisely because she is a woman.

Interestingly, the contradiction between Jaime’s bionics and her femininity are
also present in the series’ product tie-ins, many of which emphasized the importance of
the bionic woman’s conventional beauty rather than her strength, which was a central
element of the Steve Austin action-ﬁgure. As Rod Rehn illustrates, the Kenner toy
company produced a Steve Austin doll that was thirteen inches tall and wore a red
NASA-style jumpsuit and red sneakers. Owners could peer through a hole in the back of

his head to see out of Steve’s bionic eye—a wide-angle telescopic lens—and his right

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arm featured roll-back rubber "skin" that revealed removable bionic parts. By hitting a
button in the back (after twisting his head to the right), Steve's bionic arm could lift
objects weighing up to two pounds, and the doll had several accessories, including three
bionic arms that owners could interchange with the original. The Laser Arm shot a red
light beam; the Neutralizer Ann did karate chops and had a sonic stun gun; while the
Oxygen Supply Arm had a retractable oxygen mask that ﬁt in a hidden compartment.
Kenner’s Jaime Sommers action-ﬁgure also featured the character’s bionic
elements: if one turned the head from side to side, a ping sound could be heard to
represent Jaime’s bionic hearing, and panels in the doll’s thighs could be removed to
reveal bionic parts, while her jeans had lift-off patches that allowed users access to her
circuits. However, the accessories that came with the doll focused on Jaime’s role as a
conventionally attractive woman and girlfriend rather than her role as a woman with
superhuman strength. The ﬁgure had comb-able blonde hair, came with a vinyl Mission
Purse that contained a wallet, money, credit cards, a mission assignment, a snapshot of
Steve, a comb, a brush, and cosmetic case with make-up (Rehn). Consumers could also
purchase the Bionic Woman Styling Boutique, which came with an eleven-inch tall bust
of Jaime and a make-up tray with cosmetics, comb, brush, curlers and ribbons, or they
could select from a range of fashion clothes for the ﬁgure, including several evening
gowns. An alternative version of the bionic hair salon was also manufactured and
featured a reclining salon chair, photo of Steve, hair dryer, comb, brush, and sun lamp,
along with a cable to connect Jaime’s arm to a bionic station that would check her Vitals

and create an EKG readout (SWFigures.com)'5.

103

As the product tie-ins suggest, then, The Bionic Woman creators and marketers
found themselves struggling to balance Jaime’s bionic powers with her femininity which
they believed made Sommers a desirable ﬁgure for young, female consumers. However,
this tension was also exacerbated by the domestic politics circulating during the late
19708, which forced the series to negotiate second-wave feminism and anti-feminism in
its narratives. In many ways, the show embraced much of the rhetoric of feminism, as
evidenced by the many Bionic Woman episodes that feature Jaime embracing many of the
movement’s tenets. During “Bionic Beauty,” for example, Jaime must go undercover as
Miss California in order to inﬁltrate the Miss U.S.A. contest, whose directors attempt to
transport a secret device to Paris in the pageant winner’s rhinestone staff. During the
swimsuit portion of the competition, Jaime remarks that she feels like a side of beef,
foreshadowing the real-life protesters of the 1978 pageant who likened the competition to
animals being judged at the county fair. Other episodes feature Jaime championing the
OSI secretaries who feel underappreciated by their bosses, poking fun at the Virginia
Slims motto, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” and in the SMDM episode that ﬁrst
introduced viewers to Jaime, the character demands to decide for herself whether to
accept the consequences and dangers of working for the OSI, rather than letting Steve
and the government decide for her.

Likewise, depending upon their knowledge of Wagner, fans may have read the
actress and hence Sommers, as a powerful, feminist ﬁgure because of Wagner’s success
in negotiating her Bionic Woman contract with Universal Studios. As was well-publicized
at the time, Universal had decided not to renew Wagner’s $50,000-a-year contract in

1975 because although she was considered "promising," her credits included only a few

104

mixed-review ﬁlms and the studio considered her to be “too tall, too skinny, too ﬂat-
chested, too unglamorous” (qtd. in Cohen 77). When Wagner landed the guest
appearance role on The Six Million Dollar Man and caused an avalanche of mail to pour
into ABC, the actress and her agent found themselves in an advantageous position to
negotiate a new contract and together landed Wagner $500,000 a year for ﬁve years, a
guarantee of one ﬁlm role annually, and 12.5% of the take from sales of Bionic dolls, t-
shirts and other spinoffs, which at the time were speculated to produce as much as $2
million (“The $500,000 Timex”). Given that Lee Majors’ own contract paid him a “mere
$300,000” for an already popular series and included no royalties for spinoffs, Wagner’s
contract was touted as a signiﬁcant feat, and Lindsay became the highest paid actor in
dramatic television, causing Lee Majors to grouse that “the $500,000 woman was "a
bionic rip-off” (“The $500,000 Timex”).

Jaime Sommers was also one of the ﬁrst (if not the ﬁrst) professional female spies
on television to work alone on missions rather than under the protective wing of a male
partner, and while Jaime, like Steve, is not enthralled with the idea of espionage, she
agrees to work for the OSI in order to express her gratitude for saving her life through
bionics. As aforementioned, this plot device served to distance both the SMDM and The
Bionic Woman from the Watergate scandal, but it also suggested that women were just as
capable as men of sacriﬁcing their personal lives and physical safety in order to serve the
American government. Thus, Jaime’s decision to spy for the OSI helped position her
within the realm of patriot traditionally reserved for men who engage in physically

dangerous service to their country.

105

However, those few scholars addressing the series argue that Jaime Sommers is
best read as a ﬁgure that negotiated the tension between feminism and anti-feminism
rather than as one that supported second-wave feminism entirely. Susan Douglas
discusses The Bionic Woman in the context of Charlie’s Angels, The Flying Nun and
Wonder Woman, noting that all four television series represented “new exemplars of the
liberated woman” but featured them only “in comic book settings that could never be
mistaken for reality” (218). Their power, Douglas writes, “had to be kept secret, as the
women who possessed it masqueraded as regular women—a8 women with absolutely no
power at all” (218). And precisely because they possessed great strength, it was critical
that these women be hyperfeminized and achieve their power, not through their own
devices, but “through the wizardry of special effects” or through technology “designed
and controlled by men” (217-218).

While Douglas goes on to remark that Lindsay Wagner represented a
conventionally beautiful woman, she admits that The Bionic Woman was the least kitschy
of the four shows because she “didn’t have a costume, was not constantly seen in bikinis
or wet t-shirts, and didn’t giggle all the time” (218). Likewise, Sherrie Inness remarks
that The Bionic Woman offered women viewers a potentially powerful role model as she
possessed superior physical strength and was one of the ﬁrst action-adventure heroines to
work alone, but Inness sees Jaime Sommers as primarily negotiating anti-feminism and
feminism since the show “helped to reafﬁrm that women, while more capable than
generally given credit for, were still less competent than men” (32). As she speciﬁcally
points out, Jaime is depicted as an inferior (and less expensive) version of the six million

dollar man, and the series, like Charlie ’3 Angels, placed a strong emphasis on the

106

importance of femininity and sex appeal to diffuse the threat posed by second wave
feminism (32). This can be seen in the show’s publicity material as well, including a
1976 TV Guide issue that featured Wagner on the cover and claimed that she was
possibly the most beautiful woman on television.

It is important to recognize, too, that many different kinds of feminism were
circulating during the 19708, including difference feminism, which, as is more thoroughly
explained in the next chapter, focused on the “natural” feminine attributes of women and
encouraged society to recognize the ways they complimented the “natural” masculine
attributes of men. Put very simplistically, cultural or radical feminists argued that women
ought to reject men and patriarchy altogether, with some encouraging women to form
unique, lesbian, women’s cultures. Unlike radical feminists, liberal feminists sought to
work within the parameters of patriarchal society and focused on increasing women’s
access to education, high-paying jobs, and other opportunities in order to ensure equality
with men, while Marxist-socialist feminists called for the abolishment of capitalism in
order to rob patriarchy of its economic power.

Given the variety of feminist perspectives during the 19708, it is plausible to
read The Bionic Woman as a testing ground for at least a few different types of feminism.
For instance, the show emphasizes the emotional sensitivity Jaime displays at work arid
in her personal life, suggesting, much like difference feminists, that women have
something unique, yet equally valuable, to contribute to the world. However, the show
seems to primarily focus on the angst of liberal feminism in that Jaime continually strives
and struggles to succeed in the male economy of politics and science even though she

possess the strength (both literally and ﬁguratively) to “smash the whole thing.” In this

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sense, then, The Bionic Woman rejects notions of 19708 radical feminism, as Sommers
chooses to work within a patriarchal system in order to allow women greater opportunity
within it and is involved in romantic relationships with Steve, and later, with another
man, throughout the series’ rim. In terms of the show’s audience, which appears to have
been mostly white, middle-class, young, and female, this approach to second-wave
feminism may have been the most-appealing for the show’s creators to adopt, as it
allowed them to cater to that demographic’s realistic hopes of entering the system,
especially in terms of jobs formerly reserved for men, and who were probably not ready
to eschew all accoutrements of femininity or their desire for sexual relationships with
men.

This assertion is supported by at least some viewers comments posted on The
Bionic Woman forum of JumptheShark.com, a website that allows viewers to express
their opinions about the quality of particular shows. In one post, a viewer praises the
combination of Jaime’s beauty and strength and the way the mix inﬂuenced her as a
young girl. “Jaime Stunmers [sic] was my IDOL when I was young!,” the fan writes. “I
had long, blonde hair like her and I wanted to look exactly like her We had a
wooded area behind our house with a good share of fallen, rotted trees, and me, my
brother, and our ﬁiends would go out there and play Super Heroes... I was always Jaime,
my friend had to be Wonder Woman (spare me... what a gay costume! Jaime would
NEVER wear ridiculous trash like that!).” And later, the fan writes, “Remember the part
in the intro where Jaime is squeezing the tennis ball and it pops in her hand and she looks
smprised? I used to love to do that bit with the rotten branches, except when they

crumbled, instead of looking shocked, I would always look down knowingly at my hand

108

and smile slyly and nod my head up and down... (‘yeah that's right... I'm bionic ..... ’)”
(“The Bionic Woman Forum”).

Other viewers have praised the series for featuring a strong character who was
not afraid to be vulnerable, hurt, or feminine. One fan on JumptheShark.com writes that
she enjoyed Jaime because she would be happier in “macramé class than saving the world
from evil and calamity.” The fan also notes that he/she appreciated the fact Jaime
sometimes took advantage of her bionic powers for “practical things, like when she didn't

9’”

have enough time before a date and when she would use her “special speed and
strength to do otherwise monotonous household chores like scrubbing the ﬂoor, ironing,
or cooking” (“The Bionic Woman Forum”). This comment suggests that the show was
enjoyable because it challenged the idea that women had to eschew men or take on
daunting careers that left no time for a personal life and suggested that women needn’t be
“superwomen” to be fulﬁlled in life.

Yet another fan enjoyed the show because it suggested that women could be
equal to men in the professional realm. More speciﬁcally, the fan claims that The Bionic
Woman was “ground-breaking as a role model for young girls. The older I get, the more I
appreciate why it held such fascination for me at such an impressionable age, in a decade
when women's roles were changing so dramatically. Forget Charlie 's Angels and Wonder
Woman, who followed in The Bionic Woman 's footsteps; this show offered a real
character young girls could dream of being like who was just as powerful as her male

counterpart.” While another expresses that what made the show great was that it featured

a science-ﬁction, superhuman spy, in vulnerable positions where she “gets injured and

109

cries.” “How often do you see that happen today?” the fan asks. (“The Bionic Woman
Forum”)
Conclusion

Perhaps because of its ability to blend science ﬁction with espionage, The Bionic
Woman and the SMDM proved popular with viewers at a time when space captivated the
public imagination. The SMDM ran for ﬁve seasons on ABC while The Bionic Woman
ran for two before being picked up by NBC in September of 1977 for a ﬁnal season.
According to Brooks and Marsh, SMDM ranked ninth in the ratings for the 1975-1976
season and pulled a 24.2 rating in 1976-77 to rank seventh overall (1251-1252). During
its ﬁrst season, The Bionic Woman achieved a 24.9 rating to rank ﬁfth in the overall
ratings, four places ahead of The Six Million Dollar Man, and higher than Happy Days;
M *A *S*H*; Welcome Back, Kotter; The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Kojack; and The
Jeffersons (Brook and Marsh 1251). While the series fell to fourteenth in the ratings in
its second season, ranking seven places below its parent show, The Bionic Woman
nonetheless pulled a 22.4 rating (Brooks and Marsh 1252).

Precisely because of its strong ﬁrst and second season ﬁnishes, the show creators
were stunned when ABC announced that they were canceling The Bionic Woman. “We
were pulling a 30 share when ABC cancelled us,” says James Parriott. “ABC felt that The
Bionic Woman was slipping, and their researcher told them to drop the show while it’s
still hot and get something else because [the show] is gonna fail next season” (qtd. in
Phillips and Garcia 49). The show managed a reprieve by moving to NBC, but it also
lost its crossover appearances of Steve Austin on The Bionic Woman and Jaime on the

SMDM, which was only possible when both series aired on the same network. As a

110

result, the shows lost the potential that Steve and Jaime might restart their love affair,
which contributed to the shows’ ultimate demise.
When it looked clear The Bionic Woman wouldn’t be picked up for a fourth
season, Lindsay Wagner asked Steven de Souza to write a series ﬁnale.
She told me over lunch, “I feel Jaime Sommers has never been
comfortable as a tool of the government. She’s basically a peace-loving
person, and she’s only doing it because she’s grateful the OSI saved her
life. What would happen if they called her one evening and told her she
had to be airborne to Russia that night. . .and she doesn’t want to do it
anymore?” So I wrote a story that really brought that to the fore. (qtd in
Phillips and Garcia 49).

De Souza found the script to perfectly mirror Wagner’s real life situation: “Lindsay who

was tired of doing a network show, played Jaime Sommers, who was tired of being a

spy” (49).

The legacy of Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers continues, however. In 2004, the
pair were jointly ranked number nineteen in TV Guide ’s list of the 25 Greatest Sci-Fi
Legends, and according to NBC press releases in January 2007, the network is creating a
pilot for a new version of The Bionic Woman. While NBC does not hold the rights to the
SMDM, it makes more sense to resurrect The Bionic Woman rather than the SMDM
because it was not nearly as grounded in the space-race culture of the late 19708 and
instead focused more on the “timeless” dilemmas of humans’ relationship with
technology. The show also promoted women’s role in espionage as one that policed the

humanity and ethics of clandestine agencies rather than as one that demonstrated the

111

brawn of the nation. This seems particularly appropriate in the quagmire of America’s
war in Iraq and the negative publicity and questionable ethics surrounding its treatment of
prisoners abroad. Interestingly, the role of women in espionage as ethical gate keepers
also continued into the 19808, but in one of that decade’s most popular spy series, the role
was not played by an independent, female, professional spy, but rather by a suburban

mom operating as an amateur in Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

112

The 19808

The Suburban Spy and the Rise of the New Right: Scarecrow and Mrs. King

“So if I work here, does that mean that I work with you? I mean that’s what you do, isn’t it? You have
partners? But you know I might need some special training; I’m not sure I have the right skills. I mean I
type; I don’t shoot, you know. But 1 do love this area. Oh, I’m crazy about it. All the fresh vegetables come
here and besides that, the boys’ dentist is right around the block. So what I could do is, I could drop them
off at the dentist, then I could go into spy headquarters, and then I could pick up a fresh melon all at the
same time.”--Amanda to Lee in the pilot episode, “The First Time”

”No, this is not a series about a straw man who falls in love with a lady farmer. The premise here is even
less likely. Scarecrow is the code name for a square-jawed chap named Lee Stetson (Bruce Boxleitner),
who is, to put it bluntly, a spy. He works for a CIA-type outﬁt called the Agency. Amanda King (Kate

Jackson) is a pretty and recently divorced housewife, who lives with her two sons and her mother (Beverly
Garland). Now, by a series of coincidences that occur only in the fevered minds of Hollywood
scriptwriters, Scarecrow has to get rid of a package containing vital information. Naturally, he hands it over
to Mrs. King, a woman he's never met and who could be a Russian spy, for all he knows. Well, maybe she
reminds him of an actress he once saw in Charlie’s Angels. Anyway, it looks as though the dashing
operative will wind up working with the fetching housewife, who turns out to be pretty good at lurking.
Maybe she watched Charlie 's Angels, too?

--Text promoting the series premiere in TV Guide, Sept. 10, 1983.

President Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory and the rising prominence of the
New Right led television executives to reconsider their programming development during
the early 19808. Scott Siegler, Vice President of Dramatic Programming at CBS, for
instance, believed that Reagan’s victory indicated that America was “moving to the
right,” that viewers would become “more anti-foreign” and “tolerant of the U.S.
protecting its interests abroad,” and thus tried to capitalize on the political shift by
commissioning two pilot scripts for shows revolving around the CIA and its efforts to
ﬁght Soviet might’6 (qtd. in Gitlin 221). In 1981, ABC also tried to tap into the nation’s
political mood by dropping the show American Dream in order to run Today’s FBI and
an Aaron Spelling program called Strike Force. Both were traditional law-and-order
programs that stressed the comforts afforded by a legalized, national institute looking

after its citizens. According to the network’s entertainment president, Tony

113

Thomopoulos, both Today’s FBI and Strike F orce were the network’s attempt to reﬂect
the “spirit” of Americans, who, he believed, were looking to restore their faith in
organizations that could “bring this country back to some basic national values” (qtd. in
Gitlin 222), presumably because events such as Watergate, Vietnam and the CIA’s
involvement in Latin America had worn away citizens’ faith in government.

In 1981, prominent New Right members, Rev. Donald Wildmon, Rev. Jerry
Farwell, Sen. Jeremiah Denton and Phyllis Schaﬂy, also attempted to inﬂuence
television’s direction by founding the Coalition for Better Television (CBTV). During
the month of February, the coalition announced that it would hire 4000 monitors to track
the prime-time schedule for signs of skin scenes, sexual innuendo, implied sexual
intercourse, profanity and violence and would then tally the results to see which sponsor
aired the most commercials during the offending episodes and organize a boycott against
that product/company (251). The goal of the CBTV was to pressure the networks into
“cleaning up” their programs by inciting panic amongst the advertisers that supplied their
revenue. Their tactics succeeded in causing a small percentage of companies to withdraw
their support from questionable episodes on all three networks, but because network time
is a seller’s market, the move ultimately failed to have a major effect, and the CBTV
eventually called off the boycott. But while the New Right’s attempts to use a boycott in
order to inﬂuence television content ultimately failed, according to Todd Gitlin, the move
helped to convince networks that “the popular pendulum was swinging away” from
shows exploring issues of homosexuality and away from the “jiggle” genre, which
included shows such as Charlie ’s Angels and Three’s Company and focused on viewer

titillation through images of the female body (263).

114

Perhaps no other actress embodies the networks’ decision to move away from
overt sexuality, violence and “jiggle” in order to focus on themes more acceptable to the
dominant ideologies of the New Right era than Kate Jackson. During the late seventies,
Jackson played Sabrina Duncan on Charlie’s Angels, which featured her, alongside
Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith, kicking and karate-chopping enemies while wearing
highly-sexualized clothing. Undoubtedly, the show helped launch Jackson’s career by
drawing 23 million viewer households and 18,000 pieces of fan mail each week (“Kate
Jackson’s Tritunph”), but despite the show’s popularity, the actress decided to leave after
three seasons to pursue other projects, citing the show’s “ﬂuff” and focus on “T and A”
as contributing to her decision (Hicks). The move proved risky for Jackson’s career, as
the actress spent the ﬁrst few years of the eighties working on lukewarm ﬁlms, but by
1983, she had returned to stardom by landing the role of housewife-turned-spy, Amanda
King, on the series Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

Like many other spy series of the era, Scarecrow and Mrs. King reﬂected the
inﬂuence of New Right politics on television content, for one of the core ways in which
the New Right differed from the Old Right was that it considered the patriarchal family
as the sacred unit of American society and thus promoted public policies in both the
legislature and the media which stressed the importance of traditional family values,
marriage, childbirth, heterosexuality and the role of the husband as a household head. In
order to reﬂect the momentum of the New Right in the United States at the time, many
spy television creators modiﬁed some of the genre’s conventions in an attempt to provide
less objectionable content for advertisers interested in aligning themselves with the status

quo. Most notably, 19808 spy shows downplayed violence and moved away from their

115

celebrations of materialistic consumption, high fashion and the playboy lifestyle
popularized in the sixties and instead moved towards plots that celebrated more
traditional values such as the importance of family and “justice for all.” To cite just three
examples, Airwolf 8 premise revolved around Stringfellow Hawke refusing to accept a
million dollar reward in exchange for recovering a high-tech helicopter for an agency
known as The Firm. However, he does agree to perform the task in addition to
subsequent missions in exchange for the government recovering his brother or his
brother’s remains from Vietnam. CBS’ The Equalizer featured Robert McCall as an
assassin for the CIA who comes to regret his profession and thus retires from the agency
in order to work, free of charge, for the innocent and downtrodden, while MacGyver
featured its main character employing scientiﬁc ingenuity to escape dangerous situations
and often employed non-violent storylines that delivered moral lessons”. Most spy shows
also stayed clear from the elements of spoof and camp popular in the genre one and two
decades prior, with many shows taking a more traditional approach to gender instead.
Scarecrow and Mrs. King exhibited many of these same characteristics by
making its protagonist a suburban mom trying to support her two boys after a recent
divorce through part-time spy work for The Agency; focusing on the ways Amanda’s
nurturing and non-violent attributes contributed to her success as an undercover agent;
and exploring her romantic desires for her partner, Lee Stetson (a.k.a. Scarecrow).
However, CBS’s decision to develop a program about a suburban housewife-turned-spy
probably had to do with the network’s target audience as much as it did the rise in New
Right politics. More speciﬁcally, CBS’s audience has always been disproportionately

older and more rural since the network signed up more afﬁliates in the early days of

116

television and has always had more afﬁliates in smaller markets. As a result, their
audience differs slightly from ABC in particular, which was the third network to emerge
and thus had a harder time signing up afﬁliates in the small markets, which often carried
just one to two stations before the introduction of cable. ABC’s late entry meant that the
network had to target its shows at a younger demographic since it reasoned it would be
difﬁcult to woo older viewers accustomed to watching CBS and NBC but relatively easy
to attract and retain younger ones.

Naturally, CBS’s market has directly impacted its programming choices over the
decades. In the early 19808, CBS programmer Herman Keld remarked that his network
has never done well airing “ABC-type programs” like Three ’s Company or Charlie ’5
Angels, which he described as “sophisticated, slick and big-city” (qtd. in Gitlin 57),
thereby suggesting that CBS shows are more likely to succeed when they are aimed at its
slightly older, rural and suburban audience. During the 19808, the older element of CBS’s
market suited the network particularly well, however, because while the most lucrative
viewers for advertisers during the 19708’ were 18-49 year-olds, by 1980, one-third of
television’s average prime-time audience was over ﬁfty and had more disposable income
than they did one decade prior. Therefore, networks began targeting 25-54, and even 25-
64 year-olds, of which CBS had the largest share. (Gitlin 56-62) This industry trend helps
explain why Scarecrow and Mrs. King may have chosen an actress in her mid-thirties as
the series’ protagonist; focused on the “older” themes of motherhood, marriage and
divorce; included the character of Amanda’s widowed mother played by Beverly
Garland; and set many of its plots in the suburbs of Washington DC. rather than the city

itself.

117

The promotional materials for Scarecrow and Mrs. King also indicate that while the
show may have been aimed at an older, more suburban or rural demographic, it was also
targeted at women. Many of the advertisements for the show which appeared in

After the kids are off to
school and before the trip

to the orthodontist,
‘ , Kate Jackson will have

 
  
  
 
 
 
    

r 0'" SEt'ngT\ BOXleim'

a little help
with his

Fig 15: SMK advertisement featured in TV Guide (1983).
Available on-line at http://www.kate-jackson.com/smktvads.htm

TV Guide, for instance, picture both Lee and Amanda, but the copy primarily focuses on
Amanda through taglines such as “Amanda Mistaken for Princess Marked for Murder,”
“Amanda Exposed in Memoirs,” “Amanda the Bait to Trap a Traitor,” “Amanda’s Morn
an Unsuspecting Target” and “Housewife Betrays Her Country?” Ads that attempted to
introduce the show to viewers also played heavily on the bored-housewife-seeking-
adventure theme (see Figs. 15, 16, and 17), while later ads centred on the romantic
elements of the show, including one that features a photo of Lee and Amanda in a heart-
shaped frame entitled “Do You Take This Spy?” and an ad that features an image of the
pair dancing that reads “Amanda and Lee Have to Work Very Closely to Save a

Kidnapped Courier” (Fig. 18).

118

While the series underwent several changes within its ﬁrst season due to “delays,
script hassles and a general deterioration of working conditions” that led executive
producers Brad Buckner and Eugenia Ross-Lemming to leave the show and Juanita

Bartlett, producer of The Rockford

FROM THE FR‘IING PANI'. .
INTO THE cnossrmat

She'sahwsewltemooudmemcm
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Files, to join the Scarecrow team in

 
    

their stead (Hicks), the marketing and

development of Scarecrow and Mrs.
. . x,

 

King was ultimately successful. The
series ran from 1983-1987, making it
one of the longest running spy
programs of the decade. During its
ﬁrst three seasons, the show ranked
20th, 22nd, and 28‘h in the Nielsen’s
respectively (Brooks and Marsh , ,
1254-55) and was nominated for an s mraw
Am:

Emmy in cinematography, two
mm WMWMCWhMm

Emmys in costuming, and won the
Fig 16. SMK advertisement featured in TV Guide
1986 Emmy for Outstanding (Sept. 10, 1983). Available on-Iine at http://www.kate-
jackson.com/smktvads.htm
Achievement in Music Composition
for a Series. Kate Jackson was also nominated for the 1985 Golden Globe Award for
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series — Drama, although Angela Lansbury took

home the award for her work on Murder, She Wrole, another program featuring an older

protagonist solving crimes. When the show was ﬁnally cancelled in its fourth season due

119

       

 

to a sharp drop in ratings and Kate Jackson’s battle with breast cancer, Scarecrow and
Mrs. King found an extended life when reruns of the series were broadcast on both
Lifetime and PAX, and even now, twenty years later, the series enjoys a strong fan
following. Sizeable bodies of fan ﬁction and numerous fan websites abound in
cyberspace,‘8 and organized fan events, such as a 20'h anniversary celebration of the
series in North Hollywood and annual viewing parties aimed at regional fans, continue to

take place.

       
   

Analyzing

HOUSEWIFE BETMYS

HEB COUNTRY?

An agency leak
dmm.mrs

Nationalism
and Gender in
SMK

Given
Scarecrow and
Mrs. King '3
appeal to

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Fig. 17 SMK advertisement featured in TV Guide. Available on-line at women the rest
http://www.kate-jackson.com/smktvads.htm ’

of this chapter explores the way the series encoded messages regarding gender during a
time when the American nation-state was dominated by the rise of the New Right and
feminist backlash politics, while simultaneously witnessing an increase in divorce rates
and the number of women engaging in paid labor. The last section of this chapter also

investigates the ways that viewers may have adopted negotiated or even oppositional

120

viewing stances in regards to the messages encoded by the narrative itself. As discussed
in the introduction of this book, such an analysis rests on the idea that television creators
consciously work to create shows that adopt positions in-line with perceived mainstream
ideologies and avoid topics that could evoke strong controversy and lead to sponsors
retracting their advertising dollars. However, regardless of how a show may encode
mainstream ideologies, viewers can decode messages in negotiated and oppositional
ways and produce their own meanings from a text, and thus, as John Fiske notes,
“popular culture items have no single deﬁned meaning and present a bank of rich

semiotics” (5).

  
 
 
   
 
    

Encoding

Amanda and Lee _
have to work —g—New R1 1“

very closely Politics
t0 save a

kidnapwd While no
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voice

existed for

 

the New
Right
during the
Fi lg 18: SMK advertisement featured' In TV Guide. 19805, the
Available on-line at http: //www. hate jM" e Mm
term

generally refers to a network of people and organizations committed to social and ﬁscal

conservatism, including Jessie Helms, Orin Hatch, Phyllis Schaﬂy, Jack Kemp, The

121

Heritage Foundation, The Conservative Caucus, and groups working against abortion,
gay rights and pornography. Many of the New Right’s policies had been gaining
momentum since the early 1970s and were concerned with the family unit, which it
viewed as the basic and most sacred unit of the republic. Because many social
conservatives of the New Right envisioned gender as a hierarchical ordering decreed by
scripture, with God and Christ at the top, followed by men and then women, they more
speciﬁcally believed that the nation’s health depended upon the existence of strong
families, which consisted of women who served their families through nurturance,
altruism and self-sacriﬁce within the home, while men served as breadwinners and
decision makers (Klatch 676-77). These gender assignments were seen as necessary and
complimentary, and thus the New Right was in many ways at odds with the second-wave
feminist movement. For instance, both feminists and social conservatives understood
women as “one man away from welfare,” but feminists sought to ensure women’s
economic security through paid labor, while women such as Phyllis Schaﬂy believed it
was men’s responsibility to ﬁnancially provide for women and tried to ensure women’s
rights and entitlements within the conﬁnes of marriage. (In fact, this logic guided
Schaﬂy’s opposition to the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment, as she believed the
ERA would, in part, free men from their responsibility of providing alimony for women
in the event of a divorce.)

The image of the social and ﬁscal politics of The New Right have been most
closely identiﬁed with white, middle-class Americans, so given that suburban, middle-
class women were the very audience at which CBS was directing Scarecrow and Mrs.

King, it is unsurprising that many of the New Right’s politics of difference feminism are

122

comfortably encoded in the series’ narrative, images, and characters, especially as the
show features a mother-tumed-spy as its protagonist, suggests that women who exhibit
the feminine traits of domesticity, self-sacriﬁce and nurturance can contribute to the
nation’s prowess, while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of traditional
masculinity to the nation-state through the character of Lee Stetson, Amanda’s partner,
on the show.

In fact, the emphasis on difference feminism comes as early as the show’s
opening sequence, which emphasizes King’s place in the domestic sphere and Lee’s
place in the public one. In season one, this title sequence opens with shots of the Capitol,
the Jefferson Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial to alert viewers to the show’s
location. A picture of Amanda’s home, complete with a white fence and well-groomed
lawn, is then ﬂashed across the screen, serving to emphasize the juxtaposition of
Amanda’s suburban, domestic existence with the urban, political sphere of Washington
DC. and to mark her as an outsider of it. Several shots of Amanda then follow which
depict her kissing her son goodbye in the morning, vacuuming her boys’ messy room,
drying her sons’ wet shoes in the oven, assembling a children’s toy, dressing and kissing
her sons in the family room, and blow-drying a crystal glass. The music to which these
images are set is comprised of peppy, high notes emphasized by strings and xylophones.
However, this music quickly changes when the images of Lee Stetson are shown in the
next visual sequence, as it shifts to a slower and more dramatic tune that employs
cymbals and deep horns that signal the great power and dangerous activity of the male
lead. Unlike those of Amanda, the images of Stetson all feature him in public, urban

areas. He is shown running down a ﬁre escape, running across the lawn near the

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Washington monument, kicking an enemy while inside a helicopter, running with a
package at a train station, and snooping around dark buildings with a ﬂashlight and
revolver. The title sequence then shifts back to the higher, faster music and matches it
with an image of Amanda’s mother in her kitchen wearing an apron, Lee’s boss, Billy
Melrose, standing outside a storage room at The Agency, and then returns to the deeper
music to show an image of Lee and Amanda’s colleague, Francine Desmond, reading a
newspaper in The Agency’s hallway and a shot of King’s two children. The remaining
title sequence shots are of both Lee and Amanda that feature Lee dragging Amanda by
the hand, driving and ﬂying her away from danger, and laughing at her when she slips
and falls with a bag of groceries on a rainy street. Through the use of image and music,
then, the show constructs Amanda as a mother and housewife operating in a safe,
suburban home, and depicts Lee as a serious, government agent often on the run from
dangerous criminals in Washington DC. Thus, within the ﬁrst minute of the series, the
show works to emphasize the importance of traditional gender roles to the text itself.
Of course, these featured dichotomies of urban and suburban, masculine and
feminine, active and passive, non-domestic and domestic are further upheld in the show’s
narrative. Lee as a selﬁsh bachelor living in a high-rise ﬂat, who never grocery shops,
cleans his apartment, or thinks about home décor, while Amanda is constructed as a
housewife who takes pride in both her home and sons. Class differences also arise on the
show as Amanda is marked as a white, middle-class woman through her home, wood-
panelled station wagon, and wardrobe, which primarily consists of jeans, sneakers, and
over-sized sweaters—all of which suggest that she spends her resources on her family

instead of herself. Lee, on the other hand, drives a high-end sports car and is often shown

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wearing suits and tuxedos, suggesting that he ranks higher than Amanda in both income
and social status.

These binaries, though sometimes rigid, are essential to the show because many of
its comedic elements are derived from the fact that Lee and Amanda come from very
different worlds but are nonetheless forced to work together on espionage-related
assignments. Take, for instance, “To Catch a Mongoose,” which features Lee and
Amanda interrogating one of Amanda’s old high-school friends, whom The Agency
believes is now an international assassin. In order to extract a confession, Lee decides to
use both physical force and a good cop-bad cop routine to get Conrad to confess his
crimes, but in Amanda’s role as the good cop, she essentially over-mothers Conrad,
soothing his every worry and frustrating Lee to the point that he leaves the room and
reluctantly allows Amanda to “interrogate” the suspect. Using kindness, compassion, and
the tactic of “just talking to him,” Amanda does what trained operatives cannot: she gets
Conrad to open up, admit that he is not the Mongoose, and help The Agency track and
then capture the real international assassin. This scene is satisfying for many female
viewers since Amanda’s skills as a nurturer and caretaker are more effective in this
espionage-related case than the skills Lee has gained over the years in professional
interrogation training.

As episodes like “To Catch a Mongoose” illustrate, rather than reinforcing the
cultural status quo which celebrates the masculine over the feminine, in many ways, SMK
aligned itself with New Right politics by working to esteem traditionally feminine roles
and, ironically, emphasizing their importance to government intelligence. Consider, for

instance, the plot lines of several episodes from seasons one and two. In “The First

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Time,” the fact that Amanda’s mother watches the Colonial Cookery show and writes
down its recipes allows Amanda to realize that the Russians are sending codes
transmitted via those recipes, and thus, helps to uncover a KGB spy ring operating in
DC. In “The ACM Kid,” Amanda takes a teenage computer genius into her home after
his parents have been kidnapped, and it is her motherly love for the teen that eventually
helps him admit that his parents are being held captive until he agrees to break into a
secure government server. In “Charity Begins at Home,” Amanda’s service as the
refreshment coordinator at a high-security charity event allows The Agency to monitor
suspected criminals, while her work for an environmental group in “Vigilante Mothers”
allows The Agency access to a chemical weapons plant. “There Goes the Neighborhood”
features the government needing to send a pair of operatives to pose as husband and wife
in a suburban neighborhood in order to investigate Connie Beth Cosmetics, a company
thought to be linked to a Central American arms smuggling ring. Because most of the
Agency’s Operatives are unmarried urbanites, Amanda is chosen for the assignment and
helps Lee avoid mistakes that would blow their cover. For example, Amanda is put in
charge of decorating their home to look middle-class and suburban, something at which
Lee would undoubtedly fail. Likewise, when Lee announces his plan to go door-to-door
to introduce himself to the neighbors and secretly begin his investigation, Amanda
quickly explains that his behavior would raise suspicion. In the suburbs, she informs him,
the neighbors come to your house to welcome you to the area, and she suggests that they
make daiquiris and hors d’oeuvres to ingratiate themselves. Of course, Amanda is right,
and her food along with her friendly charm work so well that two neighborhood women

eventually get a job for Amanda selling Connie Beth products, which helps Lee and

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Amanda discover that the company is hiding weapons parts inside the hair dryers, curling
irons and larger appliances the women unwittingly send to their clients overseas.

These plot lines focused on the threat of communist penetration of the US
government dining a time when the Cold War was turning warm again”, but they also
explored the fear that a more subtle threat was penetrating American domestic life. As
Rosalind Pollack Petchesky helps illustrate, this theme may reﬂect the rising popularity
of the New Right movement, which she characterizes as a reaction against sexual
liberation and its threat to the patriarchal family form. More speciﬁcally, the author
argues that extreme right-wing movements are typically the expression of “preservist”
impulses of social groups who feel their way of life is being threatened. Quoting from
Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, she goes on to explain that “desperately preservist
movements require an aggressively moralistic stance. . .There needs to be invoked some
system of good and evil that transcends the political or social process and freezes it”
(211), yet that “system of good and evil is not arbitrary; it is the product of a particular
historical moment and a conjunction of the social and material forces that bring speciﬁc
social conﬂicts to the fore” (Petchesky 211).

In the early to mid-19803, the New Right’s pro-family movement worked to
preserve, if not make legally mandatory, a patriarchal family system and can be
understood as stemming from the fact that such families had almost ceased to exist in the
United States. For instance, by 1975, husband-wife families with two or more children in
which only the man worked outside the home comprised just 13.5 % of all husband and
wife families. By 1977, three-fourths of married women were working outside of the

home, with 50% being the mothers of young children, while the number of female-

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headed households in the U.S. had risen to one in seven families, one in three marriages
ended in divorce, and over one million households consisted of unmarried couples
(Petchesky 235). Just as the embodiment of absolute evil was the threat of international
communism and labor movements in the 19505, Petchesky argues feminism and the gay
right’s movement, which encouraged women’s economic emancipation and alternative
family structures, were ear-marked as the most pressing evil that threatened the
“American way of life” in the 19808 (211).

However, it is too simplistic to argue that the narrative of Scarecrow and Mrs.
King merely served as a vehicle for the New Right movement, especially since Amanda
King is a divorced mother supporting her two sons by taking on work outside of the
home. Instead, the narrative must be read as an attempt by the show’s creators to
negotiate perceived dominant ideologies with the recognition that many of its female
viewers were divorced or married women struggling to balance work and family life. As
one of the ads for the show points out, Amanda is a housewife looking to add “a little
spies to her life,” suggesting that while she may love her role as a mother, she also longs
to contribute to society outside of it, and this was not lost on viewers. Emily Ross, who
was a pre-teen when the show originally aired, notes that as a child of divorce living with
her mother: “Amanda represented possibility to me. Someone who was willing to take a
risk. She was a person who truly cared about those around her. Yes, she was a
housewife, but what her character showed me was that you can do both [work and be a
mother] and while you may have to admit that you can't be everything to everyone all the

time, you can be a mom and still have a full and exciting life of your very own.” Pat

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Kaiser, a viewer in her mid-twenties when the show originally aired, describes Amanda
as a feminist:
She chose her life and what she wanted to do. When her ﬁrst husband
took a job in Africa and said come with me—she said No, I need to raise
my children here. When she realized a long distance marriage was not
working, she divorced and did not accept alimony just child support
...When super-spy Lee Stetson told her to get out of the spy business, she
became his partner instead. When her hubby came back and wanted to
pick up where they left off, she politely declined saying she liked the
woman she had become and wanted to move forward not backwards
she was a single mother making her way in the world with a little help
from her mother. Wow! What a role model.
These two comments suggest that while Scarecrow and Mrs. King promoted the
New Right’s emphasis on traditionally feminine roles and their importance to the nation,
viewers of the show often came away feeling empowered by Amanda, who to them
represented a type of post-feminist, even feminist, hero who encouraged women to
contribute to society both in and outside of the home. In fact, Scarecrow and Mrs. King
is probably best considered a post-feminist text, rather than one that promoted New
Right, feminist backlash politics. As Bonnie Dow argues in Prime Time Feminism,
“backlash” has become a convenient catch-phrase to describe the media’s general retreat
from feminist issues during the 19805, noting that many television shows that aired
during the decade actually adopted a post-feminist stance to represent the political shifts

occurring at the time. For Dow, post-feminists differ from backlashers because they

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celebrate women’s advances in employment and higher education, but lament the fact
that many “second-wave feminists failed to recognize that 90 percent of women wish to
work and become mothers” (Hewitt qtd. in Dow 90). Thus, post-feminists were largely
concerned with helping women ﬁnd ways to balance their careers with their families and
cope with child-care responsibilities, but simultaneously reinforced the idea that these
issues are primarily women’s issues by overlooking the sexual politics that helped to
naturalize these views (91). Backlashers, on the other hand, believe that nothing good
came from the second-wave feminist movement and advocate for women’s retreat from
the workforce. Backlashers also feel that women’s natural place is in the home and that
those who choose careers will only ﬁnd themselves mired in a host of unfavorable social
and personal consequences (93).

When viewed in this light, Scarecrow and Mrs. King can certainly be read as
operating in a post-feminist vein, as the series oﬂen diverted attention away from many
feminist issues while simultaneously focusing on the challenge of balancing work and
family. For instance, Amanda must occasionally look for work outside The Agency in
order to make her ﬁnancial ends meet. In these episodes, she oﬁen experiences some
form of sexual harassment, which the narrative fails to explicitly address. Such is the
case in “There Goes the Neighborhood,” where Amanda’s interview for a job at
Honeycut Typewriters consists of the employer reviewing her ﬁle and declaring her
“perfect” for the job once he sees that she is divorced. “From where I sit, Mrs. King,” the
man says seductively, “everything looks tip top,” and later, when Amanda asks if he has
any further questions about her application, he simply asks if blue is her favorite color,

noting that it should be since she looks “delicious in it.” In this episode, Amanda is

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clearly uncomfortable with her interviewer’s advances, but she merely smiles and tries to
redirect the conservation back to work until Lee barges in, pretending to be her husband,
and rehires her for an agency mission. Neither Amanda nor the episode, more generally,
ever directly addresses the harassment in the episode and Mrs. King actually expresses
regret that she lost the job due to Lee’s brash behavior.

The show is also post-feminist in that it is largely concerned with the ways in
which Amanda balances her life as a spy with that of a divorced suburban mom and never
questions the sexual politics that assign mothering, child care, and housework to
women—duties Amanda also performs for The Agency and even for Lee. Of course,
much of the show’s comedy is based on these two extreme aspects of Amanda’s life. As
a divorced mother of two, Amanda is responsible for all of the parenting and housework
(although her mother helps out), but as a spy, she must be able to leave at the drop of the
hat and hide her activities from her family. She also must try to balance her romantic life
with her colleague Lee Stetson on top of her parenting and spy work, and this juggling
act is one of the facets of the show that fans most admired. As Susan Dickerson remarks,
“I loved the show Scarecrow and Mrs. King so much that I still watch it (dvds) and
participate in forums and get togethers for it. The show's "spy" theme was exciting and
wonderful when combined with the romantic interludes of the main characters. I was a
mother of two boys in my 20's during the ﬁrst run of SMK and Amanda was an
empowering ﬁgure for me even as a happily married woman. She demonstrated that the
"housewife" and "mother" is a lot smarter and resourceful than we think. It was fun to
fantasize being Amanda with my own spy guy.” Likewise, Dawn Yzaguirre remarks that

as a teen in the 19803, she thought “Amanda was a very admirable character. She had to

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take over caring for her family after the divorce from Joe. Being someone whose mother
worked from the time I was very young, I could totally relate to this type of situation. I
feel that her situation made Amanda an even stronger character.”

Comments such as these suggest that fans appreciated the way that Scarecrow and
Mrs. King celebrated the importance of Amanda’s domestic and mothering skills by
showing how they contributed to her success as a spy/laborer outside of the home,
disrupted the stereotype of the boring housewife, and, in the case of Dawn, may have
even helped them develop a new appreciation for the women in their own lives who
struggled to balance work and family.

However, it should be noted that while SMK constructed Amanda as a post-
feminist heroine whose caring and compassionate nature proves key to the success of an
agency operation, the show did not suggest that national defense should refrain from only
taking a feminine approach. Amanda and Lee operate as a team, and Lee is very much a
masculine character that employs physical force and weapons in order to accomplish
agency goals. In fact, Lee often saves Amanda when she is captured, drugged, or
otherwise over her head in international intrigue, and he is the one to deliver the fatal
blow to their adversaries. Lee’s status as an experienced, trained operative also means
that Lee serves as the main decision maker when he and Amanda are in the ﬁeld,
although Amanda does come up with many of the ideas that help get them out of trouble.

Interestingly, the emphasis on the importance of traditional masculinity to both
the series and the nation was also explored in the early publicity material for SMK, which
worked hard to deﬁne Bruce Boxleitner, the actor who played Scarecrow, as

representative of a new, ideal American male. Part of the need to deﬁne an image for

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Boxleitner stemmed from the fact that when Scarecrow and Mrs. King originally aired,
the actor was not that well-known. While he had starred in Disney’s space-age Tron
(1982) and Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler (1980), Boxleitner had yet to become a truly
popular celebrity or play the part of Captain John Sheridan in Babylon 5, for which he is
probably most well-known. As a result, publicity articles for SMK that focused on
Boxleitner promoted the series as much as the actor himself, and these depictions often
chose to focus on the actor’s “all-American masculinity.” To cite just two examples,
Modern Screen described Boxleitner as a present-day John Wayne: “strong, rugged, and
apple-pie American” with “down-to-earth charm, traditional values and a lack of
pretension” (Miller), while TV Guide described the actor as the “logical heir to Robert
Redford’s mantle of wholesome masculinity,” and then went on to quote the actor’s
personal manager, who described his client as a “super-patriot” and would-be war hero
(Estrin 38).

These well-crafted descriptions suggest that Boxleitner (or at least his manager)
wished to be distanced from images of “unwholesome” and “uh-heroic” masculinity,
which given the time period, most likely referred to those evoked by the Vietnam draft
dodger and even from the Vietnam veteran, who, by the 19808, had come to symbolize
loss, moral failure and national decline. As Susan Jeffords argues in The
Remasculinzation of America, such a reading of Vietnam veterans partially stemmed
from the fact that because these men had come to represent a group unjustly victimized
by the government and discriminated against by society, they had become “on par with
women, blacks and other disenfranchised groups” (xiv). As a result, Jeffords argues that

the popular culture emerging during the 19803 largely set out to reclaim American

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masculinity and to reafﬁrm the relations of dominance and patriarchy it embodies. This
was accomplished on television by featuring masculine action heroes with non-descript
Vietnam backgrounds, such as those in Magnum P.I., T.J. Hooker, Miami Vice, and Rip
Tide (2), but was most famously accomplished by ﬁlm series such as Rambo, which
depicted the government as feminized, indecisive, bureaucratic and ineffectual and
featured hyperrnasculine Vietnam veterans reclaiming American masculinity by
“showing an open disregard for government legislation” and instead exhibiting “strength
and ﬁrmness” (169). Yvonne Tasker concurs with many of Jeffords ideas and illustrates
in Spectacular Bodies how even British critics of the Rambo series interpreted the ﬁlms
as an attempt to reclaim American masculinity and might. As one critic from The
Guardian wrote: “Rambo II opened in American cinemas at the right time to proﬁt from
the Beirut high-jacking”. When the White House was impotent with rage, patriotic
Americans could watch the muscle of Rambo destroy the Vietnamese and Russian armies
as be rescued Gls from Communist prisons” winning “in the cinema the war the
United States lost on the ground” (qtd. In Tasker 93).

Of course, Boxleitner does not possess the hypermasculinity of Rambo, but the
writers of Scarecrow and Mrs. King did draw from the same vein as many of the
decade’s male-muscle ﬁlms by depicting the actor’s character as disdainful of The
Agency’s bureaucracy, and by showing Scarecrow constantly getting in trouble, even
suspended, for failing to follow the outﬁt’s rules and procedures which he ﬁnds limiting
and ineffective. Lee would much rather spring into action to defeat threats than sit
around thinking of possible strategies or considering Agency protocol. In the episode

“The Man Who Died Twice,” the writers also imply that Lee served in Vietnam when he

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mentions that one of his recruits was extremely helpful there during the war. He says that
Kai hid him during a MIA hunt into Cambodia, implying that, like many of his TV
counterparts, Scarecrow possessed a non-descript Vietnam background. Given these
insights, Scarecrow, as well as the publicity material surrounding Boxleitner, can be read
as participating in the nation’s attempts to reclaim American masculinity through the
media and aligning itself with what Tasker has called Reagan’s “muscular lack of
diplomacy” (92). By depicting Scarecrow as working within a state institution but
opposed to its bureaucratic methods, this element in SMK may also help explain part of
the show’s success since, as Tasker argues, a certain populist appeal is generally
associated with the ﬁgure of the hero who is outside or apart from state institutions, and
who, in a sense, is untainted by their inevitable corruption (105).
Negotiated and Oppositional Readings

The fan culture surrounding Scarecrow and Mrs. King suggests that viewers
responded favorably to a myriad of elements embedded in the original broadcast
material--at least some of which centered on the importance of traditional gender roles to
American society. On one fan’s web page, for instance, the author lists the top ten
reasons why she loves SMK and reason number nine celebrates Lee’s heroism, noting that
while Amanda gets into an amazing amount of trouble, “the even more amazing thing,
that I just love, is that Lee is ALWAYS there to save the day! l” (“Lori’s Scarecrow”).
Another fan site sponsored a contest celebrating the domestic food elements of the show.
More speciﬁcally, the site for the SMK Cooks Fan Fiction Collection notes that “food has
been an important, oﬁen crucial, element in this endearing and enduring housewife-

meets-spy series. Amanda cooks for her boys, Lee cooks for Amanda, Dotty cooks for

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Captain Curt, Amanda cooks for Lee, Amanda cooks for the ofﬁce, Amanda cooks for
the princess—well, actually, Amanda cooks for everyone!” The sponsor of the
collection, a professional cook and pastry chef, then writes that once she realized the
abundance of food in the series, she decided to “start cooking [her] way through it” and
what follows on the site are the recipes she and others fans of the show created for the
ﬁctional and real dishes mentioned on the series.

But while Scarecrow and Mrs. King encoded messages in-line with many of the
era’s dominant political and cultural values, SMK is not a closed narrative that
discourages viewers from adopting negotiated or oppositional viewing stances to New
Right or even post-feminist politics. In fact, the openness of the narrative may help to
explain the popularity of the show, as John Fiske argues that in order for a text to become
truly popular, it must be “producerly,” a term which refers to a work that is easy enough
to understand without intense, focused analysis but open enough to allow people to
produce their own meanings from the work and encourage at least one reading that
challenges a cultural dominant ideology. In other words, F iske suggests that in order for
a television narrative to be popular, it must avoid the use of overt propaganda and instead
be open enough to allow viewers to engage in what Umberto Eco has called “semiotic
guerilla warfare” against the dominant center.

For example, comments made by SMK fans on the intemet suggest that many
viewers enjoyed the way Amanda succeeded in the work place and upset the male-
dominated culture of The Agency. On the website jumptheshark.com, several fans remark
that the show began to suffer when Amanda became a full-status agent on par with Lee in

season three. “It wasn't the dating. It wasn't the marriage,” one viewer writes. “The real

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tension in the show came from Amanda being an intuitive, successful AMATEUR. In
the 3rd season, she started going on her own assignments, which ‘dulled the edges’,”
while yet another remarks that “the whole idea of the show is that Mrs. King didn't know
squat about the spy business, yet she still managed to upstage the Scarecrow nine times
out of ten. When she became a real agent, it wasn't cute anymore.” Likewise, one
woman’s fan page reveals that an element of the show she found enjoyable is the fact that
“Amanda is a housewife. Lee on the other hand is a trained agent of ten years. Yet
Amanda always seems to come up with ideas to solve the cases that neither Lee, or the
other agents even thought of. I love that! l” (Lori’s Scarecrow). On the one hand, these
comments reveal that viewers of the show understood housewives and mothers as
unlikely successors in the male-dominated world of espionage, but on the other hand,
reveal that viewers recognized these same stereotypes as untrue and/or unsatisfying and
thus responded to Amanda precisely because her station allowed the character to prove
society wrong.

Viewers may have also adopted more oppositional stances to the show’s narrative
if they consumed any of the publicity material about Kate Jackson published during the
show’s run and allowed that material to inﬂuence their reading of Amanda King. For
instance, while the broadcast narrative of SMK emphasized the importance of women
fulﬁlling their “natural” roles of nurturer and caretakers and adopted a post-feminist
approach to issues of work and family, publicity material for the series often focused on
the attributes of Jackson that contradicted the image of a contented woman successfully
balancing work and relationships. Articles often commented on the fact that Jackson was

heavily involved in the production of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, through her company

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Shoot the Moon Productions and suggested that her investment in her work on the series
(and on Charlie ’s Angels) is what led to her divorce from Steven Andrews, whom she
married while playing Sabrina Duncan, and to her subsequent divorce from David
Greenwald while working on SMK. Quotes selected for publication in feature articles
about the actress also depicted Jackson as intensely career, rather than relationship,
oriented. In a 1984 issue of TV Guide, Jack Hicks decided to use this quote from the
actress:
Look. I’m a Type-A personality. I need to get up early every day and I
need to work hard. I can make a very good living doing two TV-movies a
year and a feature ﬁlm every three, but I don’t want to live a life in which
my big daily decision is where to eat lunch. That’s why I came back to
regular TV with Scarecrow. I give all of me to my work, and I want a
chance to work at things I like.
In 1985, Good Housekeeping also featured a cover photo of the actress and an article
entitled “No Time for Love-- A Talk with Kate Jackson” by Vernon Scott. This article,
much like the one appearing in TV Guide, stressed the fact that Jackson is currently
fulﬁlled by her work and comfortable with the fact that it leaves no time for personal
relationships. “At this stage of the game,” the actress is quoted as saying, “if it’s a
question of my work or a personal relationship—it’s the relationship that suffers” (91-
92). “Any important relationship with a man right now would put far too many demands
on him because my schedule is pretty inﬂexible. I have to work 16 hours a day and I have
to enjoy it” (92). The article’s second to last paragraph also notes that “Kate is pleased
that when there is no man in her life she can function happily alone. ‘There doesn’t have

to be a man to validate me as a woman. I don’t have to walk into a party on someone’s

arm. I can go alone” (93). Such depictions of Jackson aligned her more with the second-

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wave feminist movement than it did with the rise of the New Right in the mid-19805, and
this, as well as her work on the quasi-feminist series“, Charlie '5 Angels, may have
inﬂuenced viewers’ readings of the series, encouraging them to focus on Amanda’s
qualities that empowered her to thrive in the male-dominated world of spying. Fans also
responded in complicated ways to the show’s supporting character, Francine Desmond
(Martha Smith), Amanda and Lee’s colleague at The Agency.

In many ways, Francine can be read as contributing to the feminist backlash
taking place during the 19805. As Susan Faludi argues, the term backlash refers to the
idea that women who put their energy into their career, favor singleness over marriage,
and strive for equality with men ultimately bring unhappiness upon themselves because
they are denying their true calling as a family caretaker. Evidence of the growing
prominence of backlash politics could be seen during the 19805 in the legislature, as well
as on television, where single women’s visibility greatly diminished on prime-time shows
and were relegated to secondary characters or to non-threatening, all-woman
environments such as those featured in Designing Women or The Golden Girls (F aludi
158-159). Backlash politics also appeared on television when the early 1980’s political
climate encouraged television executives to banish feminist issues from its program
content and by mid-decade to reconstruct a “traditional female hierarchy which placed
suburban homemakers on top, career women on the lower rungs, and single women on
the very bottom” (Faludi 148). Career and single women were likewise relegated to two
stock types: the coldly calculating careerist or the deeply depressed spinster, and in many
cases, single women who worked on television either had “no emotions” or were

emotional wrecks because they longed for a husband and children (Faludi 159). The

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single careerist, however, belonged to the lowest order of females since she “had traded
in her humanity for a paycheck, and spurned not only men but children” (Faludi 59).
Such backlash politics were encoded in the narrative of SMK through Francine —
a career-focused spy who ﬁnds children “nasty” and chose a career over marriage and a
family. Francine dates Washington insiders and uses her large disposable income to buy
designer clothing, and in the pilot, Francine proudly proclaims that she represents
“Today’s Woman,” who can do anything she sets her mind to. While Amanda prefers to
use kindness, honesty, and gentleness on the job and is often selected for missions due to
her domestic knowledge and activities, Francine lacks domestic talents (indeed, she must
take cooking lessons in the pilot episode) and prefers using semi-automatic machine guns
and aggressive interrogation tactics to accomplish her tasks. In “Brunettes Are In,” for
example, Francine enjoys using physical roughness and harsh language when
interrogating a man who tried to catch and then sell Amanda into sex slavery, and when
that achieves only partial success, she leaves the suspect alone only to come back and
employ an aggressive sexual seduction to get him to divulge information, explaining to
Lee that “just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean that I am always subtle or delicate.”
While these descriptions may seem to challenge rather than contribute to backlash
politics, Francine does ultimately serves as a commentary on the pitfalls of the feminist
movement. This is partly achieved by the fact that Francine is often shown belittling
Amanda for the roles she plays in her family and home. In the pilot, for instance,
Francine jokes that Amanda will make a great partner for Lee in the spy game because
she “knits” and in “Brunettes are In” she tells Lee that she is surprised Amanda didn’t

faint in a “suburban swoon” when the two men try to capture her. These catty comments

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pit Francine against Amanda, whom the show clearly positions as the protagonist and
thus the most desirable woman. After all, Scarecrow does not fall in love with Francine
even though they’ve worked together for years nor does Billy Melrose praise Francine’s
work with the same fervor as he does Amanda’s. As a result, Francine is encoded as an
unlikeable character and her unlikeableness stems from her disparagement of Amanda’s
decision to both work and raise a family, instead of Amanda adopting her chosen route
which solely focuses on a career and the high-end luxury goods it affords. Also, while
early seasons of the show depict Francine as comfortable with her decision to “Spurn”
children, later episodes show Francine ultimately regretting her choice to favor a career
over committed relationships, thus reinforcing the idea that her desire to strive for
equality with men ultimately brought unhappiness upon herself. The show also subscribes
to the female hierarchy Faludi references since Amanda, the suburban mother, is clearly
placed on a higher rung within the narrative than is Francine, even though Francine ranks
higher than Amanda within The Agency.

Interestingly, fans also picked up on the elements of the show which depicted
Francine as part of the feminist-backlash. Pat Kaiser, a librarian from Los Angeles,
California, notes that Francine’s “ﬂaw as a feminist was her lack of compassion for other
women.” “As the seasons went by you saw more of this compassion from her and thus
she became a more multi dimensional and likeable person. Francine thought that for a
woman to succeed she needs be like a man—she criticized Amanda for her
vulnerabilities. Over the years Francine softened just a bit and became a better friend,
agent and overall person. A feminist should empower other women not deﬂate them.”

However, Keiser also found part of Francine empowering. In the same paragraph, the fan

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remarks that she enjoyed some aspects of Francine, whom she describes as a “militant
feminist, trying to not only make it but excel in a “Man’s World.” “I loved her ‘don’t
mess with me attitude,”’ Keiser remarks. “She could face down 10 KGB agents without
blinking, but put her in a room of desperate housewives with kids and she would melt.
She could go toe to toe with Lee and her boss Billy, giving as well as she gets.” One fan
preferring to simply go by the name Rebecca, notes that growing up, Francine was also
an enjoyable character. “I liked Amanda but she was comedy. Francine was cool.
Even now, I still love competence in a character. I loved that she kicked butt, that she
was good at her job, that she was an equal. Amanda was a trainee. She got bossed
around. She was fun, but I didn't take her as seriously. She often succeeded through
happenstance and she broke vases on people's heads, whereas Francine was more
traditional in her ﬁghts and stuff.” Likewise, in an online Q and A session with Martha
Smith in 2006, another fan remarked that “I was and am a real big fan of the Scarecrow
and Mrs. King show. Of all the people on it I liked your char. the best. ‘Cause for the
times you showed (1 was only 7 at the time) that girls could do and be anything in real
life, or as close to real life as TV can get” (“Ask Martha”).

Conclusion

Scarecrow and Mrs. King marks a departure from previous female-centered spy

series. Agent 99, April Dancer and Jamie Sommers were created as single, full-time
Operatives born of the pre-feminist and feminist movements and often played with gender
in transgressive ways through dress, camp, comedy and even technology. Amanda King,
on the other hand, was born out of the rising inﬂuence of New Right and post-feminist

politics, which wished to redirect the discussion of women’s issues towards an emphasis

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on their roles as caretakers in addition to paid workers. Plots of the series often focused
on the ways Amanda’s domestic skills, self-sacriﬁce and nurturance aided in agency
missions, but also suggested a deep-seeded fear that the American family, and thus the
nation itself, was being threatened by sexual liberation movements. The show also felt
compelled to emphasize the importance of traditional masculinity to the nation-state in
response to the U.S.’s loss in Vietnam, as evidenced by the construction of Amanda’s
partner, Lee Stetson.

Regardless of the shows’ New Right, post-feminist and even backlash elements,
however, viewers of the show negotiated those elements in complicated ways. While
viewers picked up on the backlash elements of F rancine’s character, for instance, they
still found elements of her personality empowering in ways that speciﬁcally challenged
the tenets of the New Right and post-feminist movements. Likewise, viewers were able
to negotiate the character of Amanda King, embracing her ability to succeed against most
odds and balance one of the most complicated lives ever assigned to a 19805 television
show character.

Of course, what Scarecrow and Mrs. King did share with shows such as Get
Smart, The Bionic Woman, and even Biﬂ Baker USA and 1 Led 3 Lives is that it featured
women who possessed a limited physical agency and its story lines were ﬁrmly rooted in
the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, later spy series
lost their well-deﬁned enemy and had to rethink the dichotomy of “us vs. them” that was
severely disrupted by the rise of international and domestic terrorism in the West. The
metamorphosis that took place in the post-Cold War era can be clearly seen in two

television series explored in this project’s ﬁnal chapter: La F emme Nikita and Alias.

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The 19905 and 2000s

Female Warriors and the War on Terror: La F emme Nikita and Alias

"I was falsely accused of a hideous crime and sentenced to life in prison. One night I was taken from my
cell to a place called Section One, the most covert anti-terrorist group on the planet. Their ends are just, but
their means are ruthless. If I don't play by their rules, I die."

-Opening narration of La F emme Nikita

“My name is Sydney Bristow. Seven years ago I was recruited by a secret branch of the CIA called SD-6.
I was sworn to secrecy, but I couldn't keep it from my ﬁance. And when the head of SD-6 found out, he had
him killed. That's when I learned the truth: SD-6 is not part of the CIA. I've been working for the very
people I thought I was ﬁghting against. So, I went to the only place that could help me take them down.
Now I'm a double agent for the CIA, where my handler is a man named Michael Vaughn. Only one other
person knows the truth about what I do, another double agent inside SD-6. Someone I hardly know -my
father.”

«Opening narration of A lias, season one.

As evidenced by earlier chapters, women in spy television programs have lacked
a strong physical agency. The wives of Herbert Philbrick and Biff Baker allowed their
husbands to wrestle enemies in dangerous situations while they supported from afar, and
Agent 99, April Dancer and Amanda King all held their male partners responsible for the
physical conﬂicts involved in espionage (although they occasionally dropped a vase on
an enemy’s head or employed a weak karate chop). Even the Bionic Woman, who was
given super-human strength by the Ofﬁce of Strategic Intelligence, rarely employed her
power outside of running and jumping from buildings, while the Six Million Dollar Man
wrestled, punched, and knocked out walls when enemies or objects stood in his way. This
type of gendered narrative is not unique to spy television, however. A5 Frances Early and
Kathleen Kennedy note, one of Western culture’s most powerful and inﬂuential stories is
that of the male just warrior whose willingness to shed blood for the common good
entitles him to “mastery over self and others” (1). Because women in these stories
primarily play the role of the “beautiful soul” in need of male protection and/or the

maternal war-support ﬁgure, the authors posit that while a few women, such as Joan of

144

Arc, have achieved warrior status, they are mostly viewed as “temporary transgressors”
with no tradition of their own (1).

In the mid-19905, however, television began to re-imagine the warrior story, as
the small screen “increasingly cast women as warriors whose capacity to ﬁght for just
causes match[ed] or exceed[ed] that of their male colleagues” (Kennedy and Early 3).
These heroines, who included Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess,
battled evil on a daily basis, repeatedly saving the world from “untold horrors” (3). Media
journalists also commented on the increased visibility of female warriors on television
during the mid 19905 and early 20005. To cite just one example, The New York Times’
Jennifer Steinhauer wrote that many of 2000’s prime time heroines were “muscular and

,9 6‘

trained in the marital arts, restoring world order and ending bad dates with swift,
punishing blows” (5). Part of the excitement generated by these “chicks-who-kick” rested
in the fact that they disrupted many of gender’s association with class and sexuality. In
the past, tough, violent women in popular culture have been primarily depicted as either
working class women with a penchant for swearing and drinking, or as lesbians who
eschew all feminine accoutrements. The female warriors who began appearing on
television in the mid-19905, however, were often constructed as sophisticated, middle-to-
upper-class heroines who enjoyed “kicking ass” in haute couture.

At least two of these new television warriors emerged from the spy genre. The
USA network’s La F emme Nikita (1997-2001) featured a blonde-haired, blue-eyed spy,
who, according to the show’s title sequence, measured in at 5’11 and weighed just 120

lbs. While such a build seems highly unlikely for an action heroine, the show

nonetheless depicts Nikita as capable of defeating any foe in combat, even if she is

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dressed in high-heeled boots and tight dresses. Sydney Bristow of ABC’s Alias (2001-
2006) likewise performed roundhouse kicks in nightclub attire and two-piece
swimsuits—displaying a combination of violence and sexuality praised by media
journalists. A March 2002 article in Entertainment Weekly speciﬁcally celebrated
Jennifer Garner (the actress who played Bristow) as a “luscious-lipped” woman who

“jumps off buildings, swaggers in .
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leather outﬁt under the heading:

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co-ed in leather.” Peta Wilson, the
Australian actress who played Nikita, was also celebrated for her combination of sex
appeal and toughness. 1n the Dec/Jan 1998/ 1999 edition of GQ Australia, Wilson
appeared on the cover with her breasts partially exposed under a headline that lauded her
as a “Homegrown Hollywood Hitwoman,” while Dan Snierson described her character as

“part babe, part nut-crunching machine” in a 1997 issue of Entertainment Weekly (34).

146

While the “chicks-who-kick” trend has signiﬁcantly died down in recent years,

media scholars were quick to explore the potential and limitations these women presented

for viewers and Western culture in general. In her work Tough Girls, Sherrie Inness

suggests that an increased visibility of female warriors in popular culture holds promise

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for women since it disrupts the West’s
association of maleness with toughness—an
association that works to ensure male
privilege and authority in society. Inness
speciﬁcally writes that because toughness is
often understood as a prerequisite for all
sorts of roles in our culture--including
football coach, CEO, and president of the
United States—the idea that women have
little to do with toughness helps keep them
as second-class citizens since they are

assumed to lack the strength required for

many leadership roles (l7). Presumably, Inness believes that physical toughness is

indicative of mental toughness, but while the two do not always exist in tandem, in Alias

and La F emme Nikita a strong, positive correlation does exist. As Kent Ono points out,

however, many shows featuring female warriors have been stripped of an overt, feminist,

political context, and he argues that female warrior shows are not about powerful women,

so much as they are about powerful, white, heterosexual women, and thus fail to truly

transgress gender boundaries, particularly in regards to race and heteronormativity (166).

147

Also raising questions about the female warrior’s potential as a feminist icon,
David Roger Coon demonstrates that the ways tough female-centered shows are
marketed often undercut the potentially empowering messages of the broadcast
narratives. By analyzing the trailers and print advertisements for Alias and the cinematic
version of Charlie ’s Angels, Coon is able to show how many of these shows’ promotional
materials position Sydney and the Angels as the object of the male gaze and isolate their
sexuality as the basis for selling the main text (11). “Whereas the text[s] themselves show
how femininity and female sexuality can be used as a means to an end,” he writes, “these
ads simply offer the woman up as spectacle, returning them to their traditional status as
passive sexualized objects and thus undermine much of what the series work so hard to
accomplish” (1 1).

Despite these limitations, Alias and La F emme Nikita were innovative shows that
helped give women their own tradition of warriors in popular culture and re-imagined the
relationship between women and the state, as these narratives featured females using
violence to protect individuals and the nation instead of depicting women as in need of
personal and national protection. It is also important to stress that as spy series, La
F emme Nikita and Alias also reﬂected signiﬁcant shifts in American nationalism and
notions of ideal citizenship in the post-Cold War era, for while these broadcast narratives
re-imagined the female spy as a physically strong warrior who could engage in battle on
behalf of the nation, they also depicted these women as entrapped operatives whose
relationship with the spy agency reﬂected powerful moral dilemmas rarely seen in

previous American espionage dramas. As a result, this ﬁnal chapter explores the elements

148

of nationalism and feminism in La F emme Nikita and Alias, focusing on the texts’
relationship with the post-Cold War era and feminist thought.
Analyzing Issues of Nationalism and Feminism in La F emme Nikita and Alias

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years
later have traditionally marked the end of the Cold War. The signiﬁcant demise of two of
the U.S.'s most prominent enemies -- communism and the US SR-- wrought numerous
changes in American culture during the early post-Cold War era, and many questioned
whether the CIA would even be necessary in the new age. In November 1997, for
instance, the Gerald R. Ford Library held a conference to debate the continued need of a
Central Intelligence Agency. The Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet,
delivered the keynote address, where he, unsurprisingly, argued that the agency was still
necessary, reminding the audience that President Truman had created the CIA as an
insurance policy against “the kind of surprise that caught America off guard in World
War II” and to help him “sort through the confusing and conﬂicting nature of the reports
landing on his desk from various departments.” “As I look at the world today,” Tenet
stated, “it is clear to me that the potential for dangerous surprise is as great as ever.” He
then went on to list a host of present threats, including Saddam Hussein’s attempts to
build biological weapons, Iran’s plans for building intermediate range missiles, the build
up of North Korean forces near the DMZ, and the “vast and unﬁnished transformations
underway in countries with large nuclear arsenals, such as Russia and China.” What
Tenet was trying to illustrate was that even though the Cold War had ended, the threat
against the American nation-state had not. Or, as former CIA Director James Woolsey

described the early post-Cold War era: while the great Soviet dragon has been slain, a

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“bewildering variety of poisonous snakes have been let loose in a dark jungle,” noting
almost nostalgically, that “it may have been easier to watch the dragon" (qtd. in Melton).

Despite the intelligence community’s awareness of new threats and the need for
the continuation of intelligence gathering, the CIA nonetheless struggled to retain its
power and inﬂuence in the post-Cold War era. The 1994 discovery of Aldrich Ames, a
Soviet mole at Langley, led to congressional investigations in both the Senate and the
House, where politicians seriously considered dismantling the agency after listening to
testimony about how Ames had sold American secrets to Moscow for over nine years
without arousing much suspicion amongst his colleagues (Lapham). The memory of the
CIA’s misadventures in Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra scandal were also still fresh
enough in the public’s mind to warrant suspicion of the agency, and without a visible,
viable enemy after the Cold War, the outﬁt struggled to attract recruits and public
support. In fact, outside intelligence analysts believe that CIA employment levels had
dropped from 20,000 near the end of the Cold War to 16,000 by 1997, although
recruitment levels had begun to slowly increase in 1998 due to Tenet’s attempts to re-
make the agency’s image in print advertisements and at college fairs (Raum).

In order to strengthen its inﬂuence in American culture, the CIA also turned to
prime-time television and Hollywood for help. In 1995, the CIA asked Chase Brandon, a
former covert operations ofﬁcer, to take on the role of ﬁlm industry liaison in its Ofﬁce
of Public Affairs. Brandon was charged with the task of reforming the CIA’s image of a
“negative, Machiavellian conspiratorial organization full of trench coat wearing,
suspicious people who assassinated folks” (DiBenedetto-Kenyon), and his ﬁrst move was

opening the CIA’s doors to Tinsel Town. “I invite them to come, let them see it, and then

150

have them understand that the real stories about the real men and women are more
gripping and compelling than the ﬁctional things are” (qtd. in DiBenedetto-Kenyon).
Brandon, however, does more than serve as a tour guide. He actively works with
television creators, ﬁlmmakers and writers to develop accurate depictions of the CIA, and
to-date, his ﬁlm credits include The Recruit (2003), Sum of All Fears (2002), Enemy of
the State (1998), and Bad Company (2002), while he has also served as a technical
consultant for television programs including The Agency (2001-2003), Alias and JAG
(1995-2005).

In fact, The Agency, which debuted on CBS in 2001 , became the ﬁrst series
allowed to shoot scenes on the CIA’s premises. In a CNN televised report on The Agency,
David Ensor argued that this new interplay between Hollywood and the CIA primarily
stemmed from the absence of a Cold War adversary and the ways it forced the agency to
ﬁnd new ways to drum up public support for its existence and create interest for new
recruits (qtd. in Britton 245). Chase Brandon implicitly concurred with Ensor when he
admitted that granting permission to The Agency to ﬁlm on-site helped ensure a positive
portrayal of the agency and its operatives. “You don’t get to come in here and ﬁlm in our
hallways if you’re going to typecast us as ugly, nefarious people”(qtd. in Britton 245).
Likewise, Brandon remarked in USA Today that he views his job as particularly
important because Americans get much of their information about the inner workings of
the government from popular culture. In “perilous times,” Brandon said, the ways that
government ofﬁcials are depicted “educates and informs the public, reassures the public,

entertains the public” (Hall).

151

Not everyone was comfortable with the relationship between shows such as The
Agency and the CIA, however. In July 2001, Lewis Lapham wrote in Harper ’5 Magazine
that he saw the series as unwarranted propaganda for an intelligence community prone to
arrogance, deceit, and outright stupidity. His article then went on to detail the ways the
agency had bungled numerous international conﬂicts over the last ﬁfty years, noting that
CBS could have hardly taken on a more ambitious project by attempting to legitimize an
agency well-known for “chronic stupidity and criminal incompetence.” For Lapham, The
Agency was part of the CIA’s attempts to promote a revival of the “atmospherics of the
Cold War,” where the United States was once again “threatened by rogue states, starving
mobs, Arab terrorists, deadly chemicals, and treacherous Chinese.”

Of course, the events of September 11, 2001 changed many things for the CIA, as
Americans refocused their energy — not on the Soviets — but on Middle Eastern terrorists.
Faced with a viable, visible enemy once again, the CIA almost immediately enjoyed a
resurgence in applications. New York Magazine reported that from 2001 to 2002, the
CIA experienced a 50% increase in applications (“9/11 in Numbers”), and Director of
National Intelligence, John Negroponte, reported that as recently as December 2005, CIA
recruitment levels were still high and that there continued to be a “major effort under way
to increase both analysts and human intelligence collectors” in the agency (qtd. in Ensor).

But while the events of 9/11 led to an increased level of citizen and federal
support for the CIA, the agency also faced criticisms regarding its effectiveness,
structure, arrogance and exclusivity, and in this climate, the CIA again turned to prime
time television in order to help boost its public image and recruitment levels. In March

2004, an agency press release announced that it had posted a new video on its CIA

152

Careers website featuring Jennifer Garner and reported that the actress would also star in
CIA recruitment videos shown to graduate students at college jobs fairs. In the video
appearing on the CIA Careers website, the then-31-year-old actress calls on citizens to
join the intelligence service. “I play a CIA ofﬁcer,” Garner says in the ad. “In the real
world, the CIA serves as our country's ﬁrst line of defense in the ongoing war against
international terrorism. The CIA's mission is clear and direct: Safeguard America and its
people.” And later, Garner states, “It takes smart people with wide-ranging talents and
diverse backgrounds to carry out this mission people with integrity, common sense,
patriotism and courage. The kind of people who have always worked for the agency.”

According to Brandon, who served as a consultant on Alias during its ﬁrst season,
Garner was selected to appear in the ads because her character, Agent Sydney Bristow,
“embodies the integrity, patriotism and intelligence the CIA looks for in its ofﬁcers” (qtd.
in “New Recruitment Video”). In 2003, Brandon also noted that “We feel that Miss
Garner, both in character as agent Sydney Bristow and as herself, embodies the
intelligence, enthusiasm and dedication that we're looking for. Our continuing efforts to
enlist the best and the brightest would be admirably served by having her support. . .Her
participation would add a human touch to the message we're trying to convey” (“‘Alias’
Star”).

Brandon’s recruitment of Garner made sense in many ways. Considered the brain-
child of J .J . Abrams (also the creator of the hit show Lost), Alias was a “spy-ﬁ” series
revolving around a female operative and her complicated work and family relationships.
A highly-stylized narrative, the show depicts espionage as an exciting, jet-setting lifestyle

that requires operatives to go undercover in the world’s most glamorous cities while

153

sporting haute couture and Bond-like technological gadgetry. The show’s early seasons
deal with Sydney’s attempts to destroy the local branch of a global terrorist network, SD-
6, through her work as a double agent for the CIA, a task she shares with her father.
Throughout the series, Bristow and her CIA colleagues continually face new challenges
as they battle terrorists intent on harming American and international citizens, and while
Sydney often faces hardships both within and outside the agency, she nonetheless persists
in the ﬁght against evil. Sydney’s determined and resourceful nature were obviously
attractive to the CIA’s public relations team, but the show also appealed to teens and
young adults, which meant that using Garner could better help the CIA land current and
future recruits of the same age group. According to the Nielsens, for instance, Alias often
won its Sunday night time slot amongst the coveted 18 to 49 year-old demographic and
ranked second amongst teens during its ﬁrst season (“Bantam Books”).

What is somewhat strange about the CIA’s selection of Garner/Bristow to
promote the agency and attract new recruits is that Alias narratives often presented the
U.S. government and its intelligence organizations as morally dubious outﬁts that
bordered on terrorist activity itself. For instance, “Breaking Point” depicts the CIA
giving authority to a task force whose leader is funded by White House “black money”
and tortures Sydney with electro-shock therapy in order to garner information she cannot
remember but is suspected to be stored in her brain. “A Higher Echelon” also constructs
the CIA as surveilling normal citizens’ faxes, emails, and phone calls—or, more shortly,
violating their constitutional rights. The leader of SD-6 and the show’s main nemesis,
Arvin Sloane, is also an ex-CIA operative, who despite his history of ruthlessness and

terrorist activity is re-hired by the agency for his knowledge and connections in season

154

four. Alias also depicted a range of morally ambiguous situations that asked viewers to
question the integrity of the CIA. As Sutherland and Swan point out, techniques like the
Inferno protocol “are presented as dualities on the show: necessary tools when used by
the U.S. government, horriﬁc violations when used by terrorists” (131). (The Inferno
Protocol is an interrogation procedure that causes cardiac arrest in ﬁfty per cent of its
subjects, and viewers are asked to condone its use on Sark but to abhor its use on Michael
Vaughn, Sydney’s handler and lover, when he is threatened with the same treatment.)
Thus, as the American government employs tactics similar to those used by terrorists and
works with former terrorists when their interests are aligned, the morality of the
government’s actions is increasingly called into question.

However, given the constant reality of terrorism, the means resorted to seem
necessary on the show, and they ask viewers to accept that a war on terrorism cannot be
fought on the usual terms of engagement. “Moral lines must soften and bend in order to
accommodate the necessary weapons such a battle requires,” write Sutherland and Swan.
“While we are at times uncomfortable with the massive power of governmental agencies
and distressed when the government threatens our heroine, we understand that the
complexity of the situation demands a nuanced response” (131). In this respect, then, the
series asks viewers to accept and condone the government’s use of morally ambiguous
tactics in order to protect citizens in a new age, marking a dramatic departure from shows
such as 1 Led 3 Lives, Biff Baker U.S.A., The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman
and even Scarecrow and Mrs. King, which diligently worked to depict the government

and its intelligence agencies as morally upright and honorable.

155

But while it might be tempting to attribute the moral ambiguity represented in
contemporary spy shows like Alias to the events proceeding 9/11, it is important to
remember that La F emme Nikita displayed the same type of ambiguity when it ran in the
mid to late 19905. La F emme Nikita was based on Luc Besson’s 1990 French ﬁlm of the
same name and its American remake, Point of No Return (1993). Both ﬁlms tell the story
of Nikita, a hardened criminal and drug addict, who is imprisoned for life for murder and
eventually “freed” by a covert government agency that fakes her death in order to use her
as a covert assassin. Unlike her predecessors, the television version of Nikita is neither
an addict nor a murderer. Rather, the character is wrongly convicted of killing a police
ofﬁcer, but despite her innocence, the show’s secret agency, Section One, fakes Nikita’s
death in prison and then employs her as a covert operative, making it clear that Nikita’s
survival depends upon her successful and continued service to the section.

According to the show’s executive consultant Joel Surnow, the story change was
made because neither he nor the USA Network believed that viewers would welcome an
actual criminal into their homes and root for her on a weekly basis (“Section One
Declassiﬁed”). The move, however, also meant that Section One would be depicted as
much more sinister than in the ﬁlms since in the cinematic versions of the story, Nikita is
“generously” given some semblance of a normal life after being rightfully imprisoned for
murder, while the television series depicts Section One entrapping the character into a life
of espionage, even though they know she is innocent and possess the power to free her
from prison. And indeed, Section One is depicted as morally repugnant throughout the
show, as its operatives are regularly “canceled” for failing to accomplish mission goals,

challenging those in authority, or simply outliving their usefulness. The outﬁt also deems

156

itself ﬁt to decide when innocent civilians are expendable, kills those suspected of enemy
activity before it knows all of the facts, and engages in torture to garner information. As
Surnow describes Section One: they are an organization that believes they must “out-
ruthless the terrorists in order to be successful” (“Section One Declassiﬁed”).

The morally ambiguous nature of Section One ultimately pushes viewers to
consider two central questions: to what extent will a decent person go in order to survive
and how many horrible acts can a person commit before she ultimately loses her decency
and humanity? These questions play out most explicitly through Nikita’s individual
struggles as a Section One operative trying to survive and retain her humanity in the
morally-grey world of espionage, but Nikita, as the series’ protagonist, can also be read
as representative of the Western nation-state, and thus the series also asks: to what extent
will a decent country go in order to survive and how many horrible acts can a nation
commit before it ultimately loses its decency and humanity? But even here, the use of
the words “nation” and “country” are somewhat misleading as La F emme Nikita
approaches espionage from a globalized perspective. While the script was developed for
the USA Network by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran (who later went on to develop
24), its lead actress, Peta Wilson, was raised in Australia, and many of the other cast
members were American, British and Canadian. The myriad accents that appear on the
show help give La F emme Nikita an international feel, and although temporary alliances
are sometimes forged between Section One and known security agencies (the CIA, NSA,
and Interpol), viewers never discover who actually ﬁnances the operation.

As Stacy Takacs writes, rather than serving a known nation state, Section One

might best be viewed as the embodiment of the “deterritorialized Empire of

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communication and control” imagined by New Economists since the outﬁt is depicted as
a ﬂexibly specialized corporation whose purview is the planet.
It shares with the multinational corporation an utter disregard for issues of
locality, preferring to command vectors of communication and
transportation instead. Section One places a premium on mobility and
speed, dispatching its operatives all over the world in the blink of an eye
Most indicative of Section's preference for space over place, however,
is its refusal to reference its own location. Physically, Section bears no
attachment to any place outside of itself. Composed of labyrinths and
blind alleys, its architecture is self-referential. There are literally no signs
pointing to the existence of an outside world except, perhaps, the orchids
that Operation's right-hand woman, Madeline, keeps in her ofﬁce. (161)
Given this construction of Section One, it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd evidence of American
nationalism within the series, especially as the lack of recognizable monuments, such as
the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, do not allow viewers to identify the spy agency
with a particular government that might be used “to redeem them and place them into the
ranks of heroes” (N g 107). However, by taking into account race and geography, it is
clear that Nikita re-inscribes notions of white, Western superiority. That West-is-Best is
communicated on multiple levels throughout the series: Nikita works for a western-based
anti-terrorist organization, terrorists rarely emerge from within the U.S. or its allied
nations, but rather from regimes in Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and while

Nikita may continuously question the killing Section One engages in, viewers are taught

158

by the text to read the organization as the only thing standing “between the West and
worldwide chaos” (Tung 107).

Interestingly, while Alias is clearly positioned within notions of American
nationalism, the show also adopts a globalized approach to espionage and citizenship, as
Sydney and her colleagues often travel the planet in order to ﬁght terror. But Sydney is
not just cast as a global citizen through her work as a spy; her family also helps to present
her in an international light. Her mother is a Soviet operative, her half-sister is
Argentinean, her best-friend is African-American, her second ﬁancé is French, and she
has reported biological links to an ancient Italian prophet, Milo Rimbaldi. Sydney also
speaks nearly a dozen languages ﬂuently, and thus all of these elements suggest that the
purview of intelligence agencies and responsible citizens must be global in nature during
the post-Cold War era. In other words, Alias recognizes the increasing interconnectedness
of cultural, political, and ﬁnancial economies and suggests that in order to protect
Americans, the government and its agents must protect its allies and innocent civilians
abroad, an argument that also allows the CIA to claim that no place on the planet is
beyond its purview.

A moral compass in the intelligence Gum

Given the ways intelligence agencies employ morally questionable tactics in the
name of national (or Western) security on both Alias and La F emme Nikita, it is
important to recognize that what makes Sydney and Nikita viable protagonists is that they
are constructed as viewers’ and even their agencies’ moral compass. And this is,
ultimately, what the real CIA seems to have been drawn to in its selection of

Garner/Bristow as the spokeswoman for the agency and its recruitment efforts. A strong

159

example of this type of heroism on Alias occurs in season three after Sydney has emerged
from a two-year bout of amnesia only to ﬁnd that her lover and spy handler, Michael
Vaughn, has married another woman. Lauren, much like Sydney’s mother, has wormed
her way into Vaughn’s affections in order to gain access to sensitive CIA information.
When Michael discovers his wife’s betrayal, Sydney’s father, Jack, advises Vaughn to
kill Lauren, offers him the key to his private arsenal, and notes that he often regrets
having let Irena survive after discovering her disloyalty. Sydney, who has every reason to
want Lauren dead, is appalled at her father’s suggestion and tells Vaughn that he cannot
murder his wife and live peacefully with the decision because it violates their humanity
which values life over revenge. In the season ﬁnale, “Resurrection,” it is Sydney’s voice
that reigns supreme, as Vaughn comes face-to-face with Lauren and decides that he will
only disﬁgure her with hydrochloric acid because Sydney would not want him to murder
her, and his love for Sydney is the most important thing to him. Of course, pouring
hydrochloric acid on someone hardly seems ethical, even though it is clear Vaughn must
exact some revenge in order to gain closure. This may be why Vaughn is stabbed from
behind before he can complete the dark task, a maneuver that allows him to remain a
viable love interest in the eyes of Sydney and viewers.

As this episode suggests, the ethical codes embedded in the series, while not
always clear-cut, are nonetheless highly-gendered, for the men of the series accept that
moral compromise is simply a part of espionage, while Sydney is careful to resist this
logic. Consider, for instance, “Reckoning,” which features Dixon, Sydney’s SD-6
partner, blowing up a building that contains, unbeknownst to him, four CIA agents

working to bring down the rogue organization. Although Sydney does not know of

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Dixon’s back-up detonator, she blames herself for the men’s deaths, insisting that they
died because of her double-agent status and her choice to hide it and the true nature of
SD-6 from her partner. Vaughn, however, insists that these operatives’ deaths were not in
vain because these men died in service to their country, and he argues that the revelation
of Sydney’s true loyalties would have only lead to more deaths—a reasoning Sydney is
uncomfortable accepting. In “Full Disclosure,” a similar scene occurs when Sydney, who
has been captured and supposedly brainwashed as Julia Thorne, is ordered to kill a man
in order to convince the Covenant that her loyalty lies with them. Since the Covenant will
kill her if she does not kill the man, Sydney is faced with a complex moral dilemma.
Ultimately, she decides to make the kill in order to survive, although she intensely
questions the ramiﬁcations of her choice. In this episode, it is again a man, CIA Assistant
Director Kendall, who plays the role of comforter, reassuring Sydney that she had no
choice in the matter — the man was dead no matter what she decided-— and arguing that
her execution had no real consequence since the man (who was not a saint anyway) was
as good as dead either way. But Sydney does not accept this justiﬁcation, stating “That
doesn’t lessen what I did.” (Sutherland and Swan 123-126)

The gendered divisions regarding ethical codes also hold true on LFN, where
Nikita struggles to accept the cold logic of her (primarily) male colleagues at Section
One. In season ﬁve, for instance, viewers learn that Nikita has been working for Center
(the organization running nmnerous sections) in order to make Section One a more
humane place for its employees, and throughout the series, the character primarily kills in
self-defense and constantly attempts to retain her compassion for others. Her male

colleagues, most notably Operations and her handler, Michael, however, understand that

161

their work requires signiﬁcant moral compromise and inhumane behavior. In “Nikita,”
for instance, Operations notes that Wilson’s character lacks discipline and despite
Michael’s recommendation that she be given more time to fulﬁll her potential,
Operations chastises Michael for becoming emotionally attached to the “material” and
tells Michael that all trainees are given two years to develop the necessary skills — no
more, no less. “If we start making exceptions,” he quips, “we’re no better than the CIA.
Cancel her.” Nikita, of course, receives a reprieve, but when she fails to make her ﬁrst
kill later in the episode, explaining that she is not a killer, her handler angrily retorts that
the minute he believes she is incapable of killing, she will be cancelled because in the

39 ‘6

“most clandestine organization on the planet, mistakes are not an option.”

Against this backdrop of stubborn inhumanity, Nikita’s actions and values quickly
become the standard the audience uses to measure right and wrong throughout the series.
However, LFN is more pessimistic about its depiction of the compromises necessary in
the post-Cold War era. As Michael Ventura suggests, La F emme Nikita might be enjoyed
by viewers because it reassures us that “the representatives of Ofﬁcialdom can be
depended upon in a pinch.” However, he also notes that La F emme Nikita is particularly
bleak in scope. Whereas Buffy is largely uncorrupted by her struggle against the demons
of Sunnydale in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Nikita ultimately falls victim to Section One,
for while she resists killing and torturing at ﬁrst, “she soon breaks ﬁngers with the best of
them.” A prime example of Nikita’s demise and corruption occurs in season ﬁve’s “Deja
Vu All Over Again?” when Nikita shows complete resignation to the fact that a new

section recruit must be sacriﬁced during a mission aimed at taking down powerful

terrorist leaders. Such resignation, especially about the death of one of her own

162

colleagues, is an emotion that would have been impossible for she and viewers to feel just
a few seasons prior, and thus the entire trajectory of La F emme Nikita suggests that the
series must really be read as a warning about moral and political compromise. As
Ventura writes: “You want Ofﬁcialdom to be on your side? OK, it's on your side--sort of.
But it's evil. If it has to threaten you and your children to stop a terrorist, it will. Being on
society's side doesn't necessarily mean being on your side.” Put another way, the show
calls into serious questions the principles of the American democratic majority by
acknowledging that in its pursuit for the greatest good, minorities will be necessarily
silenced and even sacriﬁced.
WEResistanceJand the Spy Burea_uc_ra_cy

Regardless of the ﬁnal development of these operatives, the tension between the
individual female agent and the ethics of the male-governed agency she serves is at the
forefront of both Alias and La F emme Nikita. The shows paint a picture of a male
political system that believes the ends justify the means and that moral compromises are
just part of the job, while Sydney and Nikita are not so sure, explicitly calling into
question the ethics of their own and their agencies’ actions. Plot construction such as this
helps Sydney and Nikita retain a sense of heroism as they move through their ethically
gray worlds and, perhaps more importantly, prevents the series from falling into the trap
Frances Early warns about in “The Female Just Warriors Reimagined” when she remarks
that the women warriors present in both popular culture and history often remain
prisoners of male-centered notions about what it means to be a warrior. In other words,
Early posits that too many female warriors simply become male-gendered in popular

narratives; a trend that is dangerous because it echoes Michel Foucault’s warning that

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“marginalized people can be drawn to the power of ‘reverse discourse,”’ whereby they
ﬁnd themselves seeking legitimacy “in the same vocabulary, using the same categories
by which they were disqualiﬁed” (Foucault qtd. in Early 57). Because Nikita and Sydney
are continually subjected to a patriarchal spy system that limits and controls their choices,
however, these women are sensitive to their own abuses of power and are depicted as less
likely to recreate the same system of abuse when they are in control, as evidenced by
their constant ethical questioning and struggles to retain their humanity in an inhumane
covert world.

In fact, more than any of their female predecessors on spy television, Nikita and
Sydney are subordinated by a patriarchal system and by individual men who direct and
dominate both their personal and professional lives. For example, it is Arvin Sloane that
tricks Sydney into joining SD-6 by pretending that the organization he runs is the CIA.
When Sydney breaks SD-6 protocol and informs her ﬁance', Danny, that she is a spy
because she wants her marriage to be free from secrets, Sloane kills her ﬁance for
breaching security protocol and then threatens to kill Sydney when she fails to return to
the agency quickly enough after Danny’s death. Sloane’s deception and threats ultimately
force Sydney into a double life aimed at destroying SD-6 and freeing herself from a life
of espionage, but even in the CIA, she is subjected to a male handler, Michael Vaughn,
who later becomes her lover; to her former partner Marcus Dixon, who eventually takes a
leadership position at the CIA; and to her father, Jack Bristow, who holds a superior
professional rank and whose affections he has largely withheld from Sydney since her

chﬂdhood.

164

Nikita is likewise controlled and subjugated by men at Section One, which
constantly monitors her in both public and private. As aforementioned, the pilot episode
features Operations threatening to “cancel” Nikita if she fails to succeed as a section
operative on his timetable, and it is her team leader, Michael, who evaluates Nikita’s
progress and usefulness as an operative. Throughout the series, Nikita also engages in a
romantic relationship with Michael, who continually pushes her away and manipulates
her emotions for both professional and personal gain. Perhaps most signiﬁcant, however,
is the fact that Nikita’s own father, Mr. Jones, is revealed as the head of Center, which
controls several anti-terrorist sections, including Section One. In “The Man Behind the
Curtain,” Nikita learns that her father was ultimately responsible for framing her for
murder, recruiting her from prison, and then subjecting her to Section One’s training and
tribulations because he wanted her to take over as the head of Center when he dies—
Nikita’s desires be damned.

In both shows, then, the female protagonists are controlled by individual men that
dominate both their private and professional lives, and both are forced/tricked into a life
of espionage and secrecy from which they continually try to free themselves. Of course,
they are not the only female spies on television to have been subjected to a patriarchal
system of control and power. Agent 99, April Dancer, Jaime Sommers and Amanda King
all worked for spy agencies led by male bosses, held subordinate positions to their male
counterparts, and Jaime Sommers was especially subjugated to the masculine economies
of science and espionage which, along with her ﬁancé, outﬁtted her with bionic limbs and
“drafted” her into a life of spying, which, by the end of the series, she also wishes to

escape. What is different about Alias and LFN is that the degree of oppression and

165

control to which the female agent is subjected is more extreme and total than that which
is featured in other series and that these operatives possess a physical agency that allows
them to violently challenge that system of oppression in addition to state enemies.

More speciﬁcally, Sydney and Nikita are both skilled in martial arts, engage in
hand-to-hand combat, and handle a range of weapons while in the ﬁeld. Because they
were trained by their agencies, their physical feats are mostly suited for destroying state
enemies, but especially in Alias, Sydney’s violence is often coupled with her desire to
overthrow those who would demean, exploit, or limit women. The best example of this
dynamic occurs in “Phase One,” which aired immediately after the 2003 Super Bowl. In
this episode, Sydney goes undercover as a high-class prostitute where she must model
black lingerie for a computer server guard and his bodyguard. When Sydney appears, the
guard rejects the black outﬁt (apparently because he can) and sends her back to change
into a red outﬁt of the same nature, ﬁnally giving his approval, dismissing his colleague
and then leading Sydney to a nearby bed. When Sydney straddles him, the man believes
he is about to engage in intercourse, but Sydney uses this opportunity to extract a choke
wire from her bracelet, wraps it around his neck, and before asking him for the location
of a computer server in the room (her real mission), she angrily asks him: “What was
wrong with the black one. Do you think it’s comfortable wearing clothes like this?” and
eventually elbows him in the head to knock him unconscious. Alias episodes, such as
this, can thus be read as centering on Sydney’s attempts to defeat those who perpetuate a
patriarchal system that values women for their sexuality as it much as they can be read as

being about Sydney’s attempts to defeat broader, national threats.

166

But while Sydney (and Nikita’s) violence may work to challenge a patriarchal
system and the association it makes with femininity and passivity, it is important to note
that in the end, their violence can only push the system so far. For instance, Sydney and
viewers understand that if she succeeds in eliminating Arvin Sloane or if Nikita succeeds
in eliminating Operations, others are ready to take these leaders’ places and that SD-6,
the CIA, and Section One all possess the power, technology, and globally integrated
networks to eliminate these female operatives if they should ever try to escape or usurp
the system too forcefully. As a result, these series ultimately suggest that powerful
systems of control cannot be destroyed, as radical feminists have sought to accomplish,
because too many powerful people are invested in the system’s continuation. The best
that the female agent/agency can do, these narratives suggest, is challenge the system
from the inside. However, as La F emme Nikita suggests, even this recourse poses serious
problems for those remaining inside such systems for too long, for in the series ﬁnal
episode, “A Time for Every Purpose,” Nikita promises her father than she will take over
Center upon his death. While the episode implies that Nikita will try to use her new
power to rebuild Section in a way that makes the outﬁt a more humane place with a
greater separation of public and private spheres, as Takacs writes, this is at best a
disappointing conclusion because it belies both Nikita and viewers’ desires for the
system’s total abolition. “We’d be happier as an audience if Nikita blew the institution up
from the inside, even if she had to perish in the process.” “But this conclusion,” she
writes, “captures more realistically the political content of everyday struggles over social
power, in which reform is often purchased at the price of cooptation” (175). And indeed

this cooptation has its price, for, as aforementioned, within the ﬁrst few seasons, Nikita

167

soon “breaks ﬁngers with the best of them,” leading viewers to question whether she will
really be able to change the system of Section One and other anti-terrorism units from the
inside.

Les Femmes Fatales: Sydney and Nikita as Sexualized Spies

As spies, both Nikita and Sydney disrupt the narrative of the just male warrior and
carve out a new space for women in Western culture. As Jean Bethke Elshtain describes
in Women and War, male warriors are the “avatars of a nation’s sanctioned violence.
They are the ones who protect and inscribe the order of the society they defend, and
because they ﬁght for the values placed at the center of society, in the eyes of society
they are untouched by the negative associations of the violent acts they commit, which
are seen as a distasteful necessity” (qtd. in Ng 106). While Elshtain does not explicitly
say so in this passage, women and children often play the role of “that which needs
protecting” in warrior narratives, so by featuring female warriors who are physically
aggressive and violent, Alias and LFN disrupt that narrative by featuring female
protectors rather than females in need of protection.

This does not mean, however, that the female warrior/spy has eschewed all
feminine accoutrements; in fact, the female warrior, at least as she is envisioned in both
La F emme Nikita and Alias, uses‘conventional notions of femininity to advance her
individual and her nation’s agenda. As discussed earlier in this chapter, both Nikita and
Sydney are conventionally beautiful protagonists who are also skilled in physical combat
and weaponry, and thus possess a new female agency that relies both on the body’s
physical strength and the ways the female body is read by others operating in a

patriarchal system.

168

This can be seen as early as the pilot episode of LFN (“Nikita”), when Nikita asks
why she was chosen to work for Section One out of all of those in prison. Michael’s
answer is a simple fragment: “A woman with your looks, who can kill in cold blood.” Or
as Madeline, one of Section One’s leaders, tells Nikita: “You can learn to shoot. You can
learn to ﬁght, but there is no weapon as powerful as your femininity.” Unsurprisingly,
then, one of the ﬁrst things Nikita must learn to do as an operative is turn her body into a
feminized weapon. More speciﬁcally, Nikita, who previously dressed in oversized
clothes, possessed ratty hair, and sported nose rings, must learn to apply makeup, walk
smoothly in heels, and adjust her posture to project a softer rather than harder disposition,
in addition to shooting guns and engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Nikita must also
learn to use her sexuality to her advantage in the ﬁeld. One of the best examples of this
dynamic occurs in “Love,” when she and Michael go undercover as a kinky, leather-clad,
punk-rocking married couple to inﬁltrate an arms smuggling ring attempting to unleash a
nerve gas. The master criminal in this episode, Bauer, hires the pair to release nerve gas
in an ofﬁce building, but then refuses to release them after the job is ﬁnished. Instead,
Bauer holds Niktia and Michael at gun point and demands that the two engage in sexual
intercourse for his night’s viewing pleasure. In order to ensure their escape and help
thwart a second release of nerve gas aimed at destroying a much larger population, Nikita
must perform a strip tease for both Michael and Bauer, who is watching via a security
camera mounted in their bedroom. Nikita’s ability to perform the sexually uninhibited
dance causes Bauer to zoom in on Nikita’s body during her performance, which, in turn,
allows Michael time to send an explosive through an air vent unnoticed and eventually

secure their escape. Of course, the viewers watching the episode are also privy to Bauer’s

169

zoom lens and thus Nikita is explicitly subjected to the male gaze; however, in this
episode Nikita’s objectiﬁcation is really part of her subjectivity as she plays the role of
sexualized object only to help Michael evade Bauer’s gaze and secure their escape. In
other words, Nikita’s sexuality is both a means to an end and an outlet for viewer
titillation.

While Sydney is not the street-urchin Nikita is during her pre-spy days, the Alias
character is depicted as the girl-next-door who prefers jeans and minimal makeup while
not operating in the ﬁeld. When Sydney is employed on missions, however, she, like
Nikita, must often adopt a hyper-feminine and sexualized persona in order to evade
suspicion or garner an underestimation of her talents. Part of the constant use of
sexualized disguise on Alias stems from the creators’ attempts to temper Sydney’s
strength. As J.J. Abrams admits, part of the show’s challenge was to construct a character
who is sanctioned to commit violent acts, thereby challenging viewers’ notions about
traditional gender roles, yet who is also sexy and feminine enough to appeal to
contemporary network viewers”. In order to address “the problem” of Sydney’s prowess,
then, Abrams and his team frequently employed the convention of disguise in scenarios
that also required Sydney to engage in violence. In “So It Begins,” for instance, Sydney
wears a blonde wig and a short, blue rubber dress on a mission to Russia, where she also
engages in a kick-boxing ﬁght with an international foe, while in “Parity,” she sports a
red-wig and a low-cut, high-slit, red dress while swinging from a metal chain to enter into
a ﬁght with her nemeses, Anna.

But while the sexualization of Sydney may have tempered her strength, it also

caused many viewers to read the character as particularly empowering. To illustrate this

170

paradox, it is important to note that Sydney oﬁen pairs her sexy disguises with a silly or
incompetent persona in order to fool her would—be-captors into believing her incapable of
spy work. In “Truth Be Told,” for instance, Sydney is caught returning from a
reconnaissance mission via a closed access stairwell. To maneuver her way out of the
situation, she begins to explain to the guard in a southern American accent that she was
just looking for the bathroom and that she has had too much to drink. She begins pleading
with the guard not to tell her boss that she has had so much alcohol because she will be
ﬁred. She also readjusts her breasts and remarks that she likes the guard’s tie, and as a
result of her performance, the guard assesses that Sydney cannot be dangerous, and lets
her go.

These actions reﬂect what Joan Riviere called “the feminine masquerade” in her
1929 article “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” The piece details the case of a female
patient who habitually undermined her own
intellectual authority by ﬂirting with her male
colleagues after successfully delivering public
speeches. As Kerry Maguire notes in “The Cloak of
Deﬁnition: Fantasies of Feminine Identity,” the
woman often felt anxiety aﬁer delivering her most

successful speeches, which “led to an

 

uncontrollable urge to behave coquettishly with her

Fig. 21: DVD cover of

Alias: The Complete male colleagues, thereby undercutting the image of
First Season. Released
by Buena Vista Home authority and power generated by her public

Entertainment in 2003.
performance” (43). Riviere, a psychoanalyst,

l7l

believed that the woman performed this feminine masquerade in order to diffuse the
anger she felt her male colleagues would direct at her for her possession of masculine
power or the “penis” (3 8).

Unlike Riviere’s patient, however, Sydney does not employ a feminine
masquerade out of anxiety, rather she consciously adopts that persona in order to advance
her own agenda, which in this case is to garner information about a weapon’s facility in
Taipei. By using the feminine masquerade, then, Sydney acknowledges that a general
stereotype exists throughout the globe that paints women as silly, incompetent, and
generally non-threatening, and the show suggests that people who subscribe to these
stereotypes run a grave risk. If woman are able to consciously perform femininity in
order to garner an underestimation of their talents, then they gain an advantage. In the
case of Alias, that advantage allows women to undermine political regimes, dismantle
weapons cartels, and disrupt national balances of power. And thus Alias creates a space
where women have not yet eradicated unfavorable views about their talents and potential
in the political arena, but where they also control the ways in which they are read by
others and use unfavorable views about women to their advantage.

The spy genre, however, has always played with the art of disguise and
emphasized its connections to fantasy and the excise of power. As John Cawelti and
Bruce Rosenberg explain, folktales, myths and stories indicate that there is a perennial
human fascination with disguise that rests in the “thrill of trying on other identities—
social, racial, sexual or chronological” (l3). Disguise, they argue, allows one to
temporarily escape from one’s own identity in a controlled manner that nonetheless

allows for a “total escape from the constraints of self” and, in the genre, often allows one

172

to carry out a secret excise of power. On one level, then, Alias and La F emme Nikita are
merely drawing on the genre’s conventions to tell an exciting story since so much of
espionage tales’ excitement hinges on whether or not the secret agent will be exposed as
something other than what he or she appears to be. But given that the protagonists of
Alias and La F emme Nikita are female, the art of (sexualized) disguise and misdirection
also has feminist implications because in these series female sexuality is often a means to
an end, a thing to be consciously performed in order to advance a mission. And
ultimately, what these narratives suggest is that female spies who possess physical
prowess make better agents because, unlike men, they can hide their power behind a
number of feminine stereotypes (the drunken ﬂirt, the shy school girl, the dumb blonde,
the harmless secretary) when such power needs to be hidden, but they nonetheless
possess the power they need to defeat enemies when the situation calls for such
destruction. In other words, men may play characters to hide their true identity in the spy
series, but they lack the range of stock character roles that female agents can perform to
hide both their power and identity from the culture that circulates those stereotypes.

It is noteworthy, too, that these spy series’ emphasis on disguise and the ability of
the female operative to control the male gaze for her own purposes has its roots in the
iconic status of the femme fatale, who likewise seeks to turn patriarchal notions of
sexuality to her own advantage. (And thus it is no coincidence that the title of Peta
Wilson’s series is La Femme Nikita). Femme fatales, like female spies, are examples of
women coping with the history of cultural mediation that has, for so long, positioned
them as passive objects of male attention and design. They, more speciﬁcally, challenge

the “logic of visuality” that “bifurcates ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ into the incompatible

173

positions of intellectuality and spectacularity” and then assigns women to the latter
(Chow qtd. in Tacaks 166). However, as Tacaks argues, precisely because she controls
the way in which she is seen through disguise and performance, the femme fatale/female
spy is also a polysemic character that multiplies the opportunities for audience
identiﬁcation and ups the semiotic ante for the image-commodity as a whole and may
help to explain why these series were able to achieve success in different television
markets both abroad and domestically (157).

But even while the broadcast narratives negotiated Sydney and Nikita’s power
and femininity in a way that created a polysemic character that used her conventional

Figure 22: DVD covers of La Femme Nikita ’s second, third and fourth season. Released by Warner
Home Video.

 

for these series, which often focused on these agent’s sexuality in ways that were largely

devoid of narrative context and thus offered up these women as spectacles for male
viewing consumption and negated some of the power they held as female operatives. For
example, one ad campaign for La F emme Nikita simply featured a sultry photo of Wilson

next to the tagline "36-24-.45" (Dempsey), while another ad promoting USA’s Sunday

174

night line-up featured a photo of Wilson seductively gazing into the camera above copy
which told viewers: “On USA, it’s not the criminals who are the most wanted” (USA
Network). These ads, in other words, emphasized Wilson and Nikita’s desirability, rather
than her talents, strengths, vulnerabilities, and desires, and when the series was released
on DVD, the packaging likewise focused on Nikita’s lethal sexuality more than her
character. For example, each of the ﬁve seasons’ DVD set features Peta Wilson
seductively donning a tight and/or low cut black outﬁt complete with a gun (with the
exception of season one, where she fails to wield a weapon). The problem with these
covers is that they play on the stereotype of the dangerous but highly sexualized fantasy
girl and make violence look sexy, thereby
erasing the moral complexity of espionage
and Nikita’s struggles to retain her
humanity which the series works so hard
to bring to the forefront.

As David Roger Coon explains
about Alias, its television ad campaigns
also relied on traditional female
objectiﬁcation and sex appeal to sell the I_ . . Nut W s rim-z ugn-nl

Shes .1 concealed weapon

product, even though the broadcast

narrative embarked on cast-wide A L I AB

disruptions of gender norms (3). This was Sundays 9/8c f723-'Lj

 

especially true in some of the posters that Fig. 23: Season one promotional poster for
Alias.

promoted the series in its ﬁrst season,

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which were often devoid of any existing narrative, and presented Sydney as pure
spectacle. An early example of a such a poster features Garner in the rubber dress she
wears in the series’ second episode, “So it Begins,” and the tagline “Not just a secret
agent. She’s a concealed weapon.”

As Coon explains, the poster as a whole seems in line with the development of the
series. The image presents Sydney as a beautiful woman displaying a variety of signiﬁers
that mark her as traditionally feminine and imply the passivity and weakness usually
associated with traditional femininity. The text, however, indicates that all is not what it
seems, as the phrase “concealed weapon” indicates that a certain danger and power lurks
beneath the surface of the dress. The idea that a strong violent woman may exist in the
same body as a hyperfeminine young woman is central to the concept of the series, which
the poster reinforces, but the photographic image is so dominant that it likely outweighs
the idea suggested by the text, which is also positioned under Sydney’s right breast,
forcing viewers’ eyes to that region of her body. As a black and white image, Coon also
notes that the photo depends on its contrast of light and dark to create its impact, and thus
the viewer’s eyes are likewise drawn to the two lightest portions of the image—Gamer’s
face and breast. Additionally, Sydney is looking away from the camera, positioning her
as an object to be looked at, rather than a subject returning the viewer’s gaze.

The promotional material surrounding these series, then, ultimately works to
temper both Nikita and Sydney’s strength by hyper-sexualizing or hyper-feminizing
them. But precisely because these women are depicted as ultra-feminine, they challenge
their gender’s very association with passivity and weakness — a combination that, as

hinted at earlier, proved empowering for some female viewers. As J .J . Abrams noted

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about the casting of Jennifer Garner: “You don’t want to look at somebody and go,
‘Damn, she can kick ass! ”’ Garner “has this quality of the girl next door, the girl you’d
want to know or date or be. And then the surprise—she’s lethal.”And indeed, this
“surprise” of a conventionally feminine woman being violent and powerful is what fans
of Alias, Nikita and Buﬁj» the Vampire Slayer have ultimately responded too. As one fan
of Buﬁﬂz writes, “I adore Buffy and her ability to kick-butt, check her manicure and still
throw out a rejoinder witty enough to leave us in stitches and her joe in the dust”
(Anders), while a Nikita viewer describes the protagonist as “the peroxide-stickly ﬁgure
of Peta Wilson” before going on to celebrate the fact that, to the show’s terrorists, this
stick ﬁgure“is La Femme Nikita, ready to kick ass and defend her right to do so!”
(Brandstatter). Likewise, one fan writing on Amazon.com about Alias notes that, for her,
Sydney’s “sexuality was always very empowering rather than just titillating,” presumably
because her femininity was used to accomplish the operative’s own agenda and
contrasted nicely with the aggression and strength that Sydney soon displayed in the
narrative.

There are limitations to this type of “empowered” reading, however, for while
Nikita and Sydney challenge the idea that women should be passive and protected, that
gendered expectation is primarily linked with white, middle-class women. As Kimberly
Springer illustrates, African-Americans are “thought to be always already violent due to
their savage ancestry”, and “when it comes to women, race and violence, white North
American women are assumed to have been provoked to violence and are not permitted
violent impulses” (qtd. in Tung 110). As a result, black women’s physically powerful and

violent bodies in popular culture are not read identically to white women’s bodies. In

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other words, “a ﬁerce, kick-ass black woman” is more likely to be read as “hyper—
aggressive, wild, untamable, and vicious rather than as an admirable warrior woman
breaking down age old stereotypes that white women invoke” (Tung 111). Likewise, the
kick-ass Asian/Asian- American woman is not as transgressive either because she ﬁts
neatly into a pre-existing cultural stereotype that (especially in the Kung Fu genre)
reinscribes notions of the natural connection between marital arts and Asian bodies (Tung
114)

But while there are limits on Sydney and Nikita’s transgressive potential, their
contribution to the landscape of female warriors that emerged in popular culture during
the late 1990s and early 20003 has helped shape the public’s perception about what can
be expected from and, even, what is desired from real life female combatants. In other
words, the image of the female warrior popularized by shows such as La F emme Nikita
and Alias may have paved the way for the “heroization” of real women involved in war,
as evidenced by the initial media reports regarding Private Jessica Lynch. In 2003, Lynch
survived an ambush by Iraqis when her convoy took a wrong turn, and she was later
rescued from her captors by U.S. special forces, who documented the rescue with a video
camera. When the news of Lynch’s capture and rescue were ﬁrst reported in the U.S.,
media outlets depicted Lynch as a female Rambo from the hills of West Virginia, who
bravely fought enemy combatants while under attack. Bloggers point to The Washington
Post ’s April 3, 2003 article, “She Was Fighting to the Death,” as the ﬁrst news report to
engage in hero-making. In this piece, Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb reported that Pfc.

Jessica Lynch:

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fought ﬁercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the
Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, ﬁring her weapon until she ran

out of ammunition, U.S. ofﬁcials said yesterday.

Lynch, a l9-year-old supply clerk, continued ﬁring at the Iraqis even after she
sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit
die around her in ﬁghting March 23, one ofﬁcial said. The ambush took place
after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a

wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

‘She was ﬁghting to the death,’ the ofﬁcial said. ‘She did not want to be taken

alive.’ (Schmidt and Loeb A01)

While the Post noted later in the article that several other “ofﬁcials” cautioned that “the
precise sequence of events was still being determined,” that initial intelligence about the
incident was garnered from “Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be
assessed,” and that Pentagon ofﬁcials had only “heard ‘rumors’ of Lynch’s heroics but
had had no conﬁrmation” (A01), the headline of the article and the ﬁrst two paragraphs
suggest that the paper was keen to depict Lynch as a type of female Rambo and promote
the heroics of American troops in Iraq.

In an April 27, 2007 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Michael DeLong, the
military representative in 2003 who dealt with politicians regarding the capture and
rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch in Iraq, also explains that based on initial reports which
stated that Lynch had gone down ﬁghting, politicians from her home state, West Virginia,

wanted the military to award her the Medal of Honor. DeLong, however, argued that

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initial combat reports are often wrong, and thus more time was needed to see whether her
actions merited a medal—a move that he argues, angered politicians who repeatedly
pressured his ofﬁce to recommend her for the medal and repeatedly argued that “a medal
would be good for women in the military” (A27). Presumably, politicians believed that
such an honor would help dispel the image of the military as a hyper-masculine bastion
where women do not belong and even attract new female recruits at a time when military
recruitrnents levels were lower than desired.

When the military later discovered that Lynch's weapon had never been ﬁred and
that she had merely been a passenger in a vehicle that went astray, came under ﬁre and
crashed, DeLong wrote that while her actions “were understandable and justiﬁable,”
“they could not be labeled heroic” (A27). “In the case of Ms. Lynch, overzealous
politicians and a frenzied press distorted facts” he writes, even though Private Lynch has
always denied her heroic status. In fact, when Lynch was interviewed by Diane Sawyer in
2003, she claimed that the Pentagon used her to symbolize American courage and female
strength, even though she “did not shoot, not a round” and “went down praying to my
knees” (Lynch, “Interview”). On April 24, 2007, Lynch gave congressional testimony
before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that
the Pentagon had erroneously portrayed her as a “Rambo from West Virginia,” when she
never ﬁred a shot after her truck was ambushed. “I am still confused as to why they chose
to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day
were, in fact, legendary....The bottom line is the American people are capable of
determining their own ideals of heroes and they don't need to be told elaborate tales”

(Lynch, “Testimony”).

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The type of “elaborate tale” that the media and politicians circulated about Lynch,
however, ﬁt neatly within the images of female warriors already circulating in the
nation’s popular culture, which featured white, feminine women defending the nation
with an automatic weapon and challenging enemies of the state. What the media seemed
to be looking for was a real life Sydney Bristow or La Femme Nikita to hold up as a
symbol of both national and feminine prowess. Interestingly, controversy also arose in
the Lynch story regarding the varying treatment and media coverage of Lynch and
Shoshanna Johnson, an African-American soldier captured in the same ambush as Lynch,
who was shot through both legs and held twenty-two days as an Iraqi prisoner before
being rescued. Critics, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, have posited that Johnson's race was
a major reason that she received little media attention and a lower disability beneﬁt than
Lynch (I-Iockstader), an argument that takes on another element when viewed in light of
Tung’s argument, which demonstrates that black female combatants are more likely to be
read as naturally “aggressive and vicious,” rather than as an admirable warrior woman
breaking down stereotypes that white women invoke and are therefore less suitable for
the types of “hero-making” the media engaged in when the Lynch story broke.
Conclusion

Focusing primarily on the threat of post-Cold War terrorism, Alias and La F emme
Nikita served as a window into a new era of international relations and exempliﬁed a shift
towards greater moral ambiguity involved in the ﬁght against global threats. The series
asked to what extent a government or outﬁt can go in order to curb terrorist threats before
it becomes terrorist-like itself -- a dilemma that took on new meaning during post-9/ 11

critiques of the U.S.’s handling of the War on Terror. Both shows also broke with the

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male-centeredness that had governed the spy genre to date, as both featured female
protagonists who could out-smart, out-kick and out-shoot their male enemies, helping the
public to believe and even expect that such heroics were possible from women, as
evidenced, in part, by the media coverage of Jessica Lynch.

By blending sex, violence, complicated story lines, romance, stylized sets, and
strong writing, Nikita and Alias ultimately injected new life into the spy genre and earned
both series a niche in dramatic programming. La F emme Nikita, for example, helped
launch the ﬂedging USA Network, hoping to gain viewers through original and
innovative programming in the 19905. As Ted Edwards notes, the series was “adopted as
a darling of both the critics and the audience” from its inception, and it became cable’s
highest-rated series, attracting a weekly audience of two million viewers (ix). The series’
fans were ﬁercely loyal, too. When negotiations broke down between the production
studio and the network during the series’ fourth season, the program was cancelled. After
releasing the news, however, the USA Network received over 25,000 letters and email
from forty different countries protesting the series’ end. Fans also purchased a full-page
advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter, calling for another season—a request the
network partially met by creating eight more episodes for a truncated ﬁfth season (P.
Anderson).

Kevin Weisman, the actor who played Marshall Flinkman on Alias, argues that
his show also achieved a type of cult status in the television world. More speciﬁcally, he
notes that while Alias was never a top-ten show in the ratings, it produced a loyal,
discerning, and invested set of fans who often knew more about the show than the actors

themselves. Weisman posits that viewers’ investment in the series is what helped place

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Alias in the “cultish ‘lore’ of television history” (3). More so than Nikita, Alias was also
praised by the television industry: on top of its eleven Emmy nominations in 2002 alone,
Alias also took home The People’s Choice award for Best New Drama, and Garner won
the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama that same year. Even after its
cancellation in 2005, the show continued in syndication on TNT in the afternoon time
slot of 4 pm, attracting viewers who missed the show when it aired at 9 pm.
approximately four and a half years earlier. Interest in the show has also continued to be
generated by the series’ media tie-in novels, whose last installment to-date appeared in
December of 2006.

It is important to acknowledge, however, that while these series were innovative
in many ways, Alias and La F emme Nikita were also part of a larger spy television trend,
especially as they featured reluctant spies forced or tricked into espionage and continually
called into question the worthiness of intelligence agencies. As Britton points out in his
survey of 1990 spy series, almost every spy series of that decade (except 7 Days and The
Secret Adventures of Jules Verne) featured reluctant heroes forced under threat to engage
in televised covert wars (241). Much more than in the 19803, he writes, modern spies
were seen to oppose both evil and the murky conditions of corrupted secret services—a
trend he attributes to the fact that agencies like the CIA were struggling to retain their
inﬂuence and power after the end of the Cold War, and thus featured characters like “The
Official” in The Invisible Man, who was as much a prisoner of his agency’s need to exist
as he was an agent of it (241).

With the events of 9/1 1, however, some critics have claimed that the age of

cynicism ended, as action adventure creators felt more pressure to create positive and

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patriotic messages and understood that horrifying spectacles could no longer be used for
mindless entertainment (Britton 253). Others, however, see these conclusions as
premature, pointing out that spy shows still focus on the unethical use of power by the
CIA, suggesting that even in an age where cynicism has been tempered and the CIA is
working with Hollywood to ensure more positive depictions of intelligence agencies,
organization, such as the CIA, have been unable to withstand the mistrust of the CIA

deeply rooted in its ﬁfty year history.

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Conclusion

Only a handful of women have emerged as prominent secret agents in the spy
genre’s ﬁfty-ﬁve year history on television. As mentioned in this project’s introduction,
roughly 50% of the 162 espionage programs that have aired in the U.S. and Britain
between 1951 and 2006 feature a single male protagonist, while 17% center on an all-
male spy team or partnership. Only 6% of these series, on the other hand, feature a lone
female protagonist, and only 2.5% center on an all-female spy team or partnership (See
appendix). In the remaining 25% of programs, which feature a co-sexed partnership
or a co-sexed team of agents, women have mostly taken a subordinate role to their male
partners and comprise just one part of a multi-member team.

In fact, the subordination of female spies to their male partners spans most of the
spy genre’s history on television and manifests itself in the lower ranks these women hold
and in their weaker physical agency -- an agency that is vital for action-adventure
heroes/heroines to possess. For example, Louise Baker (Biﬂ Baker U.S.A.), Agent 99
(Get Smart), April Dancer (The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.), Jaime Sommers (The Bionic
Woman) and Amanda King (Scarecrow and Mrs. King) are just some of the characters
that have been subordinated as action-adventure characters by their lack of physical
prowess in dangerous situations, while Louise, Amanda, Jaime, and even The Avengers’
Cathy Gale, Emma Peel, and Tara King all held lower positions in their spy
bureaucracy’s than did their male cohorts, if they were ofﬁcially employed by a spy
bureaucracy at all.

The appearance of La F emme Nikita and Alias, however, marked a departure from

the genre’s history of subordinating women in the spy drama (and spy comedy) by

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featuring lone, female protagonists who were skilled in weapons and martial arts and
quickly rose through the ranks of their agency to become one of its most valued and
talented operatives. Additionally, these women navigated their way through a morally-
complex world dominated by men, while struggling to maintain their humanity and
compassion for those entrapped by a covert system that, while well-intentioned,
continually demanded repugnant moral compromise and the sacriﬁce of decent
individuals in the name of the greater good.

Indeed, one of the most striking strengths of women in the spy series is that they
often represent the voice of compassion and humanity and hamper the efforts of their
espionage agency to accomplish its security goals when those efforts infringe on human
rights to life and liberty. Much more than The Six Million Dollar Man, for instance, The
Bionic Woman continually stressed the need for the OSI to reﬂect on its treatment of
humankind in a time of rapid technological proliferation. Likewise, Amanda King’s
emphasis on kindness and empathy helped her to succeed as an operative and prevented
The Agency and Lee Stetson from relying too heavily on brute force to accomplish their
missions, while both Nikita and Sydney Bristow constantly questioned, and encouraged
viewers to question, how many moral compromises spy outﬁts could make before they
should be considered inhumane and even terrorist-like in nature.

But while the spy genre has drawn on traditionally female traits, such as
nurturance and compassion, it has also taken a dichotomous approach to female sexuality
throughout its history. In earlier programs, such as I Led 3 Lives and Biff Baker U.S.A.,
female sexuality was mostly depicted as dangerous to national security. In the former

show, for instance, numerous episodes featured communist women who used their

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sexuality to seduce U.S. government employees and citizens in order to gain access to
sensitive information or to manipulate their comrades in order to advance within the
communist party. As Julie Wheelwright’s “Poisoned Honey: The Myth of Women in
Espionage” explains, the depiction of female sexuality as dangerous is not unique to
American television, as popular accounts of spying circulated by male officials,
journalists and historians have often depicted female spies as seductresses who value
sexual and material power over patriotism and prize the overthrow of men above the call
of duty. In fact, Wheelwright suggests that this is probably the most popular depiction of
women in the spy genre, as is partly evidenced by the enduring popularity of the Mata
Hari myth.

However, the sexualization of female spies is not always linked with national
threat or material power, although contemporary spy series continue to employ the trope
by employing sexualized women in villainous roles. Instead, in some spy programs,
including La F emme Nikita and Alias, the spy heroine often performs hyperfeminine and
sexualized roles out of patriotism (or at least survival), as such performances encourage
others to underestimate their talents, allow them access to secret information or valuable
objects, and misdirect their would-be captors so they and their colleagues can accomplish
an agency goal. This depiction of female sexuality as a means to a just end marks a
speciﬁc departure from other spy tales, especially those appearing in ﬁlm and literature,
and the James Bond ﬁlms, in particular, where beautiful women primarin function as a
type of trophy for the male secret agent, signaling both his and his nation’s desirability to

viewers and readers (T. Jenkins 309-310).

187

The examination of the roles and representations of women in the spy genre is
important because these narratives contribute to popular conceptions of national heroes,
ideal citizenship, and the role of feminism in national discourses. The elevation of Jessica
Lynch to heroic status would have been much less plausible to the American public if
stories of female warriors, such as Nikita and Sydney Bristow, had not been circulating in
the years previous to and concurrent with her rescue from Iraqi captors in 2003.
Likewise, the gendered gloriﬁcation of CIA operative Johnny “Mike” Spann during the
early U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as a selﬂess patriot and the molding of his wife (who
was also a CIA operative) into a national symbol of sacriﬁce would not have been as
powerful (or convenient) if popular images had not been circulating for decades which
featured the masculine spy working to protect his family from national threats.

And ultimately, the gendered and racialized narratives of the spy genre are
partially affecting the recruitment efforts of intelligence organizations struggling to
attract both female and ethnic minority applicants in the post-Cold war era. As former
CIA operative Lindsay Moran Kegley notes, the CIA and other Western intelligence
organizations, such Britain’s MI—6, are facing a new type of domestic and international
terrorism that demands a more diverse pool of recruits with greater cultural and linguistic
diversity. “The CIA desperately needs to reevaluate and revamp its training methods in
order to contend with the ever-growing terrorist threat,” she states. “Traditional spy vs.
spy tactics developed during the Cold War era, when it was entirely possible to sway
defectors from within the ranks of our main rival, the Soviet Union” no longer work and

are “totally inappropriate to combating terrorism.” “Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are

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not hanging out on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, the ﬁrst arena in which CIA spies in
training are still instructed and expected to trawl” (“Women in the CIA”).

In order to ﬁght this new threat, Moran suggests that the CIA needs to develop
new, more effective means of intelligence gathering and to recruit both men and women
ﬂuent in languages such as Arabic, Pashttm, and Urdu and those who will excel at
spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting foreigners who will sell secrets (“Women
in the CIA”). Moran believes that women are particularly well-suited to developing such
assets, stating that in her experience “the most successful spies—that is the CIA ofﬁcers
who were most adept at getting recruitments—were women because their job greatly
relies on intuition and a reﬁned set of social skills,” including the art of ﬂattery,
cajolement, nurturance and hiding one’s true feelings (qtd. in Hersch). “In my
experience,” she states, “these traits seemed to appear and/or develop more naturally in
female CIA officers” (qtd. in Hersch). However, Moran notes that the “CIA remains
very much a good ole boys network, and to move up through its ranks as a woman is
certainly challenging,” suggesting that the agency needs to rethink its masculine culture
and recruit more women and promote them into leadership positions (Hersch).

Popular images of sexualized females in spy television and ﬁlm and the television
genre’s lack of ethnically diverse women seem to be hampering both the CIA’s and
Britain’s recruitment efforts. In a May 17, 2007 issue of USA Today, Jeffrey Stinson
reported that both Britain’s domestic secret service, MI-S, and its CIA equivalent, MI-6,
are attempting to recruit more women to aid in the ﬁght against terrorism. In fact, MI-5
has recently launched a public recruiting campaign through ads on subway trains, buses

and radio in order to attract ﬁve hundred new members, especially women, whom David

189

Bickford, a former legal advisor for MI-S, believes often make better intelligence analysts
than men and tend to be good at handling informants. MI-6 is also trying to attract more
female recruits, but is ﬁnding it difficult to dispel the “Bond girl image” of female spies
who are used as seductresses in order to collect intelligence. In the Q and A section on
its website, MI-6 has posted a response to the question: “Will I be used as a honey-trap?”
with the answer: “Absolutely not. The service does not use this or similar tactics. MI-6
describes itself as a family-friendly service with ﬂexible working hours, maternity leave
and with few exceptions, partners and children can accompany officers on foreign
assignments” (qtd. in Stinson 9A).

This, however, is hardly the image of female spies represented on American (and
British) primetime television which are both exported to its neighbor across the Atlantic.
And despite the fact that two of MI-S’s last three directors were female and the
organization has been fairly evenly split between genders in recent years, women only
made up 38% of the latest class of new recruits (Stinson 9A). Charles Shoebridge, a
London security analyst and former counterterrorism intelligence officer with Scotland
Yard, also attributes that inequality to popular culture, noting that “Given the James Bond
image of intelligence work in much of the media, it shouldn’t be surprising if the most
job applicants are men” (qtd. in Stinson 9A). While simply blaming the media seems too
simplistic to explain recent drops in new female recruits, Shoebridge is right to reveal a
disconnect between the male-dominated popular images of the clandestine world and the
real needs and presence for and of women in actual intelligence agencies, although
British shows such as Spooks (or MI—5, as it is called in the U.S.) have begun depicting

important female operatives in the genre in more realistic terms.

190

Additionally, while the CIA has been more successful in recruiting women than
Britain (Moran notes that roughly 50% of the trainees in her class were female), as
recently as May 31, 2007, CIA director Michael Hayden remarked that the agency still
sorely needs men and women who reﬂect a greater cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity
(Willing), and the agency has also recognized that popular culture has a direct impact on
its recruitment efforts and the level of public support it receives. For example, Chase
Brandon, a former CIA operative, started the CIA's Hollywood ofﬁce in the mid-19908.
Under its guise, he has, among other things, served as a technical consultant on JAG,
Alias, and The Agency, and hired Jennifer Garner, the lead actress in Alias, to star in the
agency’s recruitment videos that were shown at college job fairs and on the CIA Careers
Website. Ultimately, Brandon believes that his work as the CIA ﬁlm liaison is important,
since in “perilous times,” the ways in which government ofﬁcials are depicted “educates
and informs the public, reassures the public, entertains the public” (qtd. in Hall,
“Hollywood”) and helps attract more desirable recruits.

Of course, the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have long recognized
the link between popular culture, national security goals, recruitment levels, and agency
support. The FBI and The Defense Department have both run entertainment offices since
the 1930s and 19403 respectively, and the newly founded Department of Homeland
Security has likewise hired a Hollywood liaison to work with moviemakers and
scriptwriters and offers advice and technical help to the directors, producers and actors
portraying the nation's homeland defenders (Hall, “Homeland”). Phil Strub, who runs the
Pentagon's entertainment ofﬁce, says he hopes the movies he works on will “make the

American public a little more aware of its military and possibly be of beneﬁt to its

191

recruiting,” while Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says Ferguson will
help “give the public a better understanding of how the department protects the
country.”

What the CIA and MI-6 seem to really need, then, are spy programs that feature
both male and female protagonists from a range of ethnic backgrounds, including those of
Arab and Asian descent to encourage greater diversity in its applicants, but while hit
shows such as ABC’s Lost and NBC’s Heroes are ﬁnding success with some of the most

diverse casting ever featured on prime time television,23

current trends in spy-related
programs suggest that shows are moving more towards the conventional white and black
male protagonist, such as those on The Unit, The Threat Matrix, 24, Jericho, and
Traveler. Interestingly, several of these new programs are also suggesting that the most
prominent enemy of American citizens is the very intelligence and defense agencies set
up to protect them. To cite just two examples, CBS’ Jericho, which ran during the 2007
season on Wednesday nights, featured one of the leaders of the Department of Homeland
Security organizing domestic terrorist groups that eventually detonate nuclear bombs in
over twenty American cities, while an African-American CIA operative works with a
white former mercenary to uncover the identity of the nuclear mastermind. Early
episodes of a new summer series, Traveller, also suggest that those in power at the
Department of Homeland Security are behind the domestic bombing of the Drexler
Museum in New York and are working to frame two white, male, Yale students for the
explosion.

I am not trying to suggest, however, that television programming should work to

directly support the goals of the CIA or even the U.S. government. Indeed, one of the

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most important functions of the popular arts is to openly question and criticize the
government and its actions in a format that is both entertaining and insightful for mass
audiences. Instead, I am trying to suggest that primetime television can inﬂuence the
power, applicant pool, and public support covert agencies enjoy and that contemporary
spy programs seem to be heading in a direction that is more critical of the nation’s
defense agencies and featuring a cast that is less diverse in terms of both race and gender

than what the CIA and its allies ideally want and need.

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Appendix

When I began this project, I had hoped to ﬁnd an exhaustive or nearly exhaustive
list of spy television programs airing in English since the 19503. Unfortunately, no such
list existed, and I was forced to create my own. This list, which appears below, began by
building upon a pre-formed list of 158 English-language spy series available on
TVacres.com24. To supplement this list, I then searched several scholarly works on the
topic of spy television” and added any show denoted as an espionage program in these
books’ text that did not appear on the TVacres.com list — a move that yielded an
additional thirty-two titles.

This set of 190 programs was then narrowed by eliminating all of the children’s
spy shows and mini-series, leaving 162 regular, adult spy programs. (See Table 1 to view
this list along with each program’s station afﬁliation and season run.) Next, a
combination of spy television scholarship, the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) and
TV.com was used to garner short plot summaries and cast lists for each show. This
process allowed me to determine the sex of each show’s protagonist(s) and to then tally
the number of spy shows centering around a) a female lead b) an all-female spy team, c)
a male-female partnership, (1) a co-sexed spy team of three or more agents, e) a male lead
and f) an all-male spy team or partnership. (See Tables 2-7)

However, because show summaries and cast lists in online media databases had to
sometimes be relied upon to determine whether or not a show should be classiﬁed as
having an individual male or female lead, a prominent male-female partnership, a co-
sexed team of three or more agents, etc., this book’s classiﬁcations are subject to any

errors appearing within these databases. In most cases, however, it was possible to garner

194

information about a show from at least two sources, which helped ensure a higher level of
accuracy. However, it should also be noted that even after viewing each episode of a
particular series, classiﬁcation was not always a clear-cut process. One of the most
difﬁcult to classify, for example, was The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which was ultimately
placed in the category of shows featuring a prominent male-female partnership, instead of
one featuring an individual female lead, as the show title would suggest. This decision is
based on the fact that virtually every episode features Mark Slate working alongside
April Dancer on missions, and Mark is responsible for most of the action sequences while
April is responsible for most of the snooping/spying. Thus, even though the show
marketed April as an individual heroine through its media tie-ins and show opener, the
broadcast narrative focuses more on an espionage partnership.

Regardless of these complications, what follows is one of the most exhaustive
lists of spy television programs to appear in print and offers both future scholars and the

genre’s fans a valuable tool to use in their own research.

Table 1: List of British and American Spy Programs Airing Between 1951 and 2006

(162 Total)
Program Title Network Description of Lead Character(s)
Afﬁliation and
Program Run
24 FOX/2001+ Male Lead Working with Co-Sexed
Team of CIA Agents
Acapulco H.E.A.T. SYN/ 1993-94, 1998 Male and Female Spies Serve as Co-
leaders of H.E.A.T.
Adderly CBS/l986—89 Male Agents for the Department of
Miscellaneous Affairs
The Adventurer ITC/ 1972-73 Male Secret Agent Poses as a Movie
Star
The Adventures of Falcon SYN/1954 Male Intelligence Agent
The Agency CBS/2001-2003 CIA Operatives: Men and Women
Air America SYN/l 998-99 Two Male Undercover Agents Fly
Dangerous Missions
Airwolf and Airwolf II CBS/USA/l 984-87 Male Pilot Flies Dangerous

195

Table l Cont.

Alias
American Dad!

Amos Burke, Secret Agent
Assignment Vienna
The Avengers

The Awful Mr. Goodall
The Barbary Coast

The Baron
Behind Closed Doors
Biff Baker, U.S.A

The Bionic Woman

Blue Light
Callan

The Champions

China Smith
Code Name: Foxﬁre
Codename

Colt .45

Cool Million
Counterspy
Counterstrike

Counterthrust

Cover Me: Based on the
True Life of an FBI Family
Cover Up

Cowboy G-Men
Crusader

Danger Man (AKA Secret
Agent)

ABC/2001-2006
F ox/2005+

ABC/ 1 965-66

ABC/ 1 972-73
ITV/ABC/ 1 961-69

LWT/ITV/l 974
ABC/ 1 975-76

ATV/ITC/ABC/
1966
NBC/1958-59
CBS/1952-53

ABC/NBC/1976-
1978

ABC/1966
ITV/ 1 967-72

ITV/NBC/l 968-69
SYN/ 1952-55
NBC/1985
BBC/1970
ABC/1957-60
NBC/1972-73
SYN/ 1958
USA/1990-93

SYN/ 1 959-60
USA/ 2000-2001

CBS/1984-85

SYN/1952-53
CBS/ 1955-56

ATV/1960-1 ;

1964-67
CB SH 961

196

Assignments for "The Firm." (Female
Co-pilot Introduced in Second
Season)

Female SD-6 and CIA Operative
Adult Animated Show Featuring Male
CIA Agent

Male Intelligence Agent

Male Intelligence Agent

Male British Agent Teamed with a
Female Partner (although early
episodes feature a male-male
partnership)

Retired Male British M15 Colonel
Male 19th Century Government Agent
Paired with Gambling Pal

Male British Intelligence Agent Poses
as Antique Dealer

Male US Naval Intelligence
Commander

Male Entrepreneur and Amateur
Detective/Spy Assisted by His Wife
Female Cyborg Works as a Secret
Agent for the Office of Scientiﬁc
Investigations

Male World War 11 Spy

Male, British Secret Service
Agent/Assassin

Trio of Espionage Agents: 2 Men and
1 Woman

Male Adventurer/ Private Eye
Female Counterespionage Team
British Spies Working For Ml-l7: 3
Men and 1 Woman '

Male Gun Salesman Works as US
Government Agent

Male Agent Turned Private Eye

Male Double Agent

Male-led Crime Fighting Team with
Some Women

Male US Intelligence Agents
Husband, Wife, and Children
Undertake Government Spy Work
Male-Female Spy Team Pose as
Model and Photographer

Male Frontier Agents

Male Lead Trying to Free Others from
Totalitarian Regimes

Male NATO and MI-9 Operative

Table l Cont.

Dangerous Assignment
Dark Skies

Department S

Dead At 21

The Delphi Bureau

The Door With No Name
(AKA: Doorway To
Danger)

The Double Life of Henry
Phyfe

Emma Brody (AKA The
American Embassy)
Espionage

The Equalizer

The Exile

The FBI

The Fellows (Late Of Room
17)

The Fifth Comer

Five Fingers

Foreign Intrigue

The Fugitive

Fortune Hunter

Game, Set, Match
Gavilan

Gemini Man
Get Smart

The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.
The Gray Ghost

The Greatest American
Hero

Gunslinger

SYN/ 1952
NBC/ 1996-97
1969-70/ [TV

MTV/1994

ABC/1972-73

NBC/ABC/l951-53

ABC/1966
F OX/2002

ITV/NBC/1963-64
CBS/1985-89

CBS/1991-95
ABC/ 1 965-1 974
ORA/1967
NBC/1992
NBC/l 959-60
SYN/1951-1955
ABC/1963-1967
FOX/1994

GRA/l 988
NBC/1982-83

NBC/1976
NBC/CBS/ 1 965-70;
FOX/1995
NBC/1966-67

SYN/1957
ABC/1 981 -83

CBS/1961

197

Male US Intelligence Agent

Male and Female Team Battle Aliens
and the Secret Government Agency
Majestic-12

Trio of Interpol Agents: 2 Men and 1
Woman

Male Teenage Genius Part of
Government Project with Female
Sidekick

Male Agent with Photographic
Memory

Male US Intelligence Agents

Male US Double Agent

Female CIA Courier Involved with
London Embassy Vice-Consul

Spy Stories Based on Actual Cases
Male Ex-govemment Agent Turned PI
and Urban Vigilante

Male US Intelligence Agents Teamed
with Male French Police Ofﬁcer
Cases Based on Real FBI ﬁles and
Handled by Male Inspector

Male Duo Track Criminals for The
Home Office.

Male Spy With Amnesia

Male US Counterspy

Team of Male and Female Reporters
Investigate Spies and Criminals
Male Doctor Wrongly Convicted of
Murder Runs to Clear His Identity
Former British Male Spy Employed
by Intercept Corporation

British Male SIS Spy

Male CIA Agent Turned
Oceanographer

Male Agent Able To Turn Invisible
Male CONTROL Agent Often Paired
with Female Agent on Missions
Female Agent Paired with Male
Partner

Confederate Spy

Male FBI Agent Teamed with Male
High School Teacher and
Accompanied by One of their
Girlfriends

Male US Cavalry, Undercover Agent

Table l Cont.
Hannay
Hogan’s Heroes
Honey West
Hunter

Hunter

The Hunter
1 Led Three Lives

ISpy

ISpy
Intrigue

The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man

It Takes A Thief

Jack of All Trades
Jane (AKA Jane in the
Desert)

Jane Doe

Jericho

The John Forsythe Show
La F emme Nikita
MacGyver

Major Del Conway Of The
Flying Tigers

A Man Called Sloane

A Man Called X

Man From Interpol

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Man In A Suitcase

The Man In Room 17

Man Trap

The Man Who Never Was
Manhunt

The Mask of Janus (AKA
Spies)

ITV/I 988-89
CBS/1965-197l
ABC/1965-66
SYN/1967-1969
CBS/1977
CBS/NBC/l 952,54
SYN/1953-56
SYN/1955-56
NBC/1965-68
ABP/l 966

ITV/CBS/1958-6l
NBC/1975-76

ABC/1968-70

USA/ 2000
BBC/1982-84

HAL/2005+

CBS/1966-67
NBC/1965-66
USA/1997-2001
ABC/1985-92

SYN/1951
NBC/1979-80
SYN/ 1 955-56
NBC/1960

NBC/1964-68
ITV/ABC/1967-68

GRA/l 965-66
A-R/1956
ABC/1966-67

[TV/1970
BBC/1965-66

198

British Man Battles Espionage Agents
of Imperial Germany

Male POWs Conduct Espionage
Against the Germans during WWII
Female Detective with Spy-like
Gadgets, Assisted by Male Partner
Male Secret Agent Working in
Australia

Male-Female Duo Works for US
Government

Male Intelligence Agent

Male FBI Counterspy

Male Spymaster Hosts Anthology of
Spy Stories

Male US Intelligence Agents Pose as
Tennis Pros

Male Industrial Espionage Agent
Assisted by Woman

Male British Intelligence Agent
Male Scientist Working as Corporate
Espionage Agent

Male Thief Recruited as Government
Agent

Male 19th Century American Spy
Female WWII Undercover Agent

Married Soccer Mom Secretly Returns
to Work for Spy Agency

Male Trio of World War II Spies
Male Duo of Undercover Agents
Reluctant Female Assassin

Male Secret Agent with Scientiﬁc
Skill

Male Agent Poses as Airline Pilot

Male Freelance Spy

Male US Intelligence Agent

Male Espionage Agent for
INTERPOL

Male Duo of U.N.C.L.E. Agents
Discredited Male Spy Turns Private
Eye

Male Espionage Agents Track Cases
from Room 17

Tales of Espionage from WWII
Male US Intelligence Agent

WWII French Resistance Fighters
Male Duo of British Agents

 

Table l Cont.
Masquerade

Matt Helm

MI-S (Spooks)
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible
Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Mr. Palfrey Of Westminster
Monty Nash

A Murder Of Quality
The Name of the Game

The New Adventures of
Beans Baxter
The New Avengers

The Net
Now and Again

O’hara, US Treasury
The Omega Factor

Orient Express

O.S.S.

Passport To Danger
Pentagon USA (AKA
Pentagon Conﬁdential)

The Pretender

The Prisoner

The Professionals
Quiller

The Rat Catchers

The Return of the Saint
Sable

The Saint

The Sandbaggers
Scarecrow & Mrs. King

ABC/1983-84
ABC/1975-76
BBC/A&E/2002+
CBS/1966-73
ABC/1988-90
CBS/1996

ITV/ 1984-85
SYN/1971

THA/l991
NBC/1 968-1971

FOX/l 987-88
lTV/CBS/1976-77
USA/1998-99
CBS/ 1 999-2000

CBS/1971-l972
BBC/1979

SYN/1952-1953
lTV/ABC/ 1 957-58
SYN/1954-56
1953

NBC/1 996-2000
ITV/CBS/ 1 967-68

ITV/l 977-83
BBC/1975
SYN/1965
lTV/l978-1980
ABC/1987-88
ITV/NBC/l 962-
1969

[TV/1978
CBS/1983-87

199

Male Veteran Spy Recruits Civilians
for Different Missions

Former US Intelligence Agent (Male)
Turned Private Eye

Team of MI-5 Agents: 2 Men and 1
Woman

Team of IMF Agents. 4 Men and 1
Woman

Team of IMF Agents: 4 Men and 1
Woman

Male and Female Spy Team Poses as
Married Couple

Male Spy Catcher _

Male Undercover Agent for US
Government

British Male Spy

Rotating Male Leads, Including Ex-
FBI Agent

Male Teenage Spy

Experienced Male Agent Mentors
New Male and Female Recruit
Female Computer Specialist Fights
Computer Terrorists

Reluctant Male Agent Working for
Covert Government Agency

Male US Treasury Agent

Trio of Department 7 Agents: 2 Men
and 1 Woman

Espionage Anthology

Male O.S.S. Spy in WWII

Male US Diplomatic Courier

Based on the Files of US Army: Male
Lead

Male Agent for The Centre

Male British Intelligence Agent
Sequestered At Strange Village
Male Duo of C15 Agents

Male Intelligence Agent

Trio of Male British Intelligence
Agents

Update of The Saint, Starring Upper
Class Gentleman

Male Spy/Superhero Disguised as
Children's Author

Englishman Acts as Modern Day
Robin Hood

Male MI6/SIS Agents

Male Intelligence Agent Paired with a

Table l Cont.

Search

Secret Adventures of Jules
Verne

Secret Agent Man
Secret Army
Secret File, U.S.A.
Secret Mission

Secret Service

The Sentimental Agent
Seven Days

Shadow Of The Cloak

She Spies

Silent Force

The Six Million Dollar Man

Soldiers of Fortune
Special Agent 7 (SA 7)

Spies
Spy Game

Spy-catcher
Spyder's Web

Starman

Stingray

Tales Of The Gold Monkey
T.H.E. Cat

Three

Today's FBI

The Top Secret Life Of
Edgar Briggs

NBC/ 1 972-73

SC IFl/l 999-2000

UPN 1999-2000
BBC/1977-79
SYN/1954-55
A-R/1956
NBC/1992-93

ITC/ 1 963
UPN/ 1998-2001

DUM/l951-52.
NBC/U SA 2002-
2004

ABC /1970-71
ABC/1973-1978

SYN/1955-56
SYN/1958-59

CBS/1987
ABC/l 997

BBC/ 1 959-61
ATV/1972

ABC/1986-87
NBC/1986-87
ABC/1982-83
NBC/ 1966-67

UPN/ l 998

ABC/1981 -82

[TV/1974

200

Civilian Mom/Housewife

Trio of Male Agents Employed by
World Securities

British Male Ex-Secret Service Agent
Dragged into His Female Cousin’s
Spy Missions

Trio of POISE Agents: 2 Men and 1
Woman

Unit Rescues Captured Allied
Bombers From Nazis. Stars Men and
Women

Male US Intelligence Agent

True War Tales About Women Spies
Re-enactments of Secret Service
Cases

Business Man Fights Criminals

Male Ex-CIA Agent Travels In Time
To Change Events

Male Intemational Security
Intelligence Agency

Three Female Convicts Work for
Government Agency

Trio of Undercover Agents: 2 Men
and 1 Woman

Male Cyborg Works as US
Intelligence Agent

Male Soldiers for Hire

Male Agent for the US Department Of
Treasury

Veteran Male Spy Works with Rookie
Accountant-Agent

Male—Female Pair of E.C.H.O Secret
Agents

Male Interrogator Sniffs Out Spies
Three British Intelligence Agents: 2
Women and 1 Man

Male Government Agent Investigates
Aliens

Male Secret Agent

American Male Pilot on Adventures
Male Cat Burglar Becomes a
Bodyguard

Secret Government Agency
Blackmails Three Criminals to Work
as Agents: 2 Men and 1 Woman
Predominantly Male FBI Agents
Tackle Cases

Bungling Male British Secret Service
Agent

Table 1 Cont.
Top Secret, U.S.A.

Top Secret
Under Cover

Underrnind
Virgin Of The Secret
Service

VR.5

Whiz Kids

The Wild Wild West

Wildside
Wish Me Luck

The Wizard

The World Of Tim Frazier

The X-Files

The XYY Man

SYN/1955

ITV/l961
ABC/1991

ABP/l 965

ITV/1968

Fox 1995

CBS/1983-84

CBS/1965-69

ABC/1985
ITV/ 1 987-90

CBS/1986-87

BBC/ 1 960-61

F OX/ 1993-2002

ITV/1976-77

Male Bureau of Science Information
Agent Assisted by Female

Male Lead

Husband & Wife Spy Team Work for
the National Intelligence Agency
Male Ofﬁcer and His Sister-in-Law
Fight Alien Subversives

Male Captain Serves the British Secret
Service

Female Lineswoman Working for
“The Committee”

Teenage Whiz Kids—3 Male and l
Female—Eventually Recruited by the
Government for their Skills in
Computers.

Two Male Secret Service Agents
Work on the Frontier

Group of 5 Male Frontier Spies

Team of Female, British Spies In
Nazi-Occupied France

Male Toy Maker Paired with Male
Government Agent

Male Engineer Recruited As Spy
Male and Female Investigate
Paranormal Activities for the FBI
Male Cat Burglar Recruited By British
Intelligence

Table 2: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) with an Individual Female

Alias

The Bionic Woman
Emma Brody (AKA The
American Embassy)

Lead (9 Total)

Honey West La Femme Nikita
Jane (AKA lane in the The Net

Desert) VR.5

Jane Doe

201

Table 3: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) Featuring an All-Female

Team or Partnership (4 Total)

Code Name: Foxﬁre
Secret Mission

She Spies
Wish Me Luck

Table 4: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) with a Prominent Male-

The Avengers

Biff Baker, U.S.A

Cover Up

Dark Skies

Dead At 21

Get Smart

The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.

Female Partnership (18 Total)

Hunter

Intrigue

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

The New Avengers
Scarecrow & Mrs. King
Secret Adventures of Jules
Verne

Spy Game

Top Secret, U.S.A.
Under Cover
Undermind

The X-Files

Table 5: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) Featuring a Co-Sexed Team
of Three or More Agents (19 Total)

Acapulco H.E.A.T.
The Agency

The Champions
Codename

Cover Me: Based on the True

Life of an FBI Family
Counterstrike

Foreign Intrigue

The Greatest American Hero

Department S

MI-5 (AKA Spooks)
Mission: Impossible

The Omega Factor
Secret Agent Man

Silent Force
Spyder's Web
Secret Army
Three

24

Whiz Kids

Table 6: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) Centering on a Male Lead

The Adventurer

The Adventures of Falcon
Airwolf and Airwolf II
American Dad!

Amos Burke, Secret Agent
Assignment Vienna

The Awful Mr. Goodall
The Baron

Behind Closed Doors
Blue Light

Callan

China Smith

Colt .45

Cool Million

(81 Total)

Gemini Man

The Gray Ghost
Gunslinger
Hannay

Hunter

The Hunter

I Led Three Lives
1 Spy

The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man
It Takes A Thief
Jack of All Trades
MacGyver

Major Del Conway Of The

202

0.8.8.

Passport To Danger
Pentagon USA

(AKA Pentagon Confidential)
The Pretender

The Prisoner

Quiller

The Return of the Saint
Sable

The Saint

Secret File, U.S.A.

The Sentimental Agent
Seven Days

Shadow Of The Cloak

Table 6 Cont.

Counterspy

Crusader

Danger Man (AKA Secret
Agent)

Dangerous Assignment
The Delphi Bureau

The Double Life of Henry
Phyfe

The Equalizer

The FBI

The Fifth Corner

Five Fingers

The Fugitive

Fortune Hunter

Game, Set, Match
Gavilan

Flying Tigers

A Man Called Sloane

A Man Called X

Man From Interpol

Man In A Suitcase

The Man Who Never Was
Masquerade

Matt Helm

Mr. Palfrey Of Westminster
Monty Nash

A Murder Of Quality

The New Adventures of
Beans Baxter

Now and Again

O’Hara, US Treasury

The Six Million Dollar Man
Special Agent 7 (SA 7)
Spy-catcher

Starman

Stingray

Tales Of The Gold Monkey
T.H.E. Cat

The Top Secret Life Of Edgar
Briggs

Top Secret

24

Virgin Of The Secret Service
The World Of Tim Frazier
The XYY Man

Table 7: List of British and American Spy Shows (1951-2006) Featuring an All-Male
Partnership or Team (27 Total)

Adderly

Air America

The Barbary Coast
Counterthrust

Cowboy G-Men

The Door With No Name

(AKA: Doorway To Danger)

The Exile

The Fellows (Late Of Room
17)

Hogan’s Heroes

I Spy
Jericho

The John Forsythe Show
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
The Man In Room 17

The Mask of Janus (AKA
Spies)

The Name of the Game
The Professionals

The Rat Catchers

203

The Sandbaggers
Search

Soldiers of Fortune
Spies

Today's FBI

Top Secret

The Wild Wild West
Wildside

The Wizard

Table 8: List of Spy Shows (1951-2006) with a Prominent, American, Female Character

19503 (3)

Biff Baker, U.S.A
Foreign Intrigue
Top Secret, U.S.A.

19603 (5)

Get Smart

The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.
Honey West

Hunter

Mission: Impossible

19703 (2)

The Bionic Woman
Silent Force (unknown
episode run)

(Listed by Decade)

19803 (6)

Code Name: Foxﬁre *
Cover Up

The Greatest American Hero
Mission: Impossible
Scarecrow & Mrs. King
Whiz Kids "'

19903 (13)
Acapulco H.E.A.T.
Counterstrike

Dark Skies

Dead At 21 *

La Femme Nikita
Mr. and Mrs. Smith“
The Net

Secret Agent Man "'
Spy Game "‘

Three “'

Under Cover *
VR.5 *

The X-Files

204

20003 (7)

24

The Agency

Alias

Cover Me: Based on the
True Life of an FBI
Family

Emma Brody *

Jane Doe

She Spies

*Denotes shows that ran
for less than 20 episodes

NOTES

' In the CIA, spies are referred to as operatives whereas the term agent denotes someone from whom the
operative acquires information. In popular culture, however, the term agent and operative are used
interchangeably and thus are used so here.

2 This statistic is based on the 162 spy programs listed in the appendix, Table I.

3 I want to be clear that I am not claiming that Codename: Foxﬁre was the ﬁrst spy television show to ever
feature a woman of color in a leading role. Information on both the lntemet Movie Database (imdb.com)
and tv.com, however, suggests that this show was one of the ﬁrst, if not the ﬁrst, of the 162 programs used
in this study to feature a woman of color in a leading role. It should also be noted that this section only
examined women who appeared in regular, leading roles. Thus actresses such as the Latina Mia Maestro,
who played an Argentinean operative and Sydney Bristow’s half-sister in seasons four and ﬁve of A lias,
were not considered as women of color in major roles even though they may have signiﬁcantly factored
into a narrative for a short period of time.

4 See, for example, Julie Wheelwright’s article “Poisoned Honey: The Myth of Women in Espionage,”
Christine Bold’s “Under the Very Skirts of Britannia: Re-Reading Women in the James Bond Novels,” and
less scholarly books such as Film F atales by Tom Lisanti and Louis Paul.

5 See appendix.

‘5 Philbrick’s memoir reached number seven on the New York T imes' Best Sellers Chart in the General
category.

7 Over the course of the series, the language of this opening sequence varied slightly. The particular
opening quoted here is from the 1954-55 season.

8 For a further discussion of these ideas, see May and Gilbert.

9 For a book length study that addresses this issue, see Leibman’s Living Room Lectures: The Fifties
Family in Film and Television.

'0 See, for instance, Kessler’s Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, The Spy who Ushered in the McCarthy Era
and Philipson’s Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths.

” From 1962-1967, the James Bond franchise had released Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963),
Goldﬁnger (1964), Thunderball (1965), and You Only Live Twice (1967), and all grossed large box ofﬁce
sums for their day. Dr. No earned 60 million pounds worldwide (Pfeiffer and Worrall 21), From Russia
with Love grossed $78.9 million worldwide (31), while Goldﬁnger raked in $125 million worldwide (43),
Thunderball $141 million, and You Only Live Twice $111.6 million (65).

'2 Stefanie Powers was born in Hollywood to Polish parents and attributes her broad “a’s” to the fact that
she learned to speak Polish before she learned to speak English.

'3 Of course, not all women during the ﬁfties subscribed to the feminine mystique, as evidenced by the fact
that more women entered the paid-labor force than ever before in U.S. history, and the fact that many
women, especially those of color and from the lower-working class, had long been forced to work to make
ends meet. However, as Susan Douglas notes, the feminine mystique nevertheless had a lasting effect in
that it divided women against themselves, “pulling them between idealized images of domestic bliss and
the more gritty reality of their own lives” which often required women to not only work outside the home
but to tend to almost all of the house and childcare tasks inside it (55). According to Douglas, this stress
had a profound effect on these women’s daughters as they came of age, and they began searching the
culture for images that suggested they could aspire to be something other than a happily contained
housewife.

'4 See, for example, Dow’s Prime Time Feminism.

‘5 For photos and a description of this bionic beauty salon, see <http://www.swﬁgures.com/swf/
Vintage(NonStarWars)ActionFigure303(BionicMan-Woman).htm> Viewed February 22, 2007.

'6 These shows were called The CIA and Quarell, but neither made it to air.

'7 The synopses for these three shows were taken from Britton’s Spy Television.

'8 Examples of SMK '3 fan websites in 2006 included smkfans.com, smkzone.com, and
smkutopiabrucefannet.

'9 For example, increased military action in Nicaragua and Afghanistan during the early part of the decade
marked the end of American-Soviet détente, and at least three “ﬂare-ups” occurred in the fall of 1983
alone. The ﬁrst took place in September when the Soviet Union shot down a Korean commercial airliner
which had accidentally violated its airspace. The action killed all 269 people on board the New York to

205

Seoul ﬂight, pushing American-Soviet relations to a new low. Just a few weeks later, Grenada’s Marxist-
Leninist leader, Maurice Bishop, was ousted and then executed by the more hard-line members of his own
New Jewel Movement. In response to the takeover, the U.S. and six Caribbean nations carried out
Operation Urgent Fury, which successfully captured the leaders of the Communist coup d’etat. And,
ﬁnally, during early November, NATO carried out ABLE ARCHER 83, a war game which spanned the
continent of Europe and simulated a coordinated nuclear release. Although it did not involve actual troop or
weapons movements, the exercise did incorporate radio silences, participation by heads of state, and a
simulated DEFCON 1 nuclear alert, leading some in the USSR to believe ABLE ARCHER 83 was a
enuine nuclear strike.

0 The Beirut high-jacking refers to the takeover of TWA ﬂight 847, which was forced to land in Beirut,
Lebanon, where the hijackers held the plane for 17 days, demanding the release of several Shiite Muslim
prisoners held in Israeli-controlled prisons.

' For scholarship addressing the quasi-feminist nature of Charlie 's Angles, see David Roger Coon and
“Semi-Tough: Emma Peel, Charlie’s Angels, the Bionic Woman and Other Wanna-Bes” in Inness’ Tough
Girls.

22 This was likely a dilemma for Surnow and Cochran, as well, since Nikita attracted a predominantly adult
audience, skewed more toward men than women (Dempsey), but the show, which aired on cable, also had
more leeway that allowed its creators to push the envelope in regards to established television conventions.
2’ Lost alone features characters from Korea, the U.S., Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Iraq, and the
former Soviet bloc, while Heroes features lead characters from Japan, the United States and India, among
others.

2’ This list of programs may be viewed at <http://www.tvacres.com/occup_espionage.htm>

2‘ These books were primarily comprised of Wesley Britton’s Spy Television, Michael Kackman’s Citizen
Spy, Fred MacDonald’s Television and the Red Menace, John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg’s Spy Story,
and Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh’s The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and

Cable TVShows I946-Present

206

Episodes Cited

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“Assault on a Princess.” The Bionic Woman. Perf. Lindsay Wagner. ABC. 10 June 1976.
“Bionic Beauty.” The Bionic Woman. Perf. Lindsay Wagner. ABC. 17 Mar. 1976.

“The Bionic Woman (Parts I and II)” Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee Majors. ABC. 16
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“Blue Mosque.” Biff Baker, U.S.A. Perf. Allen Hale, Jr. and Randy Stuart. CBS. 15 Jan.
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“Breaking Point.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 23 Nov. 2003.

“Brunettes Are In.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner.
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“The Carpathian Caper Affair.” The Girl From U.N. C.L. E. Perf. Stefanie Powers and
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“Charity Begins at Home.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and Bruce
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“Comrade Eva.” 1 Led 3 Lives. Perf. Richard Carlson and Virginia Stefan. Syndicated.
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“Counterfeit Plates.” Biﬂ Baker, U.S.A. Perf. Allen Hale, Jr. and Randy Stuart. CBS. 18
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“The Day They Raided the Knights.” Get Smart. Perf. Don Adams and Barbara Feldon.
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“Dark Side of the Moon (Parts I, 11).” Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee Majors.
ABC. 6 Nov. 1977, 13 Nov. 1977.

“Death Probe (Parts I, 11).” Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee Majors. ABC. 9 Jan.
1977, 16 Jan. 1977.

“Déja vu All Over Again.” La F emme Nikita. Perf. Peta Wilson. USA. 7 Jan. 2001.

207

“The Dog-gone Affair.” The Girl From U.N. C.L. E. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
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“Doomsday and Counting.” Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee Majors. ABC. 1 Mar.
1974.

“The Drubelgatz Affair.” The Girl From UNCLE. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
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“Dynamite.” 1 Led 3 Lives. Perf. Richard Carlson and Virginia Stefan. Syndicated.
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“F embots in Las Vegas (Parts I, II).” The Bionic Woman. Perf. Lindsay Wagner.
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“The Fiance.” I Led 3 Lives. Perf. Richard Carlson and Virginia Stefan. Syndicated.
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“The First Time.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner.
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“The F orget-Me-Knot.” The Avengers. Perf. Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, and Linda
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“The Fountain of Youth Affair.” The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. Perf. Stefanie Powers and
Noel Harrison. NBC. 7 Feb. 1967

“Full Disclosure.”Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 11 Jan. 2004.

“The Garden of Evil Affair.” The Girl From UNCLE. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
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“A Higher Echelon.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 5 Jan. 2003.

“Kill Oscar (Parts I, II, and III).” The Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man. Perf.
Lindsay Wagner and Lee Majors. ABC. 27 Oct. 1976, 31 Oct. 1976, 3 Nov. 1976.

“Kiss of Death.” Get Smart. Perf. Don Adams and Barbara F eldon. NBC. 31 Dec. 1966.
“Koblen,” Biﬁ’ Baker, USA. Perf. Allen Hale, Jr. and Randy Stuart. CBS. 6 Nov. 1952.

“The Laser Blazer.” Get Smart. Perf. Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. NBC. 30 Nov.
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“The Last Kamikaze.” Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee Majors. ABC. 19 Jan. 1975.

208

“The Lethal Eagle Affair.” The Girl From U.N. CL. E. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
Harrison. NBC. 29 Nov. 1966.

“Legation.” 1 Led 3 Lives. Perf. Richard Carlson and Virginia Stefan. Syndicated.
1956.

“The Little John Doe Affair.” The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
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“Love.” La Femme Nikita. Perf. Peta Wilson. USA. 17 Feb. 1997.
“The Man Behind the Curtain.” La Femme Nikita. Perf. Peta Wilson. USA. 11 Feb. 2001.

“The Man Who Died Twice.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and Bruce
Boxleitner. CBS. 21 Nov. 1986.

“Mona Lisa.” Biﬂ Baker, USA. Perf. Allen Hale, Jr. and Randy Stuart. CBS. 11 Dec.
1952.

“The Moonglow Affair.” The Man From UNCLE. Perf. Robert Vaughn and David
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“The Mother Mufﬁn Affair.” The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
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“Murder Between Friends.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and Bruce
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“Nikita.” La F emme Nikita. Perf. Peta Wilson. USA. 13 Jan. 1997.
“Nuclear Alert.” The Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee Majors. ABC. 13 Sep. 1974.
“On the Run.” The Bionic Woman. Perf. Lindsay Wagner. NBC. 13 May 1978.

“The Paradise Lost Affair.” The Girl From U.NCLE. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
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“Parity.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 14 Oct. 2001.
“Phase One.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 26 Jan. 2003.

“The Prisoner of Zalamar Affair.” The Girl From U.NCLE. Perf. Stefanie Powers and
Noel Harrison. NBC. 20 Sep. 1966.

“Pussycats Galore.” Get Smart. Perf. Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. NBC. 1 April
1967.

209

“Reckoning.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. 18 Nov. 2001.

“The Rescue of Athena One.” Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee Majors. ABC. 15 Mar.
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“Resurrection.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 23 May 2004.

“The Return of the Bionic Woman (Parts I, 11).” Six Million Dollar Man. Perf. Lee
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“Saigon Incident.” Biff Baker, USA. Perf. Allen Hale, Jr. and Randy Stuart. CBS. 22
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“So It Begins.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 7 Oct. 2001.
“A Time for Every Purpose.” La F emme Nikita. Perf. Peta Wilson. USA. 2 Apr. 2001.

“There Goes the Neighborhood.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and
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“The U.F.O. Affair.” The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. Perf. Stefanie Powers and Noel
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“To Catch a Mongoose.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and
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“Truth Be Told.” Alias. Perf. Jennifer Garner. ABC. 7 Oct. 2001.

“Vigilante Mothers.” Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Perf. Kate Jackson and Bruce
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