Jason King (TV Series 1971–1972) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error This spin-off from the earlier "Department S" continued the adventures of hedonistic, womanizing dandy Jason King. After leaving Department S, Jason settled down to a full-time career of ... See full summary » Creators: Jason's temporary secretary in Germany convinces him to go to a health clinic. However, when several strange events occur he realises that there is much more to the clinic than it appears. 8.4 Jason is abducted in order to help the Moscow police work out how three men on a workers' delegation,got into a lift and then,when the doors opened again,there was nothing left of them but three ... 8.1 Jason gets off a plane in Switzerland and is mistaken for the hitman taken ill on the plane as he has picked up the bunch of red roses which will allow the killer's employers to identify him. He ...

7.9 a list of 30 titles created 12 Sep 2011 a list of 84 titles created 29 Dec 2012 a list of 22 titles created 12 Sep 2014 a list of 990 titles created 27 Nov 2015 a list of 41 titles created 3 months ago Search for " Jason King " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Title: Jason King (1971–1972) 7.2/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. An elite department within Interpol, Department S inherited those cases which the other member groups had failed to solve. The brains of the group was Jason King, a hedonistic maverick who ... See full summary » Stars: Peter Wyngarde, Joel Fabiani, Rosemary Nicols The Baron (TV Series 1966) Crime | Drama Stories of an antique dealer who is really an undercover agent.

Stars: Steve Forrest, Sue Lloyd, Paul Ferris A quirky spy show of the adventures of an eccentricly suave British agent and his predominately female partners. Stars: Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, Honor Blackman Jeff Randall and Marty Hopkirk are private detectives who specialize in divorce cases. Their long-running partnership seems to come to an abrupt end when Marty is killed by a hit-and-run, ... See full summary » Stars: Mike Pratt, Kenneth Cope, Annette Andre John Steed and his new accomplices Purdey and Gambit find themselves facing new and deadly dangers in the bizarre world of espionage. Mixing fantasy with a darker edge, the trio face ... See full summary » Stars: Patrick Macnee, Gareth Hunt, Joanna Lumley Simon Templar, a wealthy adventurer known as The Saint, travels around the world in his white Volvo P1800S. Stars: Roger Moore, Ivor Dean, Leslie Crawford The Protectors were Harry Rule, the Contessa di Contini and Paul Buchet, three freelance troubleshooters who ran an international crime fighting agency. Based in London, Harry was the ...

See full summary » Stars: Robert Vaughn, Nyree Dawn Porter, Tony Anholt McGill (known as "Mac") was a former U.S. intelligence agent based in London. After being thrown out of the agency for something he did not do, he finds his "false" reputation has preceded ... See full summary » Stars: Richard Bradford, Ricardo Montez, Warren Stanhope John Drake is a special operative for NATO, specializing in security assignments against any subversive element which threatened world peace. The series featured exotic locales from all ... See full summary » Stars: Patrick McGoohan, Richard Wattis, Lionel Murton Craig Stirling, Sharron Macready and Richard Barrett were agents for Nemesis, an international intelligence organization based in Geneva. Their first mission as a team was to investigate ... See full summary » Stars: Stuart Damon, Alexandra Bastedo, William Gaunt English Lord Brett Sinclair and American Danny Wilde are both wealthy playboys, they are teamed together by Judge Fullton to investigate crimes which the police can't solve. These two men ...

See full summary » Stars: Tony Curtis, Roger Moore, Laurence Naismith David Callan is the top agent/assassin for the Security Service (British counterintelligence), but he is an embittered man who performs his duties "for Queen and country" under duress. This... See full summary » Stars: Edward Woodward, Russell Hunter, Lisa Langdon Edit Storyline This spin-off from the earlier "Department S" continued the adventures of hedonistic, womanizing dandy Jason King. After leaving Department S, Jason settled down to a full-time career of writing (trashy) Mark Caine novels. He philandered his way around the world, doing research for his stories and tripping over a variety of odd--often verging on surreal--cases, usually involving beautiful women. He was occasionally blackmailed into working for British Intelligence under the threat of being arrested for unpaid back taxes. Written by Marg Baskin <marg@asd.raytheon.ca> 15 September 1971 (UK) See more » Filming Locations: (United Kingdom) – See all my reviews This is by way of a comment on one of the other reviews.

The episode "All that Glisters..." was playing recently on a TV that I could hear but not see. "Thunderbirds!" I thought since I could clearly hear the voice of Scott Tracey. On going in to actually watch the TV I was amazed to see that it was Jason King rather than Thunderbirds and that bizarrely Clinton Greyn was speaking with Scott Tracey's voice. The lip-sync was excellent but it was clearly a dubbed voice since the acoustic was different. And of course, rather than Greyn's rounded Welsh tones we were getting the distinctive Canadian sound of Shane Rimmer. Cant understand why they did this - and then not credit it? Weird. 1 of 1 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Peter Wyngarde | Tardis | Fandom powered by Wikia Peter Wyngarde played Timanov in the Doctor Who television story Planet of Fire . Wyngarde is best known for playing debonair detective Jason King in the early 1970s TV series Department S and its spinoff, Jason King .

Wyngarde's performance in those shows — topped off by a huge head of hair — was later cited as one of the inspirations for Mike Myers' Austin Powers character. The two Jason King series were part of the ITV stable of action-adventure shows of the late 60s-early 70s. At one point or another Wyngarde appeared in virtually all of the major ones, including The Avengers , The Prisoner (as one of the show's Number Twos), The Saint , The Champions , and The Baron . He also guest-starred in an episode of the US spy series I Spy . Wyngarde was considered a major TV star thanks to Jason King, but his career was hurt when he experienced a series of legal and financial issues. Wyngarde was primarily a television actor, though he made a rare big-screen appearance in the 1980 version of Flash Gordon . His most recent dramatic TV credit was a 1994 episode of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes , although as recently as 2007 he was seen engaging in an intentionally humorous mock interview for a DVD/Blu-Ray featurette for a reissue of The Prisoner.

Ironically, given his hirsute image as Jason King, he appeared in the featurette bald-headed. A Short Biography of Peter Wyngarde Born: August 23rd 1933 Fact File Peter Wyngarde is a French-born English actor best acknowledged for creating and playing the character of Jason King, a successful writer and detective, in two British television series of the 1960s and early 1970s:' Department S' (1969–1970) and 'Jason King' (1971–1972). Born Cyril Goldbert in Marseille, France, the son of an a a French mother and English father . His father worked in the British Diplomatic Service, consequently his childhood was spent in a numerous different countries. In 1941, although his parents were away in India, he went to live with a Swiss household in Shanghai. The Japanese Armed forces took over Shanghai's International Settlement on the 8th December 1941, and as a British national his father was incarcerated in the Lunghua concentration camp on 10 April 1943. Conditions in the camp were at times harsh. According to J.G.

Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life, "Cyril Goldbert, the future Peter Wyngarde" was a fellow internee at Lunghua Camp and "He was four years older than me...". Ballard was born in November 1930 but according to Lunghwa Camp archives, compiled in 1943, Goldbert was really born in 1928. His younger siblings, Adolphe Henry and Marion Simeone, were under Swiss protection and consequently immune from internment. As a young man he began acting, and from the mid-1950s had innumerable roles in feature films, single television plays and television series. In the late 1960s, he was a steady guest star on countless popular UK series of the day, many of which had espionage and adventure plots, including 'The Avengers', 'The Saint', 'The Baron', 'Sherlock Holmes', 'The Champions', 'The Troubleshooters', 'Love Story', 'I Spy' and The 'Man In Room 17'. He also played the Number Two in The Prisoner ("Checkmate", 1967). Wyngarde's movie work was narrow but had influence.

In 1961, he made the most of his brief scenes as the leering Peter Quint in Jack Clayton's 'The Innocents' with Deborah Kerr and Pamela Franklin. The next year he starred in the occult adventure movie 'Night of the Eagle'. The Big break came for Wyngarde in 1969 when he was cast in the ITC television series 'Department S', (produced by Monty Berman) in the role of the charismatic Jason King, a sardonic, well-spoken, over sexed mystery author who also works for an undercover Interpol investigative unit. With his long hair and a loud moustache, and dressed in an array of late '60s/Swinging London-style cravats, ruffled shirts, crumpled velvet outfits, kaftans, etc., Wyngarde was the original peacock. The character's eccentric mannerisms, together with his look, soon made Wyngarde the main star of the show, casting a shadow on his two co-stars, Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicols; indeed, many fans felt that Wyngarde's character dressed more flashily than Nicols' character.

Now a days, Jason King's manner of dress, together with his ferocious sex drive and even with the sporadic use of such retro terms as "groovy" makes him the very obvious role model for the 'Austin Powers' chracter, made famous by Mike Myers. In the series that spun out of 'Department S', simply called' Jason King', he worked solo but manoeuvred from bed-to-bed with a succession of women in seemingly every story, keeping up a pace that any self-respecting James Bond would have had a tough time keeping up with. In 1970, Peter recorded an album for RCA Victor called Peter Wyngarde, and a single, "La Ronde De L'Amour/The Way I Cry Over You" was released. The album was reissued on CD by the British RPM Records label as 'When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head'. Curiously,it was not a collection of lounge standards but instead an unusual collection of spoken word/musical arrangements. Several tracks are on the Radio Sounds Familiar playlist.

In 1983, he performed in the thriller 'Underground' opposite Raymond Burr (Ironside) at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto and at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London. During the 1980s and 1990s he made a number of television appearances, comprising the Doctor Who serial 'Planet of Fire' (1984), Hammer House of Mystery & Suspense (1984), 'The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes' (1994) and the 'Movie Tank Malling' (1989). In recent years he has been a regular invitee to Memorabilia, a cult, science fiction and memorabilia fair held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham The last time he appeared on TV was in 2003,as a guest of the late Simon Dee in the Channel Four one-off revival of his chat show 'Dee Time' in.

In 2007, Wyngarde participated in recording extras for a re-release of 'The Prisoner' on DVD, including a mock interview section titled "The Pink Prisoner", this material was released in the Prisoner DVD set issued in the UK in 2007 and in North America on both DVD and Blu-ray in October 2009. On a personal note, Peter Wyngarde remains a total hero of mine, and I thank him for his contributing to the golden age of television.

Related Video In this clip, Peter Wyngarde challenges the witch that's been tormenting him in the film "Night Of The Eagle' 1979 Himmel, Scheich und Wolkenbruch Scheich Al-Abdullah 1971-1972 Jason King (TV series) Jason King – That Isn't Me, It's Somebody Else (1972) … Jason King – An Author in Search of Two Characters (1972) … Jason King – Zenia (1972) … Jason King – Chapter One: The Company I Keep (1972) … Jason King – Every Picture Tells a Story (1972) … Jason King See all 26 episodes » 1969-1970 Department S (TV series) Jason King – The Double Death of Charlie Crippen (1970) … Jason King – A Ticket to Nowhere (1970) … Jason King – The Soup of the Day (1970) … Jason King – A Fish Out of Water (1970) … Jason King – The Ghost of Mary Burnham (1970) … Jason King See all 2

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(TV series) Andrea Bakolas – The George Polk Story (1957) … Andrea Bakolas 1957 Jack Hylton's Monday Show (TV series) – Hotel Riviera (1957) 1957 English Family Robinson (TV mini-series) Indian 1957 Sword of Freedom (TV series) Colonna Cult TV Lounge: Jason King (1971-72) Cult TV Lounge British and American cult television from the 1960s and 1970s Friday, 22 May 2015 Jason King (1971-72) Jason King was in many ways a TV series that nobody wanted. Lew Grade, the head of ITC who owned the show, hated it from the word go. Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner, who were responsible for making it, thought it was a dubious idea. And star Peter Wyngarde had serious misgivings about it. In fact it’s a series that probably never have been made. With Department S having been extremely successful the obvious thing for ITC to have done would have been to commission another season of a proven success.

That was not how Lew Grade saw it. Grade always seems to have had a tendency not to follow up on obvious success. His bizarre decision in 1967 to commission Gerry Anderson to do a brand new series (Captain Scarlet) rather than another season of the immensely successful Thunderbirds was an early example of this trend and a decade later he cancelled The Return of the Saint after a single season even though it was a hit. Grade had never particularly liked Department S and he actively disliked Peter Wyngarde. Wyngarde claims that Grade told him that her was only giving the go-ahead for Jason King because his wife loved the character so much. Grade also at times seems to have had trouble understanding why his popular series were popular. It was obvious to everyone else that one of the main reasons Department S was a winner was that the three lead characters (and the three lead performers) balanced each other so perfectly. Jason King was indeed the most popular character with the public but that was because he provided the spice in a well-balanced dish. Too much Jason King was likely to be too much of a good thing. And so it proved. An equally ill-considered decision was to shoot the series in 16mm rather than 35mm.

This made the series immensely difficult to sell in the US. It also meant that a series that relied on colour and glamour ended up looking cheap and shoddy. Jason King also represented a change in format compared to Department S. Whereas Department S (like its non-ITC contemporary Special Branch ) had been a clever blending of the secret agent and crime genres Jason King put much less emphasis on the secret agent side of things. Jason no longer works for Department S. He is now more or less a freelance amateur crime-fighter, although he does on occasions get inveigled into doing jobs for intelligence agencies. Jason King in fact belongs to the 1920s and 1930s British thriller tradition of wealthy amateurs for whom solving crimes is an amusing hobby and whose crime-fighting overlaps with the world of espionage. This is the world of Bulldog Drummond and The Saint , of Dornford Yates and Berkeley Gray , but with 1970s fashions (and social attitudes). The 1970s social attitudes are crucial. Of all the TV heroes of that era Jason King is the most cheerfully irresponsible and hedonistic. He makes Simon Templar look like a prude.

Simon Templar was a 1950s hero in a 1960s world. Jason King is a 1970s hero in a 1970s world. Jason King marks the high water mark of the Permissive Society. But not quite - Jason King is no hippie. He has no interest in changing the world. He certainly has no interest in challenging the consumer society. King is the epitome of conspicuous consumption. He is rich and he enjoys the good life. So did Simon Templar, but Simon Templar had a sense of duty. The Saint had made a lot of money (perhaps not entirely honestly) but he sees wealth and a sense of duty to society as being two sides of the same coin. Jason King undertakes crime-fighting and occasionally espionage because it amuses and entertains him. In the Jason King series the character becomes even more flamboyant and outrageous than he’d been in Department S. In fact while Department S trod a fine line between seriousness and parody Jason King descends into pure parody. That’s the weakness of the series but it’s also its principal charm. Jason King is so deliriously over-the-top that it almost works.

More surprisingly, quite often it really does work. For all its faults it has to be admitted that it’s often a great deal of fun. The series is also quite clever in the way it deliberately mixes up fiction and reality. Jason King is the author of the fabulously successful Mark Caine crime thrillers and at times he finds himself living out the plots of his own novels. We’re never quite sure if Jason is really capable of distinguishing himself from his fictional creation, just as we’re never quite sure if Peter Wyngarde is playing himself or Jason King. Other characters seem to be equally incapable of telling Jason apart from his fictional detective. At its best the series carries off this ploy with considerable wit and panache. Most of those involved with the show felt that the quality of the scripts was not quite up to the standards of Department S. Generally speaking that’s true. There’s nothing here to compare to the brilliance of Department S episodes like The Man in the Elegant Room or The Pied Piper of Hambledown. There are however some quite good Jason King episodes - The Constance Missal, Toki, As Easy as A.B.C. and the two-parter All That Glisters are all excellent.

To Russia - with Panache (in which Jason finds himself working for the Kremlin) is fun. And then of course there are the clothes. Nobody but Peter Wyngarde could get away with wearing such clothes. Jason King likes to surround himself with beautiful things, although his ideas on fashion and interior decoration are somewhat idiosyncratic and outrageously 1970s. He also likes to be surrounded by beautiful women and the series is not lacking in glamour, especially with actresses like Ingrid Pitt appearing as guest stars. I own the old Region 4 Umbrella DVD boxed set. The transfers are decidedly iffy but that is probably due to the source materials - a series shot on 16mm is never going to look as good as one shot on 35mm. The series has also been released in Region 2 by Network. Jason King is an indulgence, a guilty pleasure if you like, but it does have a great deal of style. It also has Peter Wyngarde at his most deliciously excessive (and no-one ever did excess quite as well as Wyngarde did). For all its flaws it’s remarkably enjoyable, and it’s certainly distinctive. Highly recommended.

Posted by Peter Wyngarde comes to film convention for Jason King fans | TV & Radio | Showbiz & TV | Daily Express TV & RADIO Jason King still reigns, just less of a woman's man TV HERO Jason King was the epitome of the dilettante dandy in the 1970s, breaking crime rings and hearts with equal gusto. 00:01, Sun, Mar 29, 2015 | UPDATED: 05:29, Sun, Apr 26, 2015 PEARCE Actor Peter Wyngrade - now without the wavy hair and bushy moustache For some, his famous breakfast quip “a bit too early for coffee... I think I’ll have Scotch”, will for ever hold memories of a bygone, more carefree era. Actor Peter Wyngarde, who played the suave author-cum-spy in Department S and Jason King between 1969 and 1972, was once mobbed by 30,000 hysterical Australian women at Sydney airport, although his career stalled in 1975 when he was fined for gross indecency in a bus station toilet.

Now the wavy locks of hair are gone, the moustache is duly trimmed and the clothes, said by Hollywood star Mike Myers to have inspired the Austin Powers look, are somewhat tamer. Still, at 86, Wyngarde was the star attraction yesterday as he signed autographs at the London Film Memorabilia Convention. SCOPE Wyngrade as Jason King back in the good old days He still had a gaggle of adoring female fans clamouring to speak to him. He once admitted: “Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as I did myself. Yet when I think about it now, I’m amazed I’m still here.” Life was not always so lush, however. As the son of a diplomat he grew up in different countries and was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded during the Second World War. Author JG Ballard was a fellow prisoner of the Japanese at Shanghai’s Lunghua civilian internment camp in 1943. Related articles Is that really Jason King, the suavest man on TV? | Daily Mail Online Is that really Jason King, the suavest man on TV?

comments Once he was an international sex symbol, regularly mobbed by screaming girls and boasting a clutch of ‘best-dressed man’ awards. But when Seventies television star Peter Wyngarde was spotted out shopping near his West London home last week – clad in knitted hat, camouflage jacket, wrinkly leather trousers and scruffy trainers – it was clear his fashion sense had deserted him a long time ago. Wyngarde – now 76 – made his name playing a suave crime author and investigator with a penchant for groovy chicks in the cult adventure shows Department S and Jason King. When Seventies television star Peter Wyngarde was spotted out shopping near his West London home last week it was clear his fashion sense had deserted him a long time ago With his flamboyant suits, bouffant hair and lush moustache he soon became one of the best-known characters on television. Wyngarde’s heart-throb status once led to him being mobbed by 30,000 hysterical women at Sydney airport, and he even had his own fashion column for women in a daily newspaper.

Suavest man on television: Peter Wyngarde as Jason King in the 1970s His adventures as Jason King were a send-up of spy and detective dramas such as The Saint and The Avengers – a typical plot would see King drive his Bentley to a country mansion where he would drink champagne with the owner and flirt with his attractive daughter before arresting everybody. He once said: ‘I decided Jason King was going to be an extension of me. I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy – I used to go to the tailor with my designs.’ Wyngarde’s camp style was later adopted by the comic Mike Myers as the basis for his own spoof-sleuth creation, Austin Powers. But Wyngarde’s career ran off the rails in October 1975 when he was fined £75 for gross indecency, under his real name Cyril Louis Goldbert. And it emerged in a 2007 biography of actor Alan Bates that Wyngarde had been living a double life. Wyngarde was married briefly in his 20s, but had an affair with Bates that is said to have lasted ten years.

Their relationship is believed to have begun in 1956, after Bates made his debut in Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in London. After his arrest, Wyngarde did stage work in South Africa and Austria, before making an appearance as a masked villain in the 1980 movie Flash Gordon. He blamed ‘small-minded people’ for ruining his TV and film career, and admitted in an interview in 1993 that he developed a drink problem. ‘Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as I did myself,’ he said. ‘I drank myself to a standstill. When I think about it now, I’m amazed I’m still here.’ As a child, Wyngarde was interned by the Japanese in a prisoner of war camp – the same camp where Empire Of The Sun author J.G. Ballard was held. TV Spies & Secret Agents · Primer · The A.V. Club Source A year after U.N.C.L.E., TV producer Michael Garrison decided to extend the TV Western cycle by combining it with the Bond-ian pop-art spy thriller.

The result was The Wild Wild West, which had Robert Conrad playing a suave, athletic secret agent who traveled across the country in a souped-up boxcar with his partner, hammy inventor Ross Martin. The two men attempted the ridiculous week after week, sneaking into impregnable fortresses (frequently in caves, which made for cheap sets) and smashing the super-machines of the future, created by the makeshift despots and mad scientists springing up in the hinterlands in the wake of the Civil War. Piling gimmick upon gimmick, The Wild Wild West offered crazy gadgets, campy villains, buddy comedy, and a winking disregard for historical accuracy. A pervasive Cold War anxiety also ran through the show, playing on the American fear of some vaguely exotic imperialist threat, manifested inside our borders. Source The Wild Wild West showed how easily spy stories could be grafted onto other genres—as did the British series The Avengers, which debuted on ITV in 1961 as more of a detective show, then went on to become one the most popular examples of small-screen spy drama. The Avengers pioneered “spy-fi,” in which international intrigue ran second to science-fiction gimmicks and Dr.

Doomish super-villains bent on world conquest. Add in high-tech gadgets and a general tendency to emphasize escapist adventure over realistic geopolitical gamesmanship, and The Avengers concocted a formula for success that kept it on the air for the rest of the decade. And it didn’t hurt that Patrick Macnee’s John Steed stood as a paragon of suave professionalism, nor that he was accompanied by a series of tantalizingly-outfitted female sidekicks like Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg, and Linda Thorson. Source Though The Avengers was the quintessential British spy series, the UK kept pumping out new secret agents throughout the ’60s. Few of those shows were sillier than The Champions, another ITC effort that mixed state-sponsored capering with a dollop of the fantastic. In The Champions’ case, a trio of enforcers were blessed with super-powers—enhanced senses, telepathy, precognition, and super-strength—which they used to clandestinely protect the world from the petty dictators trying to rule it. The show was pure froth, pitched to more of a juvenile audience, with none of the overt winking of The Avengers.

Source [pagebreak] In fact, even though the British and American agents alike took their missions seriously, there was a light-heartedness to the ’60s shows that became more dominant as the decade wore on. Perhaps that’s because it became harder to take spies seriously after Get Smart, the Mel Brooks/Buck Henry-created secret-agent parody that ran from 1965 to 1970, and which openly mocked espionage’s alphabet soup of agencies and agent names, as well as the craziness of the various spookware. Get Smart took the wind out of the sails of spy adventures, urging them to become either sillier or more sophisticated. Source In the Bill Cosby/Robert Culp vehicle I Spy, for example, absurd world-conquering plots and impossible gadgetry took a back seat to banter. I Spy was as much a comedy as Get Smart—it even debuted the same year—but it relied on the chummy interplay of Cosby and Culp, who were cool and low-key even as they traveled the globe dispatching bad guys. I Spy was patriotic in its own way, too, making the U.S.

look more integrated and progressive than it actually was at the time by portraying a black agent and a white agent as friends and equals, without ever making a big deal about it. Source While other series were getting goofier, in 1966, Mission: Impossible went the other direction, bringing a touch of class to the genre. M:I stuck covert government agents into complicated caper plots, showing how an “Impossible Missions Force” busted up terrorist cells, mob bosses, and communist dictators by using disguises, deception, split-second timing, and switcheroos. Ringleader Steven Hill (later replaced by Peter Graves) would sort through his dossiers of available agents, nearly always settling on master of disguise Martin Landau, sexy supermodel Barbara Bain, circus strongman Peter Lupus, and guru gadgeteer Greg Morris. Then they’d all embark on an elaborate ruse that the audience at home usually had to figure out as it was happening. It was the spy series as sleight-of-hand puzzle, encouraging viewers to think more about the plots than the politics.

Source The spy genre hit a lull in the ’70s—perhaps because Watergate made the idea of wiretapping for the government seem a little less heroic—but it rebounded in the ’80s with shows like Scarecrow And Mrs. King and Airwolf, which took advantage of the Reagan-era resurgence in Cold War politicking to re-introduce the idea of extraordinary folk on the frontlines of the fight against terrorism and communism. Airwolf actually started as a more complex depiction of government service, with Jan-Michael Vincent playing a Rambo/Chuck Norris-type loner, unsure whether the super-secret agency he flew his special helicopter for was really on the right side. But by the second season, skepticism gave way to jingoism. As for Scarecrow & Mrs. King, it treated espionage as the backdrop to a grand love story, putting ordinary divorcee housewife Kate Jackson in peril week after week so suave spy Bruce Boxleitner could save her. The heroes’ romantic intentions were what mattered, not their career. Source Perhaps not coincidentally, by the end of the ’80s, the spy-parodists were back on the case.

The short-lived Fox sitcom The New Adventures Of Beans Baxter lightly roasted the whole notion of heroes with trenchcoats and earpieces by making its protagonist a teenage kid, brought into the business against his will. The idea that a dopey high-schooler could save the world as well as any specially trained operative punctured some of the genre’s pretensions. Similarly, just last year, ABC Family and comic-book writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach spoofed the square-jawed secret-agent prototype with The Middleman, a wonderfully deranged heroes-and-villains saga that celebrated righteousness even as it recognized how silly a devoted lawman can look. Source In recent years, as America’s public image has taken a beating around the world, even the unapologetically patriotic secret-agent shows have contained an element of world-weariness and slow-burning frustration. Two weeks after 9/11, CBS debuted The Agency, which ran for two seasons, detailing the inner workings of the CIA. The Agency’s agents dealt with bureaucracy and internal corruption between missions that were often challenging for their diplomatic sensitivity as much as for the viciousness of the villains they went after.

In 2006, around the time of the third anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, CBS started airing The Unit, a series about paramilitary operatives and the families they leave behind when they go on missions. Co-created by Shawn Ryan (the man behind FX’s crooked-cops-can-be-pretty-effective drama The Shield) and playwright David Mamet (who shortly thereafter publicly renounced liberalism), The Unit was a complex portrait of the compromises and sacrifices required to keep the country safe. It was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. without the fancy gadgets, and Mission: Impossible with the complicated schemes. These men did their jobs with grit and guns. [pagebreak] Intermediate: The Pragmatists Though few would dare question the patriotism of 24’s hero Jack Bauer—a man who’s given up every chance at a healthy, sane existence in order to protect the Stars, the Stripes, and all the geometry between—24 itself takes the conflicted emotions of The Agency and The Unit one step further by implying that patriotism isn’t always enough.

For the first six seasons of the series (marked as “Days,” given the show’s real-time gimmick), Jack Bauer has been an on-again, off-again employee of the Counter Terrorist Unit, a government agency designed specifically to combat terrorist attacks inside the United States. As an agent, Jack has often worked undercover, even going so far as to get himself hooked on smack to infiltrate a drug cartel, but tough as the work has been, at least it’s easy to tell the bad guys from the good out in the field. Finding his way through the tricky maze of double-crossed loyalties and political infighting in the halls of CTU has proved tougher. Bauer’s agency has had more than its share of traitors over the years (at least one per Day), as well as some bureaucrats in upper management unwilling to give Jack the leeway he’s needed to get the job done. So Bauer, gifted with an unerring conviction in his own righteousness, has often been forced to strike out on his own. Spy shows are often based on the fantasy of people pretending to be someone else, but there’s always someone in a room somewhere who knows it’s all a game.

An operative’s life is made exponentially more difficult when that someone starts changing the rules. Source In a way, 24 is the prime example of the modern secret-agent show, wherein the heroes complete shadowy missions while fully aware that what they’re doing may not always be “right.” And if not 24, then perhaps the definitive 21st-century super-spy series is Alias. Created by J.J. Abrams—and marked by his unique ability to punch right to the heart of the zeitgeist—Alias featured all the elements of the spy hits of previous generations, including high-tech gadgets, international intrigue, flashy action sequences, and goofy disguises. But it was all compressed into a suitably modern sensibility, as Abrams added a lot of the crazed mythology that would pop up again in his series Lost, as well as relationship dramas for the ladies and a sexy, ass-kicking Jennifer Garner for the fellas. What made Alias feel especially cutting-edge was how it held its cards close to the chest regarding who, exactly, were the good guys.

Garner’s Sydney Bristow, recruited fresh out of college, was barely allowed to get comfortable with her job before she found out that the agency she worked for was hurting her friends, destroying her family, and—for all she could tell—doing as much harm to the world as the terrorist outfits they claimed to oppose. Keeping the goals and leadership of groups like SD-6, APO, and Prophet Five murky kept Bristow on constantly shifting moral ground—and kept the audience guessing. Source In the contemporary TV spy series, there are fewer Jack Bauers than there are Sydney Bristows. More often than not, today’s heroes tend to be recruited through deceit—or drawn in by circumstance. Consider the current Chuck, in which an ordinary computer geek has government secrets downloaded into his brain, and is subsequently forced into service. Or the short-lived syndicated series She Spies, which resembled the movie version of Charlie’s Angels in style and tone, while following three female agents who worked for the government in order to atone for past crimes.

Even the Canadian series Intelligence—about the inner workings of a Vancouver organized-crime unit—splits its story between a driven agent and the mob boss she converts into an informant, and implies that both characters do what they do because they have to, not because they want to. Then again, that sense of espionage and other covert ops as “just a job” has its roots in the same ’60s TV spy boom that produced The Patriots. In spite of its early-’60s timing and surface similarities to the James Bond oeuvre, the ITV series Danger Man (a.k.a. Secret Agent in the U.S.) largely distinguished itself by how different it was from other contemporary spy shows. Starring Patrick McGoohan as secret agent John Drake (initially an agent of NATO, but retconned in the second series to work for an MI-6 analogue), Danger Man toned down many of the hallmarks of the super-spy genre to a refreshing degree. Drake seemed more like Everyman than Superman, solving his missions with good old hard work and determination instead of insane gadgets and high-flying derring-do.

Those missions were also much more straightforward and realistic; Drake’s job was to stabilize struggling democracies and maintain an often-bloody political status quo. In fact, in its portrayal of a spy engaged in the covert cloak-and-dagger work of international espionage, as well as in its ambivalent moral tone (missions were often qualified successes, if not failures, and audiences were clearly shown that innocent people often got hurt in pursuit of what the powers that be considered a greater good), Danger Man anticipated the grim, dirty Cold War spy films of the 1970s. In addition, Patrick McGoohan’s portrayal of a spy often seriously at odds with his paymasters was a meaningful foreshadowing of his most famous role, in The Prisoner. Source American television also imported the British spy series The Baron, with Steve Forrest as an art expert whose jet-setting lifestyle was frequently interrupted by the government’s demand that he help them on a case involving a priceless antique. And ABC created its own arcane-specialist-impressed-into-government-service show in 1968 with It Takes A Thief, with Robert Wagner as a cat burglar who was asked to steal sensitive materials on behalf of Uncle Sam.

Forrest’s character in The Baron was much more contented with his lot than Wagner’s in It Takes A Thief, but for both, government work was a sidelight, not a calling. Source In some ways, The Equalizer, a CBS crime drama from the late 1980s, wasn’t a spy show at all. Most episodes played out like slightly twisted detective stories, or vigilante crime-fighter adventures. (Indeed, a bit too often, the show seemed to aspire to be nothing more than a thinking man’s A-Team.) But at its best moments—inevitably buoyed by Edward Woodward’s always-meaty performance as the title character—The Equalizer reminded sharp viewers of the best aspects of previous generations of spy shows. Woodward played Robert McCall, an embittered veteran of a mysterious CIA-type outfit, who had retired from the espionage game and become a sort of combination bodyguard/avenger who hired himself out to desperate people whose lives were in danger.

Viewers were kept on their toes by the appearance of shadowy figures from Woodward’s past, alternately acting as allies, informants, or antagonists, and by hints that his work was meant to atone for various morally dubious actions he’d committed in the past. The Equalizer was only ever as good as its individual scripts; it lacked a show-runner with the ambition to give it an overarching narrative, but it deserves credit for a dark and sometimes gripping approach to the spy drama that nicely blended it with other existing action genres in an interesting way. [pagebreak] Advanced: The Rogues Sort of an Equalizer for the 21st century, USA Network’s current hit original series Burn Notice stars Jeffrey Donovan as an ex-spy who hires himself out as a freelance justice-dispenser to the aggrieved citizens of Miami. The difference between The Equalizer and Burn Notice? Donovan’s Michael Westen has been “burned,” meaning that he was dismissed from the agency and turned into a non-person, for reasons no one will explain. Two-thirds of the average Burn Notice episode is dedicated to the client-of-the-week, and the other third follows Westen’s attempts to figure out who burned him, and to get his reputation and job back.

Mostly though, Burn Notice is about the hero explaining to the audience, in super-cool voiceovers, exactly how to plant bugs or break into office buildings or plant evidence or bullet-proof a car. Though more a fun, frivolous hour of television than anything else, Burn Notice carries the underlying message that there are no secrets anymore, and that the only loyalty that matters is to the people the hero knows and trusts best—including those of us watching at home. Source Where The Patriots do their jobs out of some rarely wavering commitment to the cause, and The Pragmatists fight on despite uncertainty about the validity of what they’re doing, The Rogues exist in a much murkier realm—often distrusted by the very people they’re supposed to be helping. In the TV adaptation of the film La Femme Nikita, Peta Wilson plays a falsely accused criminal who works on behalf of a shadowy agency that threatens to kill her if she doesn’t comply. Much of the tension in the series is derived from the heroine’s attempts to get out from under the thumb of the agents who control her.

Similarly, the too-abruptly cancelled CBS series Now And Again follows the plight of a middle-aged family man who has his brain transplanted into the body of a super-soldier, and is kept captive by the government except when he goes on missions. When he can, he sneaks away to see the family who thinks he’s dead—and who doesn’t recognize him in his new body. Though there’s rarely any doubt that the hero’s missions are vital, he maintains his own private directive: to escape as soon as possible. Source Of course not all Rogues suffer such existential crises. In the early-’70s British series Jason King, Peter Wyngarde played a detective-turned-novelist who found it impossible to get any work done because the government kept drawing him into their missions against his will. Though little-known in the U.S., the one season of Jason King had a lasting cultural impact, with the character’s natty clothes and ice-cool style serving as an inspiration for Austin Powers, the Invisibles character “Mr. Six,” and the X-Men villain Jason Wyngarde, among others. Jason King was like The Saint given a Carnaby Street upgrade.

Source And speaking of perhaps the most famous Rogue in espionage fiction, Leslie Charteris’ legendary character The Saint (a.k.a. Simon Templar) began life in a series of pulp novels in the late ’20s as more of a common adventurer, but by the time Britain’s ITV brought the character to television in 1962, he was fully transformed into yet another 007-style international man of mystery. (The comparison was made pretty explicit in the series, and it didn’t help matters much when Roger Moore, who played Templar, went on to replace Sean Connery as James Bond.) Even while fighting globetrotting super-villains and using Q-style gadgets, though, Templar retained his own distinct characteristics which distinguished him from the average super-spy. For one thing, he didn’t work for any government agency; he was more of a jet-setting free agent (and one, it was often hinted, with a criminal past) who would work with organizations like Scotland Yard, but only when it suited him, and always on his own terms.

Templar was a man with his own moral code, impenetrable as it may have been, and he was more than willing to stand against people like his sometime-ally Inspector Teal when they didn’t live up to that code. Robin Hood or “robbing hood,” the Saint was always his own man. Source If the super-spy genre can be said to have a logical end-point, it was reached in 1968 with the conclusion of Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein’s brilliant, frustrating ITV series The Prisoner. It’s the story of an unnamed super-spy (whom fans have thought for decades is meant to be Danger Man’s John Drake) who resigns over an unrevealed moral conflict with his superiors and gets banished to a mysterious island. An endless series of interrogators, always designated Number Two, attempt to get the hero—who is alternately enraged, animalistic, cooperative, and calculating—to explain why he resigned. Throughout the brief (17-episode) series, the people who run the island use drugs, flashbacks, seduction, torture, betrayal, and every other trick in the book to get McGoohan’s character to reveal a secret they probably already know.

The moral struggle is thus subtly altered, and the entire dynamic of the spy genre is changed. It’s no longer about fighting the enemy, but determining who the enemy is. It’s no longer about who deserves your allegiance, but who owns your conscience. The Prisoner often floated adrift in genre clichés, and its surrealistic elements could be hokey instead of intriguing. The show was wildly inconsistent. But McGoohan was always magnificent, and The Prisoner took the spy genre as far as television has ever allowed it to go. Top 5 1. The Prisoner Other spy series have considered what a life of secrets and voyeurism does to the human psyche, but few have been so successful at finding the genre’s layers within layers. This is the secret-agent show as radical pop art. 2. Mission: Impossible From the propulsive score to the stylish cinematography to the cast of earnest specialists, Mission: Impossible brought a touch of class and professionalism to the genre. The series was a refreshing oasis of classic adventure storytelling in an era of parody and camp. 3. The Avengers Of course, camp isn’t always a deal-breaker.

The Avengers rarely took its supervillains or heroic archetypes all that seriously, but its over-the-top design and droll humor helped redefine spook cool. 4. Burn Notice Spies don’t get much cooler than Michael Westen, an oft-betrayed and abandoned good soldier who by all rights should be a pitiable, tortured soul. Instead, Westen passes his days trying to live right and help people, while deploying all his spy know-how with a thin little grin that lets the audience know it’s okay to enjoy themselves, because the hero sure is. 5. Alias Though convoluted to the extreme, Alias understood the two elements that make up a good spy show: mind-bending double-crosses and snazzy outfits.

Question: Who played television character Jason King in the early 1970s?
Answer: Peter Wyngarde