Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture

by Michael Kackman

In Citizen Spy , Michael Kackman investigates how media depictions of the slick, smart, and resolute spy have been embedded in the American imagination. Looking at secret agents on television and the relationships among networks, producers, government bureaus, and the viewing public in the 1950s and 1960s, Kackman explores how Americans see themselves in times of political and cultural crisis. 

During the first decade of the Cold War, Hollywood developed such shows as I Led 3 Lives and Behind Closed Doors with the approval of federal intelligence agencies, even basing episodes on actual case files. These “documentary melodramas” were, Kackman argues, vehicles for the fledgling television industry to proclaim its loyalty to the government, and they came stocked with appeals to patriotism and anti-Communist vigilance. 

As the rigid cultural logic of the Red Scare began to collapse, spy shows became more playful, self-referential, and even critical of the ideals professed in their own scripts. From parodies such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart to the more complicated global and political situations of I Spy and Impossible, Kackman situates espionage television within the tumultuous culture of the civil rights and women’s movements and the war in Vietnam. Yet, even as spy shows introduced African-American and female characters, they continued to reinforce racial and sexual stereotypes. 

Bringing these concerns to the political and cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, Kackman asserts that the roles of race and gender in national identity have become acutely contentious. Increasingly exclusive definitions of legitimate citizenship, heroism, and dissent have been evident through popular accounts of the Iraq war. Moving beyond a snapshot of television history, Citizen Spy provides a contemporary lens to analyze the nature—and implications—of American nationalism in practice. 

Michael Kackman is assistant professor in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, Austin.

Genres: History

278 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[MH · Rating 4 out of 5]

An academic exploration of how American spy shows in the 1950s and 1960s participated in the project of reinforcing a national identity, largely through two-dimensional anti-communist shows of the 50s and the spy television that commented on those shows in the following decade. Kackman's project is to discuss how these shows work with ideas of Americanness and not to give thorough production histories, so he's selective with his subjects which can get a little frustrating: he's deeply interested in ratings and production costs for some shows but not for others; he all but ignores the importance of the James Bond movies that prompted the networks to produce so many of these series; and in writing about The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as a camp parody he ignores the fact that in it's early seasons it took itself quite seriously as an adventure show (and that once it tried to copy the success of Batman and went camp, the ratings nosedived, leading to its cancellation). But his writing is clear and enjoyable, and his analyses are excellent, particularly in the changing, contested nature of the domestic space; his acerbic read of I Spy's Alexander Scott as the ideal Civil Rights era Black tourist; and how the Viet Nam-era Mission Impossible team constructs the modern spy as nationless mercenaries rather than stalwart patriots, and he recovers some 1950s spy shows that are both rich texts for scholarly analysis and jaw-droppingly goofy (you don't get a much clearer example of American fears of emasculation than the six-inch tall hero of World of Giants).