The Man from UNCLE - an extended introduction to the 60’s series from a newbie slash fan
(Cross-posted from tumblr, but probably rather more readable here)
Sometime around September of last year, I happened upon a trailer for the recent The Man from UNCLE movie on youtube, and on a whim, decided to give the original 60's TV series a go. I knew very little about the show going in beyond the general notion it was one of those classic old slash fandoms from way back in the day - not that I was really looking for a new fandom at the time, just something lightweight and diverting to entertain myself with in between hacking out the last few chapters of that Teen Wolf fanfic epic I was still trying to finish. A little old, cheesy 60's TV sounded like just the thing.
This did not precisely go to plan. I still finished my WIP, but I also fell head over heals for The Man from UNCLE in a way I had never remotely counted on. The whole experience of discovering the show has been both so rewarding and so bizarre it's stirred up the need to dust off my old essay writing habits and soliloquise at length about my thoughts on the thing, chief among those being oh my god, I had no IDEA what I was getting into!
See, here's the problem: it's a damn hard series to explain in a couple of hundred words of blurb. Tell people it's basically the Napoleon-and-Illya show, and they're going to be a little thrown by how it takes most of season one to figure out that's what it wants to be, not to mention how much time it spends on ‘innocent’ guest characters. Fans (mostly) agree that the first season was the strongest, that the third went too far into farcical nonsense, and the fourth went a bit far back the other way - but that hardly even begins to cover just how widely the tone changes season to season, or even episode to episode. "It's about an American agent and a Russian agent and set during the Cold War," pretty much immediately has to be qualified with, "but they basically just ignore the fact Illya's Russian or that the Cold War's even a thing after S1, and tbh they hardly touch on it in S1 either." It's absolutely slashy and kinky as fuck, but most of the tropiest scenarios our heroes are thrown into (Brainwashing! Amnesia! Enemy impostors!) tend to sort of peter out on screen without taping into a fraction of the pathos that could have been. You've pretty much got to start reading up on the history and the behind-the-scenes developments to have any hope of even starting to get your head around it all.
There's plenty written about the show available on the net - I found The Fans from UNCLE website particularly useful - but even that's more a series of variously opinionated essays by different authors (many of whom disagree on assorted salient points) than a really definitive source, and their 'guide' to the episodes is frustratingly brief. None of the easier-to-find reviews sites seem to have been written by anyone whose taste was anything like my own (not to say they necessarily should cater to me specifically, but it's still frustrating when you're trying to figure out what to skip), and the one slash-oriented guide I’ve found doesn't get past the first season. A lot of accounts, to my mind, tend to sell the internal consistency a little high and the feminist credentials a little low, for example. The community active on LJ remains remarkably healthy, but LJ never has been the easiest site to navigate when hunting for older discussion topics. And nothing I could find on the web came close to preparing me for how much I was going to see the show change and evolve across its run.
What follows below is, therefore, both a general excuse to squee over and pick apart a new shiny thing, but also a general sort of attempt to write the introduction to the series I would've liked to have found myself before I started. Maybe it'll be some use to someone else down the line.
The complete draft of this post has now gotten so long that I've split it into parts. But because it occurs to me that extended text posts generally aren’t the best way to get people’s in a hurry, here is a picture of Illya Kuryakin in his underwear tied to a pole:
Do I have your attention yet? Good.
To follow:
- The Basics (an attempt to explain just what you are, in fact, getting into)
- The Characters (and why people are still slashing them 50 years on)
- The Seasons (a.k.a. how no two people to work on this show ever agreed on exactly what it was supposed to be)
1. The Basics (an attempt to explain just what you are, in fact, getting into)
In a nutshell, The Man from UNCLE is a formulaic spy-fi series built around the classic buddy-cop partnership - except that UNCLE was first penned back before the classic TV buddy-cop formula really existed, and seems to have stumbled onto it largely by accident. You'd hardly name a show 'The Man from UNCLE' if it was meant to be a double-act from the outset, and it wasn't - the original concept was effectively an American James Bond for television with a few twists (Ian Flemming himself was famously solicited for input during the early stages, but ultimately left little lasting impression on the series, beyond perhaps a slight propensity for silly names).
The titular 'man' from UNCLE, Napoleon Solo (that name being one of Flemming's inputs), certainly came with his share of James Bond-isms, conceived as a suave professional spy with a womanising streak. But since UNCLE was supposedly an international agency, Napoleon was given a junior partner of Russian extraction by the name of Illya Kuryakin - a bold statement indeed at the midst of the Cold War - originally conceived as a minor character, and nearly vetoed out of existence by a studio exec before he ever made it to screen. He doesn't appear at all in three episodes from the first season, and has only brief appearances in many others, including the pilot. In contrast to his charming partner, Illya developed into a more reserved personality - a mysterious man with a keen intellect and a dry sense of humour. Far from suffering for his nationality, Illya quickly proved catnip for female viewers, turning his actor, David McCallum, into a major sex symbol overnight - mobbed by so many fans at public appearances he was famously referred to as 'the fifth Beatle'. The producers swiftly promoted Illya to share the lead billing, and while it's presumably possible to overstate his personal importance in turning the show into the biggest success story of its day, it obviously didn’t hurt.
A handful of episodes in the later UNCLE seasons feature only one or the other of the duo (one in S3, two in S4 to be precise), but the show had well and truly ceased to be about 'the Man from UNCLE' well before season one was out. Napoleon and Illya share roughly equal screentime from the second season onwards, if not always simultaneously - a large majority of episodes send them in separate directions for most of the action. By and large, if there was a job that required someone to schmooze with society folks in a tuxedo, it went to Napoleon, and if there was a job that required someone to pose as his chauffeur or perhaps just some random local, it went to Illya, along with most of the literal dirty work. Neither was too proud to switch up when circumstances called for it though, and there were always plenty of fist fights, shoot-outs and getting-tied-up by the bad guys to go around on both sides. Perhaps most importantly though, it's hard to imagine UNCLE could have asked for much better when they cast Robert Vaughn and David McCallum for those roles. In a show where the calibre of guest stars and writers could vary wildly from week to week, I think it would be hard to overstate just how far the charisma of the stars of UNCLE goes in making the show work. But we'll get back to them a bit later.
Rounding out the main recurring cast was Napoleon and Illya's boss Alexander Waverly, the UNCLE section head for all North America. Like Illya in the early days, Mr Waverly appears only briefly in most episodes and not at all in a number from the first season, only very occasionally venturing out into the field. (Confusing matters for the viewer, all three still appear in the credits of every episode, and have been unhelpfully listed against every single episode on IMDB, regardless of who actually shows up that week.) Waverly's role is largely to brief Napoleon and Illya on whatever job is on the cards for this week and present a respectable, mild-mannered and all-but-unflappable presence as the face of the organisation, going only very slightly doddery around the edges with age.
Rather like UNIT of 70's Doctor Who, UNCLE itself was conceived as an internationally run security organisation with an acronym obviously meant to imply an association with the UN, then later hastily qualified otherwise ('United Network Command for Law Enforcement') when it became apparent the real world United Nations might not be so keen on the idea. Of course, rather than alien threats, UNCLE deals with 'ordinary' supervillainry - primarily the machinations of the questionably named evil THRUSH organisation (which the show never claimed to be the acronym for anything in particular, though the novels eventually suggested an answer you might rather forget). Your typical THRUSH plot would tend to involve them developing some new superweapon or secret formula, kidnapping some notable scientist or getting their claws into some important political figure. Spy-fi elements from mind-reading devices to de-aging formulas to doomsday machines show up on a regular basis, but tend to function as interchangeable McGuffins for the most part - the odd borderline-implausible piece of UNCLE tech is about the only such example that ever survives the story intact.
From the earliest concept stage, the other key conceit of the show was that every episode would see an 'innocent' become involved in each case. Like the companions of Doctor Who (who serve much the same purpose), you get the occasional male example, but the overwhelming majority are female. Often, she'll be the informant who gives UNCLE their first lead - the naïve employee of a particular person of interest, or perhaps the wife or family member of someone who's disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Others simply find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it's not uncommon for the innocent to become involved only when UNCLE themselves go out of their way to recruit her to their cause, thanks to any of those same sorts of tangential connections to the unfolding case. The job of charming the innocent into helping and preparing her for her role usually falls to Napoleon, and only a relative minority fail to fall for his charms (though that may be more figurative than you think - many innocents are spoken for, and not all are interested, and Napoleon is far too much of a gentleman to push his luck).
Despite a number of memorable exceptions, most innocents to appear on the show are cast from a relatively limited set of moulds - typically young, white, pretty and unthreatening first, and all else last (female villains on UNCLE are a whole other story, which we'll get to below). But the really lovely thing (to my mind) about the role innocents play is that the idea that ordinary women can - and indeed should - be trusted with serious responsibility in dangerous circumstances has been built into the ethos of the series from ground level. Individual innocents may panic and scream under pressure, they may need rescuing, they may fall apart over pretty dresses, they may well be coerced into getting involved without any real chance to say no, and a great many will still fall for Napoleon within hours of meeting him - but they may just as well be the one rescuing him at some point, and their help is always warmly recognised. For all the inevitable sexist baggage that comes from the era (and even a show like UNCLE is hardly immune), there's an underlying level of respect in how even the silliest of them are treated that's very refreshing. The rare script which requires one of our heroes to utter the lines, "oh, we can't get her involved, it's much too dangerous!" comes out quite hilariously out of character.
If there's just one thing that disappoints me a little about the collective innocents of UNCLE, it's how they pale in comparison with their counterparts on the other side of the law. Female villains on UNCLE range from femme fatales to scientific geniuses to kinky torturers to matronly old women who wield authority like an iron claw. A number are seen running THRUSH operations their own name, the equal or even the superior of any notable male THRUSH lieutenants to share their screentime. They may have to deal with sexism or unwanted male attention, but none ever seem to be judged by the narrative simply for being women trying to do a man's job, and there is all of one straw-feminist villainess in all the episodes I can think of. A professional racing car driver, a literary critic, a batty grandmother and a dominatrix going by the name of 'Mother Fear' (who never once has to strip down or crack a whip on-screen to convince us of her credentials) are just a few of the many weird and wonderful examples to get their spot in the limelight. Unfortunate as it is that the villains get to have so much more fun than the good guys ever do, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a show on TV today with half so many great villainesses as UNCLE has, and that's really saying something.
Your mileage may vary on how well some other aspects of the show have aged. Various shades of brown or yellowface are regularly employed to fill out the guest cast for episodes set in some international location, and telling yourself well, I guess the show is still basically a product of its time can only reduce the cringe-factor by so much. Actual non-white guest stars of various ethnicities do get to appear on UNCLE throughout its run (not least the wonderful Frances Nuyen from The Cherry Blossom Affair, who plays one of my favourite innocents of all time) - and are lucky enough to get most of the better scripts too - but there's a lot of decidedly missable material sandwiched in between the better episodes, and it's worth knowing that going in.
One of my earliest impressions on watching S1 for the first time was to be pleased to find it much less ridiculous and exploitative than the James Bond franchise, which has never really worked for me. Plots are lower-key, women are treated as actual human beings, and good planning and quick thinking are far more likely to be what saves the day than raw machismo. High-tech gadgetry of the James Bond school of espionage gets a bit of a look in, but relatively few episodes hinge on it. Villains do occasionally leave their prisoners in easily escapable deathtraps, but most have better manners. But beyond all that, there's a kind of endearing innocence and optimism that permeates the whole show - from the very concept of a Cold War-era series about a an American and a Russian working together for a truly benevolent international agency, defending the world from megalomaniacal villainy. Napoleon and Illya may be capable of ruthless professionalism, but at heart they're always portrayed as fundamentally nice people, working to do a good thing. Losing even a single innocent in the line of duty would be unconscionable. About the only time you'll ever see them disobey orders is if those orders involve abandoning their partner to certain death.
The new movie's reimagining of Napoleon and Illya as reluctant heroes - a thief serving out his parole and a dedicated Soviet agent living in the shadow of family disgrace - is fairly telling of how times have changed, but strips the core out of what I've come to love about the originals. I have a terrible weakness for the idealism of shows like UNCLE - it's half the fun.
2. Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin (and why people are still slashing them 50 years on)
So, having covered the basics, let's get onto talking a little more about the stars - the real draw for us slashers (and I daresay a good portion of the regular viewing audience too).
Always the darling of the show in his day, Illya's appeal doesn't seem to have dampened with the fans in the last few decades. I fell for him hard on my own first watch, to the point where I skipped a lot of episodes where he didn't appear (if anything, the rarity of his scenes in the early series only adds to their appeal). He's a thoroughly likable character, combining the best parts of the snarky sidekick and mysterious outsider all in one - just alien enough to be intriguing.
Though fanfic often (and not unreasonably) extrapolates his having had to deal with his share of anti-Russian sentiment while working in the US, and the new movie re-imagines him as a man driven by conflicted loyalties, the original Illya has a quiet confidence a thousand miles deep, and plainly feels he has nothing to prove to anyone. A card-carrying cynic, Illya has bone-dry wit, a disarmingly cute smile, and an occasional tendency to get over-involved in his undercover roles in charmingly ridiculous ways (Illya may gripe about some of his roles, but when he commits, he commits). He can play several instruments, speak a number of languages, and apparently convincingly reproduce any accent (except, apparently, that of a native English speaker). He rarely expresses strong opinions on food or drink, but never misses a good chance to stop for a meal. He's not much for tact and charm - even his rare upper-class roles come out on the irascible side - but otherwise, it may be shorter to list the things he can't do (though 'avoid an obvious opportunity to get himself captured and tied up' would have to be top of the list). The show goes back and forth a lot on his feelings on women, varying from 'perfectly susceptible to a pretty face, just less of a horndog than Napoleon' to almost comically blank disinterest. His "How did I get into this? Oh, right, Napoleon,"-face is quite the thing of beauty.[[MORE]]
Fandom makes much of Illya's intelligence - particularly scientific background and quantum physics degree, and his expertise with explosives (in actual fact, his PhD is mentioned all of once, and barely in passing then, and there's no evidence he has any particular expertise with explosives until another couple of mentions-in-passing in late season 4). On the other hand, I feel fandom has sometimes sold Illya rather short on being both a total troll and some kind of fsking ninja - which is to say that the young David McCallum had the upper body strength to go up a wall like a squirrel (no stunt double required), and that I had no idea just how much I was going to enjoy watching him do it until the writers cottoned onto this around S2 and began taking every opportunity to let him climb all the fuck over everything at the least excuse. Given the chance to do so without compromising a mission, he will also happily play dead or feign innocence with a flawless poker face purely to wind people up (if Napoleon isn't the target, he's probably playing along). As the younger, slightly shorter and blonde-blue-eyed partner, fandom also makes much of his waifish stature and angelic looks. This somewhat exaggerates the reality, where David McCallum's all of a couple of inches shorter and only a few years younger than his costar, and not that pretty standing still, but I'll be damned if there isn't something about that man in motion that does things to me. Like so many good spy tactics, it sneaks up on you.
Rather like his partner did, come to that.
Unlike Illya, Napoleon took a little while to grow on me. The basic archtype of the inveterate womaniser who flirts with anything in a skirt but never settles down is an old one, and can easily go badly wrong. Most are far more about the fantasy of what men want to be than what actual women want out of a man, quickly alienating my half of the audience. That so much of Napoleon's womanising happens in the line of duty complicates things further - how much the job is the purpose and how much it's merely the excuse is hard to tease out, and probably varies by writer. One day he'll follow a blatant THRUSH honeytrap after barely a flutter of her eyelashes, another you'll see him surreptitiously checking his watch in the middle of making out with a mark. Whether the target is single, married, or sometimes even male, Napoleon's ability to charm his way past people's defences is one of his greatest assets, and both he and his boss clearly know it.
All that said (or, indeed, as @out-there-on-the-maroon put it here, in a post that echoed my own thoughts so well I had to link them), there's something unexpectedly sincere in how Vaughn's Napoleon reacts to women on screen. Almost every woman he flirts with will end up on a date with him after the action - typically dinner and dancing in some fancy restaurant - but how many he takes home afterwards remains an open question. Plenty of innocents are portrayed as very innocent indeed, and though some are surely happy have Napoleon (ahem) remedy matters, it's even harder to imagine him much disappointed by those who'd rather say goodbye at the door. For Napoleon, wining and dining a beautiful woman is its own reward, and taking her out for some fun after the excitement just his way of showing his gratitude for her help in the latest affair (other S1 innocents are given a substantial cash reward - UNCLE likes its irregulars to feel appreciated). It is one of the greatest shames of the series, to my mind, that we only twice get to see Napoleon turning on the charm for a woman older than himself, which he approaches with scarcely less apparent enthusiasm. Perhaps what saves Napoleon most is that he's just old-fashioned enough to be a gentleman - and by that I mean a true gentleman, who treats women with genuine respect, and who'll back off if he's not welcome. Napoleon's ability to charm women seems to depend above all else on the way women charm him - effortlessly, over and over again, while episodes like The Terbuf Affair make it clear that it's the pressures of the job first and foremost that keep him from settling down. If his love life is restricted to a string of one-night-stands, it goes without saying he'll go out of his way to make sure the lady has as good a time as he does.
Perhaps the real wonder of Napoleon's manwhoring for justice is that women on UNCLE actually don't seem to be judged for the same behaviour. Those who pursue him (or Illya) with open enthusiasm are never vilified - perhaps faintly ridiculed at worst. Even outright femme fatales are likely to be more sympathetically portrayed than the average villain, not less. The gorgeous woman with the ear of the (male) villain-of-the-week is more likely to be presented as the true brains of the operation than the conniving ho who slept her way to the top, while others are running major operations in their own right. The lack of any real double-standard over sexuality makes it that much easier to sit back and enjoy watching Napoleon do what he does best.
All that said, Napoleon's more than just a libido in a nice suit. He's plainly a highly competent agent, never hesitates to take charge in an emergency, and for all that fandom that fandom makes of Illya's scientific prowess, it's Napoleon who actually seems to McGyver his way out of the more traps by creatively using whatever's at hand (Illya's more likely to ninja his way out, and I am very okay with this). If he's occasionally painted as the uneducated doofus next to Illya's Renaissance Man during briefing, he leaves it behind in the office. He's the very picture of grace-under-pressure, remaining suave and smart-mouthed even at gunpoint, though he also pulls some of the most endearingly hangdog faces when caught flatfooted. About the only time we ever really see him sulk over rejection is the rare occasion when the girl goes for Illya instead of him. By the end of the series, I was eagerly going back to watch episodes I'd originally skipped for Napoleon alone. Not since Captain Jack Harkness have I loved a total flirt like Napoleon nearly so much. A little charisma, a lot of sincerity and some basic respect for your partners goes a long way.
So there's everything to love about both of the individually, but as for all great partnerships, the combination is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
I'm personally fascinated by the parallels between them and that other classic 60's duo of Kirk and Spock from the original Star Trek, launched only a few years later - both pairing an alien genius with his womanising-but-otherwise-very-professional boss, producing a superficial clash of personalities over a deeper and enduring friendship. For bonus parallels, Spock too was never expected to become such an overwhelming popular character, let alone with the female fanbase, and likewise narrowly avoided being dropped from the cast by executive meddling before the pilot ever made it to air. In additional neat trivia, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy first appeared on screen together in an episode of Man from UNCLE - the quite excellent Strigas Affair from season 1. Also like Kirk and Spock, Napoleon and Illya get themselves shipped to hell and back, and certainly not without the subtext to explain why.
Episodes which do much with their relationship (let alone hit the dedicated slasher's much-watch list) remain in the minority throughout UNCLE's run - a good number only have both characters in the same place together for a scene or two at most, and may not have much for them to say to one another even then. The history of their relationship is similarly spotty. We never do find out how long they've known each other or how they met - the decision to keep the protagonists' backgrounds largely mysterious was apparently made early in the show's history, and it stuck - but the easy camaraderie between them is all but fathomless. On paper, they ought to clash on every front - a Russian and an American, even before you factor in Napoleon's implied upper-class background against Illya's proletarian roots, and yet it never seems to matter. A friendly habit of winding one another up once in a while (often in a decidedly flirty manner) or Illya's occasional bitching during his more cynical moments are about as bad as the friction seems to get. A great many of their best moments of improvised teamwork are all but wordless, plans shared with barely more than a glance between them. It's lovely to watch.
What you won't see is the two of them ever really talk about their relationship. Not even (to my great frustration) if one of them has been brainwashed or replaced with an enemy lookalike (which happens more than once) and what they should know about one another logically ought to be a major plot point. Like their personal histories, regrets or mortality, the core of their relationship goes almost entirely unanalysed and unspoken. The overarching subtext - and it's always hard to know how much the writers were building in intentionally, or even aware they were creating it at all - is that not talking about it is simply how they deal with the ever-present threat that one or both of them could die in the line of duty or be reassigned to the other side of the world tomorrow. This isn't to say they don't communicate, but a lot of the sweetest moments between them are little more than an exchange of smiles.
They also rescue one another a lot. Which you'd think would be all part of the job, except that I really can't overstate how much getting captured, tied up and perhaps whipped or tortured in variously kinky fashion is a day-to-day occurrence for the both of them. This goes so far that Illya has had himself kidnapped by the villains on multiple occasions purely to draw Napoleon out (which it will, even if he's been specifically ordered to wait for backup). You won't much see them openly worry about one another, but leaving the other in serious danger is more than you can ask from either of them. And then there's the flirting, and the established habit of following one another even while on leave, the odd display of jealousy... if I started listing specific slashy moments, we'd be here a while.
More than anything else though, the heart and soul of the ship for me is the way the show has made clear again and again that there isn't and couldn't ever really be anyone more important for either of them. Napoleon's women come and go, but marriage to a civilian would never work. Both married their jobs long ago, and in a way, one another.
3. Changing With the Seasons (a.k.a. how no two people to work on this show ever agreed on exactly what it was supposed to be)
Beyond the three main characters, the Innocents, UNCLE vs THRUSH and a few favoured (and conveniently marketable) pieces of tech, remarkably little about the show remains consistent through its run, or even from episode to episode. Tone varies from the political drama of episodes like The Dove Affair or The Candidate's Wife Affair to ridiculous balls-to-the-wall inanity of stuff like the second part of the Alexander the Greater Affair - and that's even before you hit the wilder changes of the last two seasons. Showrunners changed with each season, bringing with them wildly different visions of what the show ought to be, from serious drama to spoof. Season 1 (widely considered the best of the four) could be characterised as often serious but with about as many light-hearted or downright silly episodes to space it out, whereas after the shift to colour, seasons 2 and 3 become progressively shallower and campier as they go - though still with occasional more serious fare. This trend comes grinding to a halt as we hit S4, which is goes so far in attempting to 'fix' the excesses of the previous seasons that the new season becomes almost uniformly grimdark and gritty throughout. Opinions on whether this worked vary, but in practice, the attempt to save the show backfired badly, and it was cancelled mid-season. An attempted revival in the 80's likewise failed, as did the recent movie (both have their merits and their fans, but certainly can't be called commercial successes).
Complicating things further, two stories out of every season were released in movie-length editions in international cinemas. Whether the TV-versions were cut down to a single episode (as in S1) or shown as a two-parter (as occurred thereafter), nearly all had substantial scenes added or replaced for their cinematic releases - mostly taking advantage of the venue to throw in some extra T&A. Some of the tamer footage later got recut back into other episodes (see esp: The Four Steps Affair from S1). The movies do mean that at least a couple of S1 episodes are available in colour, but largely tend more towards spy-fi clichés and empty spectacle. They're mostly loud and fun, but don't showcase the best of the series, IMO. There was also a short-lived spin-off series The Girl from UNCLE, a number of published tie-in novels, plus some comics and enough other supplemental material to keep arguments about what counts as canon going for a long while yet, though even the most dedicated fans are unlikely to tell you it's all essential viewing.
How seriously we seem to be expected to take the very idea of UNCLE varies drastically from story to story. While more serious episodes build up the political intrigue or present UNCLE as having a contingency plan for everything from Waverly's incapacitation down to supposedly-innocuous phrases that can be uttered over a radio to indicate danger, others will see Napoleon and Illya walk into traps that would be lucky to fool a moderately-suspicious first-grader. Though UNCLE has done the typical 60's spy trick of concealing the entrance to its HQ behind an 'ordinary tailor's shop', it's apparent from the very first scene of the pilot that virtually every ne'er-do-well on the planet knows precisely where it is. S1 may, as I've sometimes seem claimed, be nominally more into realism than later seasons, but I find even that debatable - it's also the season where members of UNCLE's communications staff of sexy young women seem to find ample time to lounge around on sunbeds, take up pottery or flirt shamelessly with Napoleon over the radio. There’s always been a sense of fun about the series, realistic or otherwise.
While S1's Giuaco Piano weaves a complex chess metaphor of bluffs and double-bluffs as both sides work to anticipate the other's next move, Gazebo in the Maze sees Illya captured by a guy who 'accidentally' drops a book outside UNCLE’s not remotely secret headquarters, leading him onto a suspiciously empty British double-decker bus running a route in New York for no obvious reason, then later traps Napoleon by literally telling him "you can sit down, it's perfectly safe" on a booby-trapped chair. And while an episode like The Girls of Nazarone sees Napoleon recruit a grudgingly unenthusiastic innocent because she simply happens to be roughly in the right place to help him stage an elaborate con, he's utterly stumped when faced with an enthusiastic volunteer from his own staff in Never Never, even with a theoretically infinite timeframe to come up with something interesting for her to do. UNCLE's cigarette box communicators are made very cheaply in Japan, then in a later episode are quite expensive, but could be made more cheaply if outsourced to Japan. Few of these sorts of head-scratchers are ever so much as lamp-shaded by the script; almost the only consistent factor is the inconsistency itself.
What does stand out about S1 is a willingness to take deeper thematic ideas more seriously. Appropriately, given the mandate for innocents, a major recurring theme plays up the contrast between the world of espionage and the life of the civilian. The world innocents glimpse while working with Napoleon and Illya is glamorous, sexy, exciting and frequently, horribly dangerous, effectively precluding either of them ever forming long-term relationships outside of their work - if they live long enough to even consider it. Innocents sometimes wonder how they'll ever go back to their old lives after seeing what they've seen (though they almost invariably do in the end). Episodes like The Terbuf Affair see Napoleon pining quietly for an old lover he's given up, while the finale The Odd Man Affair sees a former spy eagerly taking the opportunity to return to the field. A few others like The Shark Affair and The Dove Affair pit UNCLE against enemies with sympathetic motives of their own, blurring the usual lines of black and white. Even in the first season, such episodes are the exception rather than the rule, and separated by plenty of lighter fare - but they collectively lend a depth and poignancy to the show that goes sadly lacking in later seasons.
From the switch to colour and change of showrunners in the second season, any real interest in deeper themes falls by the wayside. A handful of better-developed villains or the very rare innocent whom Napoleon seems to have gotten closer to than most are about as near as we'll ever get again. Notably gone too is much of the glamour of the spy world, taking with it what seems to be most of UNCLE's annual budget. No longer does Napoleon have tens of thousands of dollars to throw around getting innocents on his side - instead, we start to see him taken to task for expenses as mundane as ruined suits. UNCLE seems to be increasingly taken as little more than a day job for its agents. Rather than giving innocents a glimpse into UNCLE's world, our heroes instead sometimes seem to be getting a glimpse into theirs -- to the point that a number of stories become so focused on the guest stars that our regular heroes seem to be there for contractual reasons alone. Even when we finally return to the subject of the incompatibilities between espionage and lasting love in one of the final episodes of season 4, thematic resonance is kept to an absolute minimum. Although there are still great episodes in the later seasons they're consistently shallow fare, which I feel is something of a shame.
What these stories lack in substance, however, they do at least partially make up in style. The quality of stunts and action scenes improves markedly from the start of S2, as does the frequency with which Illya ends up climbing things or stuck in a wet shirt, and the parade of increasingly kinky scenarios as Napoleon and Illya are tied up, threatened and/or tortured by villains in virtually every episode gets started in earnest. Chains, whips, various forms of brainwashing and even a maternally-themed dominatrix all make appearances. Silver communicator pens gradually start to replace UNCLE's original cigarette-box communicators, and various other gadgets begin to complicate their arsenal too. Innocents are more likely to be single women who collide with the case in the course of their day jobs than demure housewives, and the slightly grating S1 assumption that all women want expensive dresses and society parties relaxes away (perhaps in line with UNCLE's apparent budget cuts). A number of second-season episodes open with exciting and largely self-contained action scenes, sometimes so long the plot of the rest of the episodes feels cramped as a result. There may not be anything in S2 I loved quite so much as the highlights of S1, but there's still plenty I enjoyed to bits, if sometimes for fairly shallow reasons...
(Ahem)
The third season holds a special place of infamy among the fanbase as the season where completely OTT camp sensibilities infested the show, allegedly inspired by an attempt to imitate the success of the new Adam West Batman series. Individual mileage may vary on whether S3 truly deserves its reputation - tone varies by as much as it did in previous seasons, and there's a case to be made that the deservedly bad reputation of just a few really bad examples (The My Friend The Gorilla Affair, mostly) drags the rest of it down. For my own money, I'd actually say S3 represents perhaps the least drastic change in tone from the previous season anywhere in the show's run - a bit more reliance on random gadgetry, a new fixation on ending almost every episode with a huge free-for-all fistfight, and a strange new insistence that Illya a) will not show interest in girls, and b) will get captured at least once in every episode are perhaps the most striking differences from the season past. That said, my list of all-time-favourite episodes coming out of S3 is notably pretty thin, while the dumb-but-still-entertaining category is unusually well populated.
And then we hit season four.
That S3 was something of a misstep is hard to argue, so it's perhaps understandable that with S4, production took a drastic change of direction to 'correct' the mistake. The result, unfortunately, seems to have been a mandate against not just camp sensibilities but against the very idea of escapist fun. S4 is grim and gritty to the point that even those who enjoyed the resulting season (which, to be fair, seems to include most of the easily-found review sites which cover the various seasons, and a lot of slash fangirls too) note the episodes commissioned as not having 'as much humor as perhaps they should have'. And it's a damn difficult section for me to summarise objectively, as believe me when I tell you S4 did not work for me on any level.
Espionage in S4 is a serious business, filled with shouty, angry people and their shouty, angry enemies. A particularly infamous scene sees Illya forced to torture Napoleon to maintain his cover. This is also the season where Napoleon is tortured as part of an internal investigation on UNCLE's own premises, while UNCLE itself proves to be infested with traitors up to the highest levels of authority. There's nothing S4 loves more than a good shocking betrayal, and it loves them so much that all but one or two episodes out of the whole season revolve around our heroes or the innocent of the week being horribly betrayed by someone they'd trusted. Words can hardly express how old it gets by a handful of episodes in. Even Napoleon's charm and Illya's wit get barely any play, and there are precious few real character moments between them. All that drama and misery does produce a few very nice displays of loyalty, and has inspired some genuinely lovely episode-coda fic - most of it dealing with the fallout of everything Napoleon and Illya have been put through that week, only to be brushed aside on screen without resolution. Meanwhile, the personality and the idealism that originally attracted me to the series has been all but stamped out of existence. There isn't a single episode in all of S4 that makes my all-time-faves, and only a handful I much enjoyed.
Accounts of how S4 was received in its own day vary - the standard view seems to be that ratings were well on the way down by the end of S3, and the changes that came with S4 was too little too late to reverse the trend. A more detailed source, however, suggests that ratings were down but not yet dire after the third season, and plummeted only during the fourth, and I suspect this is more likely on the money. For all S3's faults, it's hard to believe anyone still on board at the end of that era would have reacted well to the drastic switch in mood with the fourth. Whatever the truth of the matter, the show was abruptly cancelled mid-season. The biggest shame for me is that I honestly can't say I'm sorry that S4 didn't last longer.
The footnote to the UNCLE story is the 80's attempt at a revival in the form of The Fifteen Years Later Affair, which, for better or worse, failed both with the established fanbase and in producing new interest in the series. I haven't actually seen it myself. In order to generate a reunion episode, the script called for Napoleon and Illya to have left UNCLE not long after the original series concluded and not spoken since, and understanding objectively why that would sound like a good idea to a TV producer doesn't make it any less infuriatingly contrived.
In all, the history of The Man from UNCLE is a bit of an odd beast. Whatever it was about the show that made it work in its own day seems to have been stumbled upon by accident, and largely lost on later producers despite various different attempts to recapture the zeitgeist - though it's hard to think of UNCLE's story as a cautionary tale so much as a show that peaked a little early for its long-term good. Producer Sam Rolfe's departure from the series at the end of season 1 is one of the more widely cited sources for UNCLE's fall from grace, though the show's success did significantly outlast his tenure. Much as I gripe about tonal randomness, UNCLE’s blend of humour and drama, mixing spells of silliness in alongside world-threatening action obviously worked in its favour, engaging the audience and broadening story possibilities. Losing sight of how to keep that balancing act going may have been much of its downfall in the last season or two of its run.
Excluding supplemental material, there are 105 episodes of the UNCLE series proper. There are maybe 20 of those I'd personally consider really essential viewing, and probably 30-40 others I thoroughly enjoyed. Many are decent but unremarkable, only a minority are really all that slashy, and a rather distressingly large number so bored or irritated me I gave up part way through. That's not exactly a stunning hit rate, but the episodic nature of the series means there's not much lost by skipping what doesn't work for you, and the fact I was still head over heels for the series by the end of S1 (and even S1 had its share of clunkers, believe you me) says a hell of a lot about just how much I was enjoying the episodes that stood out. Other folks may find themselves loving a completely different subset; there’s plenty to go around.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just wasted over 7K analysing this thing, and the snowballing list of fic ideas I’ve come out of it with ain’t gonna write themselves...