At the peak of its popularity, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was telecast in 60 countries and consistently ranked in the top ten programs on U.S. television. Eight feature-length films were made from two-part episodes and profitably released in the United States and Europe. TV Guide called it “the cult of millions.” The show received 10,000 fan letters per week, and Vaughn and McCallum were mobbed by crowds of teenagers as if they were rock stars. U.N.C.L.E. was also a huge merchandising success, with images of the series’ stars and its distinctive logo (a man standing beside a skeletal globe) appearing on hundreds of items, from bubble gum cards to a line of adult clothing.

The show had a little something for everyone. Children took it seriously as an exciting action adventure. Teenagers enjoyed its hip, cool style, identifying with and idolizing its heroes. More mature viewers appreciated the tongue-in-cheek humor and the roman à clef references to such real-life political figures as Ma- hatma Gandhi and Eva Peron, interpreting it as a metaphor for the struggle common to all nations against the forces of greed, cruelty, and aggression.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. redefined the television spy program, introducing into the genre a number of fresh innovations. Notably, the show broke with espionage tradition and looked beyond the cold war politics of the time to envision a new world order. The fictional United Network Command for Law Enforcement was multinational in makeup and international in scope, protecting and defending nations regardless of size or political persuasion. For example, a third-season episode, “The Jingle Bells Affair,” showed a Soviet premier visiting New York during Christmastime, touring department stores and delivering a speech on peaceful coexistence at the United Nations, 22 years before Mikhail Gorbachev actually made a similar trip.

The show also broke new ground in reconceptualizing the action adventure hero. Prompted by a woman at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) he once met who complained that the leads in U.S. series were all big, tall, muscular, and, well, American, producer Norman Felton (Eleventh Hour and Dr. Kildare) decided to vary the formula. His series, developed with Sam Rolfe (co-creator of Have Gun—Will Travel) teamed a U.S. agent, Napoleon Solo (Vaughn), with a Soviet one, Illya Kuryakin (McCallum). Each week they were sent off on their missions (called “affairs”) by their boss, Alexander Waverly, a garrulous, craggy, pipe-smoking spymaster played by Leo G. Carroll.

Neither the suave Solo nor the enigmatic Kuryakin were physically impressive. They were instead intelligent, sophisticated, witty, charming, always polite, and impeccably well tailored. Sometimes they made mis- takes, and often they lost the battle before they won the war.

What made U.N.C.L.E. truly appealing was the way it walked a fine line between the real and the fanciful, juxtaposing elements that were both surprisingly fantastic and humorously mundane. For example, as they battled bizarre threats to world peace, such as trained killer bees, radar-defeating bats, hiccup gas, suspended-animation devices, and earthquake machines, the agents also worried about expense accounts, insurance policies, health plans, and interdepartmental gossip.

While the series showed that heroic people had ordinary concerns, it also demonstrated that ordinary people could be heroic. During the course of each week’s affair, at least one civilian or “innocent” was inevitably caught up in the action. These innocents were average, everyday people—housewives, stewardesses, secretaries, librarians, schoolteachers, college students, tourists, even some children—people very much like those sitting in U.N.C.L.E.’s viewing audience. At the start of the story, they often complained of their boring, unexciting lives—lives to which, after all the terror and mayhem was over, they were only too happy to return.

By contrast, U.N.C.L.E.’s villains were fabulously exotic and larger than life. In addition to the usual international crime syndicates, Nazi war criminals, and power hungry dictators, U.N.C.L.E. also battled THRUSH, a secret society of mad scientists, megalomaniac industrialists, and corrupt government officials who held the Nietzschean belief that because of their superior intelligence, wealth, ambition, and position, they were entitled to rule the world. A number of prominent actors and actresses guest starred each week as either villains or innocents, including Joan Crawford, George Sanders, Kurt Russell, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (who appeared together pre–Star Trek in “The Project Strigas Affair”), and Sonny and Cher.

The U.N.C.L.E. formula was so successful that it spawned a host of imitators, including a spin-off of its own, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., in 1966. Starring Ste- fanie Powers as female agent April Dancer and Noel Harrison (son of Rex) as her British sidekick, Mark Slate, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. took its cue from the wild campiness of the then-popular Batman rather than from its parent show. Although it featured many of the same elements of Man, including a specially designed gun and other advanced weaponry and the supersecret headquarters hidden behind an innocent tailor shop, Girl’s plots were either absurdly implausible or down- right silly, and the series lasted only a year.

By its third season, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had also become infected by the trend toward camp, and though the tone was readjusted to be more serious in the fourth season, viewers deserted the show in droves. Once in the top ten, the series dropped to 64th in the ratings and was canceled midseason, to be replaced by Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

This was not the end of U.N.C.L.E., however. Because of concerns about violence voiced by parent–teacher groups, the series was not widely syndicated, and reruns did not appear until cable networks began to air them in the 1980s. Nevertheless, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was not forgotten. Nearly every spy program that appeared during the ensuing decades borrowed from its various motifs (naming spy organizations with an acronym has become a genre cliché). For example, Scarecrow and Mrs. King expanded the premise of U.N.C.L.E.’s original pilot episode into an entire series. Even nonespionage programs as diverse as thirtysomething, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Seinfeld continued to make references to it.

In 1983 Vaughn and McCallum reunited to play Solo and Kuryakin in a made-for-TV movie Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair. Three years later, the stars again reunited for an homage episode of The A-Team titled “The Say U.N.C.L.E. Affair.”

In the early 1990s, Felton and Rolfe negotiated with Turner Broadcasting (TNT) to make a series of made- for-cable U.N.C.L.E. movies, but the project stalled when Rolfe died in 1993. Subsequently, John Davis Productions optioned the property in order to produce a feature-length film for theatrical release. Develop-ment, however, has not moved beyond the scripting stage. In 1996, there were plans for Vaughn and Mc- Callum to play villains on a spy-spoof series, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but the short-lived series was canceled be- fore such an episode could be filmed. Eventually, only McCallum appeared as a villain in an episode that aired in the United Kingdom.