If you blinked back in 2005, you might have missed Eyes which didn’t even last a full month. ABC filmed 12 episodes, but only aired five before yanking it off the air.
It was an hour-long drama about Judd Risk Management, a private investigation firm. So, it wasn’t espionage in the classic sense, but there was a lot of sneaking around.
It was an ensemble show. Tim Daly was Harlan Judd, who owned the firm, but he was surrounded by 7-8 other players with their own dramas, and a central plot point around how the troubled firm was going to survive and who was maneuvering for power over whom. It reminded me of a legal drama where ownership and partnership are the chess pieces.
But there were some neat spy-ish bits in the pilot episode: lots of surveillance, reconstruction of shredded documents, and general skullduggery.
I remember watching it on network TV when it came out and being surprised at how little it was marketed. Production values were sky-high, so I’m sure the show cost a fortune to make, but there was very little promotion of it — it just kind of appeared suddenly, and then disappeared just as quickly.
Probably for the best, honestly, because the pilot made it seem like it was heading into soap opera territory pretty quickly.
The episode is on YouTube, but is frustratingly missing the last two minutes of audio (which I remember being a montage over David Bowie’s Under Pressure… which, now that I think about it, is probably why it was removed).