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).
To Catch a Thief (1955)
I read somewhere that 1955’s To Catch a Thief was fairly spy-adjacent. I watched it this morning.
It’s got about everything you need: a very debonair hero in Cary Grant (he was 51 at the time), a beautiful girl in Grace Kelly (she was just 26), amazing locations on the French Rivera, elegant galas, classic sports cars, and intrigue around stolen jewels.
Grant is John Robie, a former jewel thief nicknamed “The Cat” who broke out of prison during World War II and joined the French Resistance. He became a hero and earned parole, then went straight. But 15 years later, someone has started robbing the idle rich in Nice and Cannes using John’s old techniques. He has to catch the real thief before the police come for him.
It’s probably as close to a Bond film as you can get without actually being about espionage. The love affair between Grant and Kelly is a little weird when you consider their ages, but it’s handled in typically vague fashion for the 1950s.
Parts of it were filmed on location, and the scenery is gorgeous. But I almost forgot it was a Hitchcock movie — it just doesn’t have that Hitchcockian vibe to it.
Magnum P.I., S3E1
Magnum P.I. was always spy-adjacent. Magnum was an intelligence officer (…or a Navy SEAL?…or both?), and multiple episodes had a espionage angle to them, usually related to Magnum’s somewhat-murky service during the Vietnam War. He even gets called back to Naval Intelligence a couple of times.
Here’s a 22-second video of one of the most infamous moments in the series. In Nam, Magnum and T.C. were captured and tortured by a KGB agent named Ivan. When Ivan reappears in Hawaii looking for them, it results in a pretty shocking ending for primetime in 1982.
Spoiler: Magnum just plain shoots him in cold blood. The episode ends on a freeze-frame which was omitted from some international broadcasts, as it was problematic. There are no details given about how Magnum gets away with the murder.
This was the ending of a two-parter (actually a two-hour TV movie back in 1982), and the next episode in the series just picks up like nothing happened, innocently guest-starring the zany brothers from Simon and Simon, even.
(I’m still really salty that Robin’s Nest was torn down. You can see it here on Google Maps — it’s never been re-developed. It would have made an amazing AirBnB.)
Timothy Dalton on Charlie’s Angels
Back in 1979, Timothy Dalton guest-starred on Charlie’s Angels as cat burglar Damien Roth, described as “a man with James Bondian tastes, means, and charm.”
Though not technically a “spy,”The Thomas Crown Affair does lurk on the periphery. I loved the Pierce Brosnan version from 1999, and it looks like we’re getting a new one from Michael B. Jordan.
