Masquerade was an attempt to bring the Love Boat/Fantasy Island format to espionage. It didn’t even last a full season back in 1983.
Rod Taylor, Greg Evigan, and Kirstie Alley were the three constants. Taylor was the head of “Operation Masquerade,” which was a program to use civilians in spy operations, ostensibly because the Soviets knew all about the “real” spies. Evigan and Alley played his lieutenants.
Then, in each episode, there were a crew of guest stars recruited for that episode only (you can see the Love Boat angle, right?). For example, the pilot movie has Earnest Borgnine, Cybil Shepard, Richard Roundtree, Rue McClanahan, and others. Each of them bring their own little subplots and conflicts, as well as some special skill that was critical to that week’s antics.
The plot of the pilot was a far-fetched plan to discredit a Soviet spy stationed in Paris so that he wouldn’t be selected as the new head of the KGB. The entire thing was absurd and more played for laughs than drama. (For example, at one point, Borgnine’s plumber replaces the water in the Soviet’s shower with gin, to make him appear to be an alcoholic. That’s why they needed a plumber on the team, naturally.)
Someone has posted the entire pilot movie on YouTube. It’s just over an hour, which means it must have been 90-minutes with commercials. The quality is horrible, but you can get the idea.
As a bonus, here’s a 30-second bumper promo for the next episode which shows Walter Gotell (General Gogol from the Bond films) doing his best Soviet accent (he was actually German).
Also, check out the opening credits and theme song. It’s an orgy of espionage cliches.
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.)
Scarecrow and Mrs. King, S1E1
For absolutely no particular reason, I watched the first episode of Scarecrow and Mrs. King the other night.
(I almost said “re-watched” because I can’t imagine I haven’t seen this before, but it’s been 43 years since it aired, so who can remember...)
The show was a moderate success in the 80s, running for four seasons between 1983 and 1987. It was Bruce Boxleitner’s first notable thing after Tron, and Kate Jackson’s first after Charlie’s Angels.
It was… cute. Boxleitner is an agent for “The Agency,” and Jackson is a recently divorced single mom. He runs into her on a train platform and gives her a package before he gets roughed up by some KGB agents. That draws her into a plot involving a cooking show that is secretly communicating orders to kill other agents (shades of Wayne Newton’s character in License to Kill). By the end of the episode, she’s been recruited as his “civilian partner.”
There’s a weird amount of killing (I counted six people in that episode alone, most of it off-screen), and some plot holes and very convenient coincidences that don’t quite make sense. But it otherwise holds up, so long as you remember this was primetime in the early 80s.
Back in the mid-90s, there was a very short-lived primetime show called Fortune Hunter. I can’t find a full episode (only five of them actually aired), but here’s a short promo video.
Carlton Dial was a literal fortune hunter — he did jobs for money. I vaguely remember that he was searching for treasure or other valuable items. (There weren’t even enough episodes to totally flesh out the concept.)
There was also a weird plot device where he had cameras in his contact lenses linking back to a computer geek at home base… or something (I might be foggy on that). And, of course, Dial’s gun shot tranquilizer darts, because this was primetime and he was a good guy.
The show did not succeed, but I remember it being mildly interesting, and borrowing heavily from the Bond canon (see the video: “…Dial. Carlton Dial.”). This was right in the middle of Bond’s legal turmoil and exile from the theaters, so the time was right to fill the gap.
The show was so fleeting that I couldn’t even find a decent image for this post. And tragically, the star, Mark Frankel, died in a traffic accident just a couple years after the show aired.