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).
Cover Up (1984)
Cover Up lasted for a single season back in 1984, but it’s most well-known for how one of its stars died mid-season.
Danielle Reynolds is a New York fashion photographer. She’s married to Mark, an embassy functionary (but really a CIA agent) in La Costa, a fictional country south of the border. When Mark is killed in a car bombing, Danielle finds an ex-special forces soldier named Mac who just happens to be handsome enough to pose as a model, and they travel to La Costa to investigate. At the end of the episode, it’s decided that they will take Mark’s place doing missions for the CIA using their photographer/model cover story.
Mac was the centerpiece of the show — it was kind of a reverse Charlie’s Angels, in that respect. He was played by newcomer Jon Erik Hexum, and in addition to his impossibly good looks, he had a genuinely compelling screen presence.
Tragically, during the filming of episode seven, he was playing on-set with a handgun loaded with blanks. He put it against his head and pulled the trigger, not realizing that even though a blank doesn’t propel a slug, there’s still a short range explosion of propellant. The resulting brain damage left him in a coma and he was removed from life support six days later.
He was replaced with another hero, and the show finished out a 22-episode season, but it just didn’t have the ratings to get renewed.
The CIA boss is played by Richard Anderson, who was Oscar Goldman in the Six Million Dollar Man. And the main villain in the pilot is Louis Jourdan, who had played Kamal Kahn in Octopussy just a year before. The theme song was Holding Out for a Hero (RIP Bonnie Tyler) sung by Hexum’s girlfriend at the time.
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).
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 (1983 - 1987)
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.
Fortune Hunter (1994)
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.
