Good morning Mr. Vaughn,
The man on the photo on the bottom is Bruce Geller, a writer for TV in the early 1960s. After seeing the movie Topkapi, a movie where an intelligent group plans a great robbery, he thought that would be a great idea for a TV show. In the era where James Bond imitators were action, adventure series (The ManFrom UNCLE, I Spy, Wid Wild West) he brought a thoughtful, generally nonviolent, series to CBS. It was called Mission Impossible.
Your mission should you decide to accept it is to read this review and then give us your analysis of the series. Should you or any of the audio video members be caught or thrilled, Scott will disavow any knowledge of your actions.
Please dispose of this review in the usual manner. (which you often do anyway.)
Mission impossible. What’s a great TV show for its first three years. It was almost a who done it, a puzzle when you watched it. What the hell were these people doing?
Famously, it opened with Mr. Briggs during the first year (played by Stephen Hill) and then Mr. Phelps (played by Peter Graves) for the next six years, getting an international mission presented to him on a recording that would usually self-destruct.
The next scene would show him organizing a team that would go after an international conspiracy against the United States.
So every week it was the same cast, but a very different roles. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, a married couple, create a new characters every week and they were outstanding. People don’t know that Martin Landau was the first person Gene Roddenberry asked to play Mr. Spock. He turned it down because he didn’t wanna play the same character every week so the role was offered to Leonard Nimoy.
At the time Mission was very different TV and was very compelling.
It really didn’t matter what the bad guys were doing, and what they were up to, what was interesting is how they were about to be brought down. The show had very little action and violence in it except at the end, off screen, you know the head bad guy was going to get it.
Of course, one of the most memorable aspects of the TV show is the theme music. It opens the show and closes it, but the music in the middle is often very very good.
It was produced by Desilu which means even today on Blu-ray it looks fantastic. CBS was paying about $525,000 per episode and because it always took place in a foreign country with a different scenery, different costumes and different backgrounds. It cost about $40,000 more per episode to produce. Stu did this because studios made up their money and syndication. Sadly, Desilu was a success. So every week they were losing money on Star Trek, Mission, Mannix and the Lucy show. In today’s money, they were probably losing almost $1 million a week, so the studio was sold to Paramount.
And Paramount immediately cheapened the series. They essentially fired Martin Landau and Bob Bain. They also fired the original writers. Bruce Geller left. It to save money the impossible missions force now only fought domestic criminals. They did bring in Leonard Nimoy who stay two years. On the fifth year they brought in Leslie Ann Warren, but if you watch the episodes, they didn’t know how to write for her. She was much younger than Barbara Bane Nimoy left after the fifth year because the show began to be more about gimmicks than action or writing. So the sixth and seventh and final years were just not as good as the first three.
My biggest complaint was that in the last few seasons, gimmicks became dominant instead of the acting in the writing. Also, then when someone put on a mask, they looked exactly like the person they were impersonating. Their height instantly, changed their voice changed, their movements changed and their skin complexion changed. It often seems silly and not serious.
As with every Desilu Production, the images here are surprisingly very good. The pictures are sharp with great color, which surprised me. The DTS 5.1 sound is also excellent.
I do recommend this series, especially the first years.
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