On October 21, 1954, the CBS anthology show Climax! ran an episode titled "Casino Royale", featuring American Combined Intelligence Agency agent Jimmy Bond bankrupting a sinister Russian spy at a casino. A producer thought the show had merit, and after buying up the rights, Jimmy Bond, Secret Agent premiered on CBS in 1955.
The original show's star Barry Nelson was unavailable due to contracts with My Favorite Husband, where he played the lead character, so after a search relatively unknown Irish-American actor Patrick McGoohan was cast as Jimmy Bond.
The first two years saw relatively high ratings for the show, with its combination of exotic settings, beautiful women, and the commanding presence of McGoohan, who stressed the difficulty of his job, but with the waning of the cold war the popularity of the show declined. In the final season the opponents were changed to members of the "International Crime Executive", or ICE, which made the scripts even more lackluster.
The original source, a book by British journalist Ian Lancaster Fleming, ran into copyright problems and was kept off the stands in America. Fleming wrote a small number of sequels, which sold adequately in Britain and Canada, but they never gained the American market and the last one, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1958) ended with the marriage and retirement of the agent.
Spy shows languished until the mid-sixties, when Matt Helm, starring Peter Falk as cynical, burned-out counterintelligence agent Matt Helm, became a hit. The show featured Helm having to deal with threats to American society and government by various unspecified foreign powers, the most significant of which was Dr. Liang Chun (Khigh Dhiegh).
Based on the rising popularity of the show, the British series The Avengers, starring Ian Hendry and Julie Stevens as two ordinary people swept into fighting espionage and international crime, with the help of a secretive government agent played by Patrick McNee, which was very popular there, was imported, but did not appeal to American audiences.
The original show's star Barry Nelson was unavailable due to contracts with My Favorite Husband, where he played the lead character, so after a search relatively unknown Irish-American actor Patrick McGoohan was cast as Jimmy Bond.
The first two years saw relatively high ratings for the show, with its combination of exotic settings, beautiful women, and the commanding presence of McGoohan, who stressed the difficulty of his job, but with the waning of the cold war the popularity of the show declined. In the final season the opponents were changed to members of the "International Crime Executive", or ICE, which made the scripts even more lackluster.
The original source, a book by British journalist Ian Lancaster Fleming, ran into copyright problems and was kept off the stands in America. Fleming wrote a small number of sequels, which sold adequately in Britain and Canada, but they never gained the American market and the last one, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1958) ended with the marriage and retirement of the agent.
Spy shows languished until the mid-sixties, when Matt Helm, starring Peter Falk as cynical, burned-out counterintelligence agent Matt Helm, became a hit. The show featured Helm having to deal with threats to American society and government by various unspecified foreign powers, the most significant of which was Dr. Liang Chun (Khigh Dhiegh).
Based on the rising popularity of the show, the British series The Avengers, starring Ian Hendry and Julie Stevens as two ordinary people swept into fighting espionage and international crime, with the help of a secretive government agent played by Patrick McNee, which was very popular there, was imported, but did not appeal to American audiences.