TV: Get Smart

We may like to sentimentalize our favorite TV shows, but to be brutally honest, most of them are pretty dumb. The concepts for stuff like "Gilligan's Island," "M*A*S*H," and especially "Hogan's Heroes" (let's set a comedy inside a German POW camp!) are simply silly on paper. "Get Smart," fortunately, suffers little from being viewed in a more sober light, since it's designed to be a parody of the entire spy genre.

Don Adams, in the role which would come to define his career, plays hapless "Agent 86" (as in "this guy's had too much; 86 him"). Along for the ride is Barbara Feldon, Edward Platt, and a host of evil ne'er-do-wells in the form of KAOS, an organization bent on world domination. Much of the humor comes from Adams' wickedly on-target deadpan delivery - while 86 is frequently incredibly incompetent, Adams never breaks character:



It's silly fun that I really enjoyed as a kid - I still remember watching reruns on "Nick at Nite" during the summer (I'll be blogging more about those lost summer gems in due time). Like many old TV shows, Hollywood's trying to make a feature film. It stars Steve Carell (a casting choice that's hard to argue with):