Every Version of Get Smart

The Shoe Phone That Launched a Franchise

Get Smart was not adapted from anything. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry invented it whole, pitching it to NBC as a parody of the spy-mania sweeping pop culture in the wake of James Bond and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The show premiered in September 1965 and ran for five seasons, splitting across NBC and CBS, making Don Adams and Barbara Feldon two of the most recognizable faces on American television. Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 of CONTROL, was incompetent in every practical sense and correct in every moral one, which turned out to be a durable comic formula. The show never took itself seriously enough to age badly in the way straight spy dramas do, and that self-aware absurdism is exactly what made it worth revisiting in every decade that followed.

Unlike most properties that get the revival treatment, Get Smart has been pulled back to screens not because studios own valuable IP, but because the premise keeps finding new relevance. The spy genre keeps bloating with self-importance, and audiences keep wanting someone to puncture it. The shoe phone, the Cone of Silence, the hallway of closing doors in the opening credits: these images have outlasted the specific Cold War anxieties that first made them funny.