Mission: Impossible premiered on September 17th, 1966. Created by Bruce Geller and produced by Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions, the show quickly infiltrated the cultural consciousness, much like how its team of secret agents infiltrate various countries in order to enact their plots. The show has experienced ridiculous longevity, thanks especially to its main theme by Lalo Schifrin, which has turned into a sort of musical shorthand in and of itself. Chances are, you heard the theme long before you saw a single episode of the show. There have been books and video games and comics. It spawned one of the greatest film franchises of all time.
This is a show that helped define what we think of spies. If James Bond gave us espionage’s cool sociopathy, then Mission gave us its intelligence, its teamwork, its intricacies, and its interactions.
1.) The Sources
The demand for exotic spy stories was high during this time period. James Bond had put his mark on the world, with Dr. No; From Russia, with Love; Goldfinger, and Thunderball blowing through cinemas. There were some novels, too, but they are by and large terrible. The Saint, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers, and Get Smart dominated television airwaves. This was a time when cool was defined by these globe-trotting adventurers, when style and sophistication ran synonymous with secrets. (There’s also the counterpoint, in the dark, pessimistic stories of John le Carré. But that’s another point.) Geller took all these, then decided his show would take many of these spy elements and mix them with con artists.
At its core, Mission: Impossible is a caper, a story that follows a group of professionals working together to execute the perfect heist. David Maurer’s The Big Con was a fixture of the writers’ room. The show owes a significant debt to Jules Dessin’s, Topkapi, from 1964. Apparently, Geller saw this film and decided he wanted to make something like that, except through the perspective of the “good guys,” inasmuch as we can call any law enforcement agency “good guys,” and at least what stood in for the “good guys” during the Cold War for a specific section of people. There’s a scene in the pilot where the safecracker has his fingers smashed and broken much like another character from Dessin’s film. The characters are all introduced cheating at a card game. Martin Landau spends much of his time doing slight-of-hand tricks. (Something Cruise would later emulate in the movies.)
For what it’s worth, Brian De Palma lifted Topkapi’s climactic theft for the Langley sequence in the first Mission: Impossible film. Jules Dessin watched it and said, “Are they allowed to do that?”
2.) Showing Its Age
TV shows from this time period exist today as a sort of time capsule of the era. Like, they hold up and present this ideal Americana that never existed, ignored everything else that was going on around them. Mission: Impossible, for sure, was a product of its age. It’s also a mess of elements that have aged well and others that make for some uncomfortable viewing.
Mission’s pilot stays just vague enough with regards to its plot to not commit to anything. Dan Briggs’s IMF team heads to a fictional South American country, Santa Costa, to remove some nuclear warheads from a power-hungry general. Now, the United States has a rich history of destabilizing governments, especially those in Latin America, especially at times when it seemed the people or the leftists were about to take over. Typically, they favored the fascistic regimes who would be sure to keep corporate interests intact, and, if that never worked, they made sure to cut the island off, starve it out. Think, Cuba. None of that makes it into this episode. The IMF aren’t doing anything so insidious, just relieving a general of a nuke.
Some of the more questionable bits come when Martin Landau disguises himself as the said general. “I’m the best, but even that might be pushing it,” he says. “I believe you’re up for it,” Briggs replies. It would be one thing if he just wore a mask, just practiced the movements, but the pilot actually shows him darkening his skin with makeup. That being said, I did get a kick out of how often he accidentally dropped his accent. Part of the thrill of the scenes came from whether or not the Santa Costa military troops would catch them because Landau couldn’t maintain his accent.
Continued belowThere’s also some business with Cinnamon Carter, the woman on the team. “I don’t need to prepare for something that comes naturally,” she says. Most of her role exists as distraction. She wheels in team members. “If they notice you instead of me, I’m leaving the sisterhood of women,” she quips. In order to do a quick save, she appears in her slip. That being said, there’s an intelligence toward the Carter character, a calculation and awareness of their situation. Whenever Landau’s character gets stuck in a corner, he gawks around, confused about what he’s supposed to do until someone bails him out. Cinnamon Carter reacts in real time, with real cool, and a real keen sense. We could chalk this up to being the ’60s and women were relegated toward being window dressing, but Carter is an active member of the team and does more than stand around and look pretty. So, progress?
There’s a lot of outdated tropes and elements Mission subscribes to, but because it ultimately focuses on this group of people doing their best to get a job done, because the pilot is so much more centered around watching pieces fall into place, because it knows what makes a caper story so exciting, it overcomes these odd and sour elements.
3.) Lalo Schifrin
There’s not a lot to say except Lalo Schifrin’s music slaps. He and the sound editors use it strategically in the pilot, so when it hits, it hits hard.
The James Bond theme might exude cool, it might hint at danger, it might imply a suave attitude, but the Mission theme is exciting and thrilling and suspenseful. When those first notes hit, you know you’re in for a ride. It’s a theme that survived U2 and Limp Bizkit, has been reinterpreted numerous times yet still holds those same emotional pulses through its variations. In a time when most franchises want nothing to do with the themes from their source material, the people who have made the Mission: Impossible movies doubled down on using that riff.
And one that’s even better is “The Plot,” which very well might be the best spy theme ever composed.
Anyway, here’s a fun video about how Schifrin found the music.
4.) Style
It should come as no surprise that I’m a major fan of the Mission: Impossible movies. They have their individual tones and style, their own sense of movement and rhythm and staging. Unlike essentially every other modern franchise, the filmmakers have been encouraged to put their stamp on the material, to make it feel like it was theirs. So you have the Hitchcockian slow burn from Brian De Palma, with its floating, tilted frame. There’s the opera of violence from John Woo. There’s J.J. Abrams’s glorified episode of Alias. You have the Busby Berkeley/Buster Keaton/Chuck Jones adventure from Brad Bird. And the retro spy thriller from Christopher McQuarrie. Even Fallout, the first installment to be directed by the same director, shifts in tone and demeanor, giving us this stunt spectacle.
(Am I using these articles as a backdoor way to talk about the movies? You’d better believe it.)
Anyway, what the movies have in common is this sort of classic Hollywood style of filmmaking. The camera drifts over the sets. There’s a press for clarity, for composition, for balance. The setups are meticulously prepared — for the most part, because Abrams’s entry features these jerky motions and hard close-ups, but they also feel like they’re meticulously controlled jerky motions and hard close-ups — and carefully framed.
Which is not true of the TV series.
The pilot, directed by Bernard Kowalski and photographed by John Alton, takes on a more gritty, pseudo-documentary style. I originally thought it was taking a page from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, but that movie premiered a month before this show, so I guess they both borrow from the same sources. The camera stays tight on characters’ faces. It snap zooms at pivotal moments. It falls out of focus. The whole sequence with the safecracker is blurry and hazy, conveying the claustrophobic vault set and the hasty setup. Alton goes handheld. The frame whips back and forth like it cannot take in all the action.
Part of this, I think, is to hide the show’s limitations. The pilot does not offer a lot of sets. We’re told that the IMF team is heading down to Santa Costa, but the extent of the island is a bunch of armed guards standing around a hotel that was probably filmed somewhere in southern California. It offers just enough to sell the illusion. Even the climactic chase sequence is filmed in the dark on a long stretch of highway, lit up occasionally by fireworks.
Continued belowIt also adds an immediacy to the story. The Mission: Impossible pilot runs 50 minutes, and it uses each minute of its time to establish the caper, provide obstacles, pull off the heist, and get the IMF crew out of there. Geller purposefully avoided showing us any real backstory from the characters, offering up only enough for us to care whether or not they’d be able to pull the whole thing off. The pilot features three editors — Mike Pozan, John Foley, and Axel Hubert — and they’re constantly cutting around the sets in a rhythm with a rapidity I never saw much out of ’60s television. It tricks us into thinking this world is bigger, that the stakes encompass more.
5.) The Blueprint
A pilot is a thesis statement, a declaration of what the rest of the series is going to be. And Mission, in its original incarnation from 1966, ran for 171 episodes over seven seasons. There was an additional 35 episodes produced for a revival in the ’80s, but that series mostly remade many of the scripts from the original. And Mission comes out with this assurance, this sensibility, this confidence. It lays out its structure, from where Briggs, and later Phelps, receive their mission, recruit the team, enact the plot, and then escape. This structure carries through to the movies. And that constraint allows for more creative ways to tell these stories and let the plots unfold.
Of course, this is the pilot, so some of the most famous moments, from the IMF head’s “Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” or “This message will self-destruct in five seconds” are absent from the episode. Instead, Briggs is told “if you decide to accept it,” and that the message will “decompose after five minutes.” So it’s a good thing he skipped over the record’s musical introduction during the debriefing scene. A scene, by the way, is reenacted in Rogue Nation. I’m interested to see when these beats, these elements come into being, at which point they become the classic lines people say without really knowing where they came from.
I don’t see Briggs’s IMF team about to throw themselves out of airplanes or chase each other with helicopters. I don’t think they’re going to climb the tallest tower in the world or nearly drown themselves in an underground vault. I doubt they’ll use a car to drop several stories in several seconds. Nevertheless, this episode didn’t feel small, the stakes didn’t come off as blasé or whatever.
Martin Landau once told a story where he was talking to Lucille Ball about the show. She told him she didn’t understand it but it was proving popular so she didn’t want to mess with it. He asked her how she watched it, if she sat down and gave it her full attention. Ball said she treated it the same way she did any TV series, dropping in and out while she did something in the kitchen or talked on the telephone. He told her, no, she had to watch the show then come back to him. When Ball did, he said she suddenly understood.
The TV series might lack the spectacle we’ve come to associate with Mission: Impossible, but it has its own intensity, its own terseness, its own personality. It kicks off with a cool charisma and unfolds with confidence. It gives us just enough for us to want to check in on their next adventure.
