The Mainstreaming of the Spy Genre…
By 
Some interesting observations here:
In all the years of the Emmys, only two shows about espionage have ever won the Outstanding Drama Series award: Mission: Impossible in 1967 and 1968 (it was the 1960s) and Homeland in 2012 (we’d just killed Bin Laden). It’s not that the Television Academy lacked for spy series, from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Alias to The Hour and The Americans. But for some reason, Emmy voters pre-2000 seemed to prefer shows about everyday folks doing everyday jobs. From 1981 to 1999, there were only two years when the Outstanding Drama winner wasn’t about cops, lawyers, or doctors (and in the case of David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, all three!). In the quarter-century since, the genres expanded to include crime shows (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad), political shows (The West Wing, The Crown), and shows about the moral decay of the American character as incubated in Manhattan office towers (Mad Men, Succession). Yes, several spy series from this period produced Emmy winners in acting and writing — Matthew Rhys got Lead Actor in a Drama for The Americans; Abi Morgan won for writing The Hour — but in many cases, you could argue they deserved much more. We had to watch Victor Garber go Emmy-less for his Alias performance three years in a row. That damages a person!
I love conversations about how genres get mainstreamed, from Westerns to gangster flicks to metal to whatever else you can imagine. I suppose, though, that I’d never really thought about where the spy genre fit into the firmament of TV. The Mission: Impossible wins are interesting as historical artifact, but I guess maybe I find them even a little less surprising than Homeland’s win. Homeland was bad, y’all. Entertainingly bad for a while but good lord, not good.*
In terms of the best that the genre has to offer… I think a lot about rewatching both Sandbaggers and the Americans to see whether they live up to my memories, but they were very, very good. To my mind they represent the Respectable Poles of spy fiction, situated between the heroic and the bureaucratic. Too heroic and you get to James Bond, which has its place but is tiresome, while too bureaucratic…. well, I just love stories about bureaucracy. The show that’s on now that I’d place in or near this rank is Slow Horses, plus possibly the recently departed Andor…
Your thoughts are welcome.
*anyone who hunts down a glowing contemporary review of Homeland from the author risks an immediate and total ban.