Yet Another Journal

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» Tuesday, January 30, 2007
I'll Take the Fifth Now
I've been slowly working my way through the Get Smart! DVD set and finally, today, have come to fifth season.

If you remember when Get Smart1 was on the network, NBC cancelled it at the end of its fourth season. The wedding of Max and 99 temporarily elevated the ratings, but then they began to drag again. Television, as always, runs in cycles and the spy craze cycle was pretty much over. The Girl from UNCLE had failed, The Man from UNCLE was over by the time Get Smart! left NBC, and various other small spy series had failed.

CBS, however, which was trying to reinvent inself after many years of being a "rural network," with shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres (they didn't totally toss out the rural shows until several years later), picked up Get Smart! for a fifth season. They tinkered with the theme song and credits, and brought in another new wrinkle: the Smarts as parents.

The "dom-com" coming to the "smart" (forgive the pun) urban spoof pretty much killed it.

I have at least one friend who told me he didn't want to buy the entire Get Smart! set because he didn't want fourth or fifth season. I liked the series so much I could put up with fifth season, especially with the extras. The only advantage to fifth season when it aired was that CBS switched the series to Friday, where I could see it in my own living room rather than behind the counter at the bowling alley on Saturday night. Otherwise, fifth season was a mess as far as I was concerned. Look, I know Robert Karvalas was Don Adams' cousin and Larrabee was fine in small doses, but in fifth season it seemed to be more and more Larrabee doing more and more stupid things.

Then there were Max and 99's twins, who, after their birth, never even got names and identities. They were an increasingly unweildy prop that got pushed to the background unless a humorous situation, like the Chief and Larrabee babysitting, presented itself. The concept actually could have worked if they had focused a little more on the balance of being parents/being spies, as in Undercover Blues.

(In fact, now that I think of it, they could have done something that balanced the stories, and we could have had Max and 99 on missions without worrying about the twins. In first season they introduced the spies' retirement home. They could have hired an retired spy as a loveable, maybe eccentric, but capable regular babysitter without pushing the character too far to the forefront. Then Max and 99 would have had a safe place for the kids, they could go off on missions without being accused of being bad parents, and they could have explored the concept a bit more.)

Of course, this wouldn't have taken care of the quality of the scripts deteriorating, but it might have helped. [wry grin] Probably the worst Get Smart! episode ever written is, naturally, from fifth season: "Hello Columbus, Goodbye America."

On the other hand, now that I'm watching fifth season again for the first time since Nickelodeon ran "Maximum Smart" so many years ago, and comparing them to what's passing for sitcoms now...

...well, let's say they're looking more like Oscar material. (Okay...would you believe Emmy material?)

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