Blowing the cover: America’s long-standing affair with television espionage Premium

Spy shows on American television have shaped public perception, with the CIA and FBI influencing scripts behind the scenes.

For Netflix, 2025 began with a worldwide streaming hit — The Night Agent: Season 2. The pervasiveness of spy entertainment in American media meant that success was more a matter of routine, and Americans have indeed eagerly loved and followed along with the fictional pursuits of their national intelligence agencies. It took a little over a decade since the television boom for spycraft stories to start syndicating over the medium. Since the 1950s, there has not been a decade in American television devoid of a spy staple. With each show shaping, deepening, and reflecting the anxieties of the public watching it, U.S. spy shows have come to define an omnipresent storytelling medium.

The reputation of “the spy” in worldwide media has certainly undergone severe rehabilitation. What was considered in early literature a profession of deceit, has become a personification of national interests. The rise of spy fiction in literature coincided with official efforts following the Second World War to establish a robust intelligence agency. The United States formed the CIA in 1947, and the Agency has since then built a symbiotic relationship with Hollywood.

Through radio shows and then early television, the American audience was made familiar with the “agent”. They become an invisible, imagined first line of defence against enemy infiltration. Poring through declassified FBI and CIA files, showrunners created a prototype of the spy that continues to live on our television sets today. Driven by morals of patriotism over the greed of materialism, spies are compelling characters. With the U.S.’ tendencies to play World Police, the spy genre has always had an interested audience in need of comfort and reassurance.

That comfort is usually found at the end of a long drawn-out violent sequence, which is justified by the fact that the violence benefits American democracy. The plot structure of spy shows has shown little evolution, either safely transporting a secret object from point A to point B, or escaping something or chasing someone. Often, their enemies range from international counterparts, criminal organisations, or domestic terrorists creating mischief at home. The contours of the enemies do not matter as much as their existence.

It may be a lucky accident for the CIA that the commercial usage of television, the peak years of the Cold War, and the most powerful years of McCarthyism overlapped to brew an espionage storm. In the early 1950s, spies on television were less the result of creative imagination and more the derivation of FBI files. With communism as the main villain, shows carried the binary understandings of WWII world order. Scripts often parroted the black-and-white doomsday scenarios promoted by the government and justified the existence of intelligence agencies as guardians of the American ideal. Things had to be more relaxed in the coming decade, even as the American government was running amok internationally.

Buoyed by the success of the first few James Bond films, espionage found a loyal audience and television was fast to respond. The 1960s saw television reach a saturation point with multiple shows running parallelly. Shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964), and Mission: Impossible (1966) cemented the essentials of the American spy genre. Unlike their predecessors, these shows were optimistic, self-assured in the might of America, comprising a stylish core group who jetted off to European locations and mixed with suspense and humour, while bringing contemporary issues of race and gender to the fore. The decade saw genre blending as well with The Wild Wild West (1965), bringing cowboy spies to the screens. Finally, Get Smart (1969) wrapped the decade up with show-mocking and satirising the genre.

The next two decades were a moment of self-reckoning for the American public who would go on to learn some uncomfortable truths about its government. In the last few years, the United States had not only faced the missile crisis, but had also actively contributed to the death toll of the Cambodian civil unrest, and still had troops on the ground in Vietnam. These international tensions were bookended by the Watergate scandal which seemed to blow the lid off. Accordingly, spies on TV adjusted and took a flight back home to spend more time on domestic issues. The agents started to become more cynical, with the 80s ushering in the age of the disillusioned spy. The political shift to conservatism, with the landslide 1980 election of Republican Ronald Reagan to the White House, was reflected in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novel series which hit the press in 1984 and was appreciated publicly by Reagan. Meanwhile, on television, MacGyver (1985) and The Equalizer (1985) featured disenchanted leads, who were reconsidering the American espionage methods.