Studio executives decided to cancel the spy comedy “Get Smart” after its inaugural season in 1965. It was because of poor ratings, despite having a stellar comedy pedigree — it was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.
“But, no one liked the show they put on as the replacement,” Brooks says. “So, I got a call saying they were putting us back on the air. Any show becomes a habit if you keep it on the air. You want to see them.”
The decision proved wise. “Get Smart” ended up running for four seasons on NBC and a fifth on CBS. It won the outstanding comedy series primetime Emmy in 1968. The goofy battles between CONTROL and KAOS went on for 138 episodes.
HBO Home Entertainment is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Emmy winning series by releasing it digitally for the first time. It can be purchased now across all major online retailers at a suggested price of $1.99 for each episode and $19.99 for each season.
Before launching “Get Smart,” Brooks already had established himself as one of the top comedy writers in television with “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour.” When the idea was pitched to him to produce a TV show about a New York detective, Brooks offered a twist.
“There was James Bond and the TV shows ‘I Spy’ and ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ I told them if we had a very incompetent secret agent, we would have a good show,” says Brooks, 89, recalling details of the early days of the comedy series as if they had happened only yesterday.
The network executives liked the idea but wanted to make the show more family friendly. It was suggested that Smart be given a dog and that the agent’s mother be part of the show. Brooks was trying to get away from the standard family comedies that filled the airwaves at the time and wanted to make something that was more absurd.
He says that the network executives always wanted the opposite of what he wanted.
“They wanted everything to be friendly and I wanted it to be irritating,” Brooks says. “I said, ‘We’ve got to tell the truth to make things work. We’ve got to be crazy. We have to have fun.’ “
He finally got the OK to make the show his way.
Brooks and Henry created most of the concepts and visual gags over a game of pool. They would shout out ideas and Alfa-Betty Olsen, a long time writing collaborator with Brooks, would write them down.
Out of that game came things like the infamous Cone of Silence, a sound proof device that never worked properly, and the telephone shoe. The bumbling Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) became Agent 86 because of a job Brooks had at one time in a restaurant. When the restaurant ran out of an item they would say “86 it.”
Barbara Feldon’s Agent 99 came from how guys would look at women’s legs and rate them, such as “she’s a nine.” They doubled the compliment for the female spy.
They also came up with a long list of what would become catchphrases for Agent 86: “Would you believe …” “Missed it by that much!” “Sorry about that, Chief,” “The old (such-and-such) trick,” and “I asked you not to tell me that.”
Brooks says those were only words in the script. It was how Adams delivered them that made them so memorable.
“We were so lucky to get Don because he made the lines funny because of his expressions. He played the role very seriously and that made it even funnier,” Brooks says.
That fit the way the show was written. Brooks and Henry created each script as if they were producing a film noir drama. Then they would push everything to absurd to create the humor.
It’s been a half century since “Get Smart” was unleashed on the TV world. Since then, it has continued to pop up – there was the 1980 feature film “The Nude Bomb,” starring the original cast, and a 2008 feature with Steve Carell taking over as Maxwell Smart. There was even an attempt to relaunch the show in 1995.
The show’s popularity endures. To this day, when Brooks does speaking engagements for his feature films, he knows there will be questions about “Get Smart.”
“That’s because the series has held up so well. That’s because we wrote very tight, real stories,” Brooks says.
Had the network stuck to its cancellation plans, “Get Smart” would have “missed it by that much!”
Rick Bentley, The Fresno Bee
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