The Spy Command

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Mission: Impossible. The original 1966-73 television series has had multiple lives. There was a 1980s TV revival. And, from 1996 to 2025, there was a series of movies with Tom Cruise.

M:I began with an ambitious writer-producer, Bruce Geller.

Geller had penned scripts for shows such as Have Gun-Will Travel and The Rifleman. He became a producer as well, even collaborating with Sam Peckinpah in an episode of the anthology show The Dick Powell Theater.

Geller wanted to get into feature films. He viewed his Mission: Impossible pilot as a way to achieve that. Geller didn’t expect the pilot to sell. It was complicated. It would be hard to duplicate as a weekly series. However, once made, the pilot would be a major example of what Geller could do.

Then came the law of unintended consequences. CBS bought the pilot and ordered the series. For Desilu, it was one of two difficult series to produce. The other was Star Trek, ordered by NBC. Both shows debuted in the fall of 1966. M:I and Star Trek would be made in close proximity at Desilu.

One crew member, associate producer Robert H. Justman, worked on both pilots. Both Geller and Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry wanted Justman for series production. Justman went with Star Trek.

Regardless, Bruce Geller now had to churn out weekly Mission: Impossible adventures. He made a key hire, Joseph Gantman, as the day-to-day producer. It was Gantman who did the heavy lifting in developing a reliable supply of scripts.

Mission: Impossible was a difficult series to work on. The original star, Steven Hill as team leader Dan Briggs, for religious reasons, quit working on Friday afternoons. Scripts had to be revised. Martin Landau as disguise expert Rollin Hand, originally was intended to appear only occasionally. Soon, he was virtually a regular.

Eventually, Hill departed after the first season. Peter Graves came aboard in the second season as the new team leader, Jim Phelps. He’d remain through the original show as well as starring in the 1980s revival.

Geller devised visual flourishes. It was his hand that lit the fuse in the show’s main titles accompanied by Lalo Schifrin’s iconic theme music. A photo of Geller, wearing sunglasses, was in an early episode as an operative Briggs decided wasn’t right for a mission.

M:I wore down behind-the-camera personnel.

Gantman left after the second season. Writers William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter took over at the start of the third season as the new producers. But they had conflicts with Geller and departed part of the way through the season. Others came in and out until the end of the original show. M:I was not a model of stability.

M:I wasn’t very stable in front of the camera, either. In the middle of the second season, Paramount’s then-parent company, Gulf + Western, bought Desilu. New Paramount executives wanted to curb M:I’s costs. That led to Martin Landau and three-time Emmy winner Barbara Bain leaving the show.

Executives later barred Bruce Geller from the lot. Geller would continue to be credited as creator and executive producer but would have no influence on later seasons.

The M:I cast became a revolving door, with various actors, including Leonard Nimoy, Sam Elliott, and Lynda Day George being cast as regulars. Greg Morris as gadget whiz Barney Collier and Peter Lupus as Willy Armitage ended up in all seven seasons. Producers had intended to phase Lupus out. But fans made known they wanted his Willy character to stay. So he did.

Regardless, M:I ended up being the longest-running U.S. spy show from the 1960s Spy Craze.

Later generations know M:I best from the Tom Cruise movies. But they wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for Bruce Geller, a creative dynamo.

Filed under: The Other Spies | Tagged: Allan Balter, Barbara Bain, Bruce Geller, Desilu, Joseph Gantman, Lalo Schifrin, Martin Landau, Mission: Impossible, Paramount, Peter Graves, Robert H. Justman, Steven Hill, William Read Woodfield | 4 Comments »