Mission: Impossible—The Complete First TV Season

Although it provided fodder for dozens of comedy sketches and eventually became a parody of itself, this high-adventure series got off to a good start with gripping, surprisingly complex yarns steeped in Cold War intrigue. Mission: Impossible premiered in 1966 with a largely unknown cast, but by virtue of its unusually clever scripts and exotic settings became an early example of “destination TV”: a show around which people actually arranged their schedules. Steven Hill played Dan Briggs, head of the IMF (Impossible Missions Force), a top-secret private agency engaged by the government to carry out dangerous assignments too hot for American military or law-enforcement agencies. His team—chosen at the beginning of each adventure in a little ritual that became one of the show's trademarks—included actor and makeup genius Rollin Hand (Martin Landau), actress Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain, then Landau's real-life wife), technical wizard Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and strongman Willy Armitage (Peter Lupus). The IMF's various missions taxed the ingenuity of writers, who almost always rose to the challenge of providing exhaustively detailed capers that kept viewers riveted in their seats. Among the best shows of the 28-episode first season are “A Spool There Was,” a Landau-Bain tour de force that finds Rollin and Cinnamon going it alone to recover a crucially important wire recording; “The Traitor,” in which the IMF discredits an American defector and whisks him out of enemy territory before he can impart top-secret information; and “Action!,” which finds Dan and the team sabotaging the efforts of an Iron Curtain filmmaker who is manipulating footage of American troops in his movie about wartime atrocities. Disappointingly, the seven-disc set contains no extras, but this is still recommended. (E. Hulse)