Yes, the show got rather cartoonish as the years went by, but that first season everyone seemed to be taking it fairly seriously as a caper/thriller, rather than as camp.
I never saw the show at all until four or five years ago when one of the cable ‘nostalgia’ stations started airing it; after Hill’s episodes I was spoiled and couldn’t enjoy Peter Graves’ more wooden delivery. (I will always feel affection for Peter Graves for his Airplane turn, but not even his most ardent fans will claim he was a master thespian.)
(Fans of Star Trek will find it worthwhile to watch those first episodes, as of course both shows were filmed on the same lot and had not only many guest stars in common, but also sets (!) and incidental music.)
They were both sold to the networks on the same trip to NYC in early 1966. ***Mannix ***followed the next year … and then Lucille Ball sold Desilu to Paramount.
Most fans of MI know that Steven Hill got together a prayer group with (as I recall) Leonard Nimoy and at least two other guys from Trek, during that year.
On Hill’s performances: sometime in the past year, TCM showed the 1959 Kiss Her Goodbye, one of Hill’s few leading-man roles in feature films. It features Elaine Stritch as his romantic interest (a rarity for her, too). It’s well worth a viewing.
The thing about Steven Hill as an actor, is: he was never not interesting, and he was never not-real. Not for an instant.
I’ve caught a few episodes recently. One of them was seriously messed up; the team had kidnapped someone and was keeping him in a fake prison set that they’d built. They convinced him that he was going to be executed. I don’t remember why, exactly.
Solow talks about it in Star Trek: The Real Story, published in 1996. Desilu at the time had very little money, so MI was largely bankrolled by CBS, thanks to Ball’s close relationship with the network.
He was a professional hit man. They wanted to get his confession on tape, so they could nail the guy he worked for.
The best thing about that episode was that they showed in great detail how to make a rifle grenade using stuff from your local hardware and sporting goods stores.
And then they have the weightlifter kayo him in the most low-tech way possible. No, if we inject the guy with a hypodermic, it’ll leave a mark and he’ll realize he’s been drugged; how fast can you choke him out by wrapping him up in a judo hold?
I always liked the one where they tricked the old Nazi into killing the young neo-Nazi before he could launch a Fourth Reich. That and the one where they faked a nuclear attack are my all-time favorite episodes!
The first-season episode where they found Hitler’s lost gold was a really good one too!
The cemetery where they found the Braun crypt was actually next door to Desilu’s Gower Street studio. And the water tower Barney climbed in the episode with the mind control drug was right in the middle of the studio compound.
Hm…I’ll have to load up my DVDs. I could have sworn that they started B&W. If not…then I guess I don’t know why Hill’s episodes wouldn’t be in rotation.
