NETWORK: NBC
Get Smart got a shot in the arm in its fourth season with a bit of a new direction along with a new showrunner, Arne Sultan taking on Executive Producer duties from Leonard Stern. For the fourth season, the writers decided to resolve the romantic tension between Max and 99 and married them. The first third of the season is their engagement and follows their wedding plans. These episodes are almost serialized a bit with the wedding through-line, and it gives a bit of added life to the show keeping it from being too formulaic late in its run. For instance, there's an episode about buying an engagement ring, an episode about choosing a best man, an episode about meeting the in-laws, and each is its own little spy story. The back half of the season has Max and 99 in their new married life, which gave producers an excuse to redecorate Max's apartment. If we learned anything from I Love Lucy, it's that producers love to change the set to keep things fresh.
It could have been a terrible idea to get Max and 99 together romantically and make them a married couple, and yet I think it works pretty well. The new dynamic adds to their relationship as work partners, while they have to navigate their personal feelings against the missions. Max wants to protect 99, and she wants to protect Max, and often enough they save each other. Besides, in the life of a spy, where will you ever find love but in the arms of another spy? In one delightful episode, Max is so worried about her that he hires a couple of students from CONTROL spy school to keep tabs on her, but she mistakes them for KAOS agents and keeps trying to lose them. Agent 99 is a capable woman and spy, and it's good the show never forgets this. She is intelligent and resourceful and when she needs Max, she always has backup.
The upcoming nuptials provide for fun story opportunities, such as Max having to meet 99's mother and maintain his cover as a greeting card salesman. The episode in which Max proposes is very nicely handled, I thought. The wedding episode itself was one of the better TV wedding episodes I've seen, though 99's very mod '60s dress is... interesting, particularly the headpiece. Incidentally, a well-placed snore obscures 99's real name during their marriage vows.
The Smarts' honeymoon also leads to an absurd and delightful episode sending up Gilligan's Island, in which they are shipwrecked and wash up on Schwartz's Island (named for Gilligan creator Sherwood Schwartz) and come upon a KAOS plot. The episode was filmed on the actual Gilligan's Island sets.
In "To Sire, With Love," Max's double, the King of Caronia from last season, returns for a two-part episode. Guest starring as the villain is none other than a young James Caan! Another episode is a parody of contemporary police drama Ironside, about a wheelchair-bound detective. In this case, the wheelchar-bound Leadside is a criminal mastermind bent on destroying Smart.
The Chief gets more to do this season as well, such as when Max and the Chief end up serving together in the Navy, with Max as the Chief's superior. At the end of the season, the Chief is kidnapped and taken to a POW camp run by KAOS, leading to a riff on The Great Escape, directed by Don Adams.
Though sometimes the stories are a little stale and the show is not always quite as funny as it was in earlier seasons, I felt season four to be a real jolt of life into the show. I enjoyed season three a lot, but I thought season four gave them a bit more creative license to liven things up, which is what you want late in a show's run. This would in fact prove to be the show's final season on NBC. However, CBS picked it up for a fifth season. Season four would go on to not only win for Comedy Series for the second time, but would get Don Adams his third consecutive Emmy for Actor in a Comedy Series. During his acceptance speech, he said, "I would like to thank NBC for giving me the chance to win this again for the third time, and CBS for picking me up next year and giving me another crack at it!"
As it turned out, no nominations would follow for that fifth season, and it would be the final one for the show. Domestic plots would continue for the Smarts, as Agent 99 would deliver twin babies and the show wouldn't know how to write around them. But even cancellation was not the end for Get Smart. A decade later, Maxwell Smart would leap to the big screen (without Barbara Feldon), in The Nude Bomb. This theatrical feature would later be followed by a TV movie, Get Smart Again, for which Agent 99 returned. In 1995, 30 years after the series premiered, a short-lived reboot aired on Fox. Adams and Feldon returned to reprise their roles, now running CONTROL, while the series followed a new agent, their son, played by Andy Dick. I watched it back when it aired, but it lasted only seven episodes. Those curious can find it on DVD, if it's still in print. Finally, a theatrical remake of the series eventually came starring Steve Carrell in the role of Smart and Anne Hathaway as Agent 99. Despite its ups and downs, Get Smart remained a show with a legacy, one of quality and comedy that still holds up.
FAVORITE EPISODES: The Impossible Mission, The Worst Best Man, With Love and Twitches, Schwartz's Island, One Nation Invisble, The Day They Raided the Knights, Greer Window
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