‘Get Smart’ at 60: How Buck Henry, Mel Brooks and Don Adams Created TV’s Funniest Spy Spoof
Celebrating 60 years of Maxwell Smart, Agent 99, and the spy comedy that turned espionage upside down
Sixty years ago, American television viewers were caught between two powerful cultural currents. In theaters, James Bond ruled with Sean Connery’s suave charisma, exotic locations and gadgets that seemed plucked from the future. On the small screen, spymania had taken hold with shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy. The genre promised style, action, and the fantasy of secret agents protecting the free world during the height of the Cold War. Into that atmosphere stepped Get Smart, a series that dared to ask: what if espionage bravado was, at its core, ridiculous?
When it premiered in 1965, Get Smart cleverly turned spy tropes inside out—and became a classic. “Get Smart outlasted all the others,” says Donna McChrohan Rosenthal, author of The Life and Times of Maxwell Smart. “James Bond movies launched in 1962 and have continued ever since, so I wouldn’t call a parody like Get Smart the genre’s last gasp. But let’s face it, times change, the world changes, the political climate changes. Eventually, people are ready for something new.”
Much of the credit for the show goes to Buck Henry, a writer-performer with razor-sharp wit, and Mel Brooks, already making his name as a bold satirist. Together they created a show that didn’t just lampoon Bond — it shredded Cold War spy culture: gadgets that never worked, faceless bureaucracy, and even the supposed moral certainty of the “good guys.”
“Mel Brooks is a sight gag kind of guy,” Rosenthal explains. “Think of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and The Producers. He came up with Get Smart‘s shoe phone. Can you imagine anything more preposterous? You’ve been clomping through muck with it, crashing its technology into pavement and to use it you have to stop walking, squat down and take it off. That’s spoofing James Bond’s sophisticated gear in the broadest way.”
Over five seasons, Get Smart also delivered catchphrases that became part of the language (“Would you believe…?” “Missed it by that much”), a roster of eccentric supporting characters and one of TV’s most endearing duos in Don Adams’ Maxwell Smart and Barbara Feldon’s Agent 99. It won Emmys, drew consistent ratings and lived on in reruns, reunions and even a feature film.
‘Smart’ genesis
Every successful series has an origin story, but few are as straightforward or as funny as Get Smart’s. Buck Henry recalled it vividly. Called into producer Daniel Melnick’s office (Melnick had also spoken with Brooks), he was given the marching orders.
“He said, ‘Here’s the thing: what are the two biggest movies in the world today? James Bond and Inspector Clouseau,” Henry remembered. “’Get my point?’ Well, I think that’s the best bottom-line story I’ve ever encountered in show business. That was it. That was the genesis. No actor, no sketch, no backstory. Just: spy parody.”
Brooks contributed the title. “Let’s call the guy Smart so we can call the series Get Smart,” he said. It was simple and ingenious.
“I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible comedies,” Brooks told Time in 1965. “They were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel, I’d set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first.”
ABC rejected the idea, but NBC programming chief Grant Tinker saw potential where others didn’t. The pilot, essentially Henry and Brooks’ script with minor adjustments, showcased Don Adams’ soon-to-be-iconic performance. Producer Leonard Stern added polish by writing the legendary opening sequence of slamming doors and corridors, one of the most memorable introductions in TV history.
Writing the pilot was exhilarating but slow. “It took us a very long time because we’re both lazy,” Henry laughed. “It was more fun talking about it than actually putting it down on paper. But that’s true about everything.”
Still, the version they delivered was the one viewers saw: The bumbling hero, the glamorous partner, the parody of espionage tropes and the absurdity were all in place. When the show premiered in 1965, audiences didn’t yet know what to make of Maxwell Smart or Agent 99 — but the foundation was there. Television suddenly had a spy who could save the world, even if he stumbled his way through it.
The gadgets that made him ‘Smart’
Once Get Smart cleared the hurdles of network approval and casting, the next challenge was creating the comedic machinery that would define the show. Henry often said the half-hours were constructed like “little movies.” Unlike most sitcoms of the time, Get Smart episodes had real plots with a beginning, middle and end. “We always thought of them as little adventure films,” Henry explained. “So there was an awful lot to get in, plus Don’s jokes and then a guest or two that would be interesting to write for.”
At the heart of this design were the gadgets. Bond had popularized exotic spy tools (cars with ejector seats, pens that fired bullets among them) and Henry and Brooks leaned in, only theirs rarely worked. The most famous was the Cone of Silence, a contraption meant to guarantee privacy but which left those inside unable to hear one another while everyone outside heard every word.
“The Cone of Silence,” explains Ron Magid, author of The Get Smart Files, “was the show’s poke at government extravagances, a hugely expensive piece of equipment that was continually on the blink. Max would inevitably insist that it be used, despite the Chief’s objection, and it always backfired. There was even a ridiculous British version, the Umbrella of Silence.”
Magid adds, “The shoe phone caused Max untold embarrassment in public. Little old ladies would discreetly nudge him and say, ‘Your shoe is ringing!’ It nearly always blew his cover. Once, when an operator tried to trace his location during a collect call, Max snapped, ‘I’m sorry, operator, this is an unlisted shoe!’”
Casting Maxwell Smart and Agent 99
Just as important to the show’s DNA was its surreal streak. Agent 99 never had a real name, and Henry insisted on it. “I wanted to keep it that way forever,” he explained. “Obviously you can’t allude to it as a joke or it loses its absurdity. I liked that a show could refuse to tell the audience something obvious. It’s just a little more surrealistic and foolish.”
If Get Smart was going to succeed, it needed the right leads. No amount of clever satire or outlandish gadgets would matter if the central duo didn’t connect with audiences.
That’s where NBC executive Grant Tinker came in. As Henry remembered it, Tinker happened to see the script and thought of Don Adams. “Grant Tinker says to either Mel or Leonard [Stern], ‘What do you got?’ He gets handed the script and says, ‘We’re looking for something for Don. This is it.’ That’s the legend.”
Adams stepped in and defined the role instantly. His clipped, nasal delivery—borrowed from William Powell and exaggerated in stand-up — became inseparable from Smart. “He brought that ridiculous voice,” Henry said, “but also comic timing that was perfect for this guy who was very boastful and very stupid. And he looked like a cartoon. He looks like someone drew him.”
Adams imported material from his act, most famously the “Would you believe…?” routine. “The only comment I had from the network,” recalled Leonard Stern, “was to change Don’s strident delivery. That was negated when an astronaut on the first moon flight imitated him: when something went wrong, he said, ‘Sorry about that, Chief.’ Within weeks, everybody was doing their version of Maxwell Smart’s voice.”
Adams himself explained it in 1966: “Maxwell is a fighter for the forces of good, but is not a hero like other agents. Bond, Bulldog Drummond, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. They don’t fumble, they’re superb with women, they dress right. Maxwell is fumbling and bumbling. The average guy looks at Bond and knows he could never do it their way. Maxwell tries, but he misses. He’s not superhuman. But he believes in what he is and wants to do his best.”
If Adams embodied the foolishness of Get Smart, Barbara Feldon’s Agent 99 supplied its elegance. Henry had first noticed her on CBS’s East Side/West Side. “She was wonderful,” he said. “She had these two sides, the showgirl side, having been a Copacabana dancer; and this glamorous, really smart other person. The two together were terrific.”
For Henry, Feldon was the ideal foil: smart, stylish, unflappable. But he regretted the show’s structure limited her. “I was trying to make Barbara’s part bigger and more interesting, which was hard. The half hours were so loaded up with plot. And five years of Get Smart put a huge crimp in a career that would’ve gone somewhere else.”
Feldon herself later reflected, “99 was really a line drawing, a cartoon with warm current going through it, but she didn’t have many aspects. She didn’t have a background. She was totally preoccupied with adoring Max. That was her. Everything else was shoved out. There was no room for a past or a future.”
The chemistry, however, was undeniable. Henry resisted turning it into a conventional sitcom romance. “That was in the beginning,” he admitted. “But I hoped it would never develop into a serious sitcom situation, which it did. When they had twins, that was just beyond the pale. I wanted her to never have a name, never a backstory. Keep it surreal, keep it foolish.”
Life in the writers’ room
Behind Maxwell Smart’s bumbling exterior was a writers’ room working at a relentless pace. Unlike many sitcoms of the 1960s, which could recycle stock gags, Get Smart episodes had to be built like little action-adventure films. “Sit in an office and try and think up stories that had a beginning, middle and an end,” Buck Henry recalled. “Talk to the other teams of writers and write. Mostly I wrote openings and closings, but sometimes I would write a whole one. And they were long days. We did like 36 a year. It was endless.”
Thirty-six episodes a season was punishing. “Comedy team writers had their own voices,” Henry said. “Stan Burns and Mike Marmer specialized in overall satire. Jerry Gardner and Dee Caruso were brilliant at parody. Another team wrote anything that resembled a sitcom. So the stories came in from different angles.”
Henry loved the details. One title that delighted him was “The Dead Spy Scrolls,” about an agent who died near wet cement. “That made me particularly happy,” he admitted.
Other contributions were more subtle. Larrabee, the dimwitted CONTROL agent, simply “sort of appeared,” Henry said, partly because he was played by Don Adams’s cousin. And then there was Hymie, the robot who became a fan favorite.
“Everybody’s favorite agent (besides Max and 99) was Hymie,” says Ron Magid. “He was programmed to respond literally to commands, so if Max said ‘Grab a waiter,’ Hymie would return carrying the maître d’ over his head. Originally a KAOS robot, he was reprogrammed by CONTROL and eventually became Max’s best friend and best man.”
Dick Gautier, who played Hymie, once told People magazine, “Hymie never stifled my career. He only enhanced it. I know kids who were named Hymie, because they looked like me.”
For Henry, the grind eventually took its toll. By the end of the second season, he was exhausted. “I didn’t have much time off, which is why I quit after the second year. I just couldn’t do it. And I had run out of those jokes.” Brooks had already bowed out after the pilot, leaving Henry with much of the creative burden in the early years. Still, he left satisfied he’d helped establish a strong foundation.
The irony was that a show built on parody required as much discipline as any “serious” drama. Each episode demanded intricate plotting and carefully timed jokes. For Henry, the writers’ room was a crucible of creativity: exhausting, hilarious and ultimately unforgettable.
‘Get Smart’ lives on
Looking back decades later, Henry admitted he wasn’t sure how to define the show’s legacy. “I haven’t a clue,” he said. But he acknowledged that Get Smart tapped into a cultural moment. “It came along at a time when the relationship between the general population and the government was getting edgy. And we sort of had a voice in that, kidding around with the FBI and the CIA, which had been kind of sacrosanct in terms of making fun of them.”
Donna McChrohan Rosenthal kept in touch with Don Adams and Barbara Feldon for years. “They liked the characters and what they did with them,” she said. “Don brought much of the Maxwell Smart persona from his nightclub act —material he had field-tested. Don and Barbara could hardly have missed that the show was a success, but I remember being at a party in the 1990s. Don was tremendously moved by the outpouring of regard. I had the impression he hadn’t realized how deeply Get Smart had taken hold.”
Not every aspect aged well. Henry admitted that certain characters and storylines would never make it to air today. He also disliked how later seasons leaned into sitcom convention, marrying Max and 99 and giving them twins. Still, those misgivings don’t diminish the show’s impact. Get Smart won Emmys, launched catchphrases, and influenced generations of spy spoofs, from Austin Powers to Johnny English. Its opening sequence of slamming doors and corridors remains one of the most recognizable in television history.
Sixty years later, Get Smart gives every indication it will live on for all eternity. Would you believe a couple of centuries? How about the next 45 minutes?
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