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ers, I try to reconstruct a historic show via original sources and rec- ollections from an era when paratexts about TV were far less numerous than is the case of Queer Eye, which has a superabun- dance of information and critique that is instantly available.

The Avengers entered an established field of prime- time TV drama and made it look very different. The late 1950s and early 1960s on UK and US television had been characterized by male action adventure, frequently in dyadic form. In the mid- 1960s, situation comedies began to dominate schedules, because they were cheap to make. That changed in 1965–6, when eight espionage programs appeared across the three principal US networks, capital- izing on James Bond’s popularity. The longest- lasting show, Mission: Impossible (1966–73, 1988–9) rose and fell with the high moment of covert action by US spy agencies, before Watergate deglamorized breaking the law in the name of security. It returned in the 1980s during a lengthy writers’ strike, when offshore remakes appealed to the networks and Australia offered cheap loca- tions and personnel. Another success, Get Smart (1965–70, 1993) embodied both the 1960s popularity of stylish espionage and TV’s taste for parodying its own genres (Miller 2001b; Miller et al. 2005).

Stereotypes about women proliferated in action adventure of the day, as they did in most other genres. Exhaustive content analysis of US network television from the 1950s to the 1970s reveals that women comprised just 20 percent of working characters. Action series had especially strict segregation, with few heterosocial part- nerships. The genre was basically a male world of crime. Barbara Tuchman summarizes the situation thus: “Symbolically subservient, policewomen who have been knocked to the floor by a bad guy are pulled from the floor by a good guy; in both cases, women are

on the floor in relationship to men” (1979: 531). The situation continues to trouble critics, as the extensive content analyses cited by the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sex- ualization of Girls (2007) clarify.

But something different happened in the ITV’s UK drama series The Avengers, at a time when casting a woman in an adventure series, and then not having her romantically involved with the male lead, shocked network executives. A huge hit around the world, for decades it was the only import shown in prime time on the US

154 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS broadcast networks during ratings periods. To study the show, we

must first of all deal with the extraordinary ephemerality of television before producers realized how long their texts could thrive as money- making opportunities and archivists recognized the medi- um’s importance as cultural history. For example, just 15 percent of 1960s British TV still exists. In the case of The Avengers, its massive overseas sales saw the series with different titles and voices depending on the territory, while it also spawned adaptations for radio, theater, film, and literature, in addition to inspiring clothes, music, fanzines, board games, websites, coffee- table books, memoirs, and other paratexts that are part of its heritage (Miller 1997, 2003a; for later academic work on this series, see Black 2004; Britton and Barker 2003; Chapman 2002; Freeman 1999; O’Day 2001; Redmon Wright 2007). To comprehend the twists and turns of this complex cultural commodity, we need a wide array of tools in our kitbags: archival study of the series’ paratexts and episodes, accounts of the production process and how it drew both on established generic narrative codes and on fantasies about audiences, through to actually existing fragments of critique and reception (Henderson 2007).

When I wrote a book about The Avengers (Miller 1997), the series was not yet available on DVD and only spottily on VHS, so I spent many hours viewing programs on film at the British Film Institute. My other sources included press books, scrapbooks, production stills, cultural histories of the era, fan sites and discussion groups on the World Wide Web, and email correspondence. The Web had only just become publicly available when I was doing my research, in 1995 and 1996. I wasn’t aware of any earlier book- length studies of programs that extensively drew on it, so I lacked a how- to guide. I located numerous online fan groups and used what

I now know to call a snowballing sample to contact people who remembered the program, drawing on my own international networks and these nascent fan sites. This allowed me to find out what viewers around the world made of the show, and I followed up on their memories in search of other sorts of verification whenever possible. This produced some dissonance. For example, my recol- lection before I wrote the book was that I had watched The Aveng- ers in 1965–6 in London each Thursday, along with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. This was not true, as I learnt from consulting news-

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