Better with time

I'm watching The Man from UNCLE, one of my favorite shows when I was a little girl. It was one of my favorites because I thought these two were hotties. It's obvious to me now, 40 years later, that I clearly had no idea what I was watching.

The plots are complicated, violent, over the top and drenched in Cold War paranoia. I couldn't have comprehended all that. I was right about these two, though. They still are very attractive. And the interplay between them is priceless.

Agent Solo is forever optimistic. No matter how bad the situation is, how sadistic the torture he faces, how inevitable his demise appears, he is always sure that somehow, some way, it will all work out in the end. Right will triumph, and he will live to fight another day, to romance the girl, and to wear another really nice suit.

Agent Kuraykin is the brooding pessimist. His dress is more casual, as befits a man who is more concerned with intellectual pursuits. His attitude toward his assignments is that if it can go wrong, it will. Perhaps that's why he's always more willing to rush in and rescue Napoleon than Solo is to rush in rescue him. While Solo is the more flagrant ladies man, Ilya does pretty well with the girls, too.

Napoleon and Ilya seem to genuinely like one another, and share the kind of day-to-day, workaday bond that coworkers share. They frequently ask one another what's up, and shake their heads over the unreasonable behavior of their boss, as though they worked in neighboring cubicles instead of for a supersecret intelligence agency dedicated to protecting the free world from tyranny. They're hip, dry and funny.