I have most of the episodes on tape and have almost worn them out rewatching them. This is so funny, so good, so sweet. It perks me up all over to watch it. The DVD is ruinously expensive but still...I might get it some day.
The theme song is perfect. The relationships are wonderful. The episode where hen-pecked Melville (Debbie beat him down and he beat Adderly and Mona down) got involved with a beautiful female spy behind the Iron Curtain was choice. The one where Adderly went home to see his parents, just terrific. And Mona! Mona who would have loved to be an agent if life hadn't led another way, and enjoyed her spy novels but was nobody's idea of a femme fatale. Melville and Mona both wished they could be like Adderly, but Mona got to help him while Melville for most of the series was just an obstructive force. And Maj. Clack who seemed to secretly want to get Adderly back into full service if he could earn it by showing the hand didn't matter and he wanted it enough.
And the quips! One I remember was when Adderly was playing catch in the windowless basement office and held up his smashed gloved hand and his ball mitt on the other hand, clapped them together and said, "Flippers!"
As the other reviewer said, much of this is an office comedy. Some of it is about overcoming handicaps of all sorts, whether Adderly's hand or Melville's cowardice. And part of it is about making at least a few of your dreams come true as all three of our office dungeon-mates have a chance to run with the big dogs, and do amazingly well.
I dropped it down to 9 instead of a 10 because sometimes Mona's speech pattern when she is "thinking on her feet" in difficult situations gets on my nerves. And of course the whole Iron Curtain thing is now over. But it's fun to see international espionage from the Canadian point of view and having Canadians save the world instead of Americans.
