Mannix
In 1967 Desilu Studios produced its final TV series for CBS, a high-tech adventure show called Mannix starring Mike Connors. During the show's first season, Mannix works for Intertect Ltd., an impossibly large "detection and security" firm based in Los Angeles offering high-end services using a full range of real and imaginary technologies of the 1960s. These included offices equipped with audio and video surveillance, rooms full of IBM mainframe computers and Burroughs tape drives used for storing and evaluating investigation data, and radio beacons for geo-tracking vehicles across the United States. Throughout the first season, Mannix exemplifies the anti-authoritarian critique of computers, which were still relatively new fixtures of the American business landscape outside of universities and military contractors. Unlike many cinematic and televisual depictions of early computers, the work done by Intertect is actually a plausible environment for computing machinery of this type, as is the narrative trope of horn-rimmed glasses-wearing operators being expected to derive useful information and operational strategies as a return on the machines' obviously sizable investment.
As a stereotypical tough guy loner and veteran of the Korean War, Mannix naturally prefers to rely on his instincts, and delights in easily outwitting both the machines of Intertect and their technocratic operators. Although commercially successful and on its way to winning multiple Emmys for the studio, after the first season of Mannix, Lucile Ball personally intervened in the show's narrative conceit to request a diminished role for computers in the show. In season 2, Mannix has accordingly resigned from Intertect to open his own detective agency where he is free of the surveillance, control and continual need to resist the dictates of Intertect's technological infrastructure. In Mannix, the alignment of computational devices with an oppressive corporate technoculture is fully and consistently realized, as is the mode of resistance used by the show's eponymous hero. Mannix is positioned in direct opposition to the default characteristics of computing culture of the 1960s, a man of action, non-conformist, street-smart, guided by experience and instinct over statistical probabilities and technological calculations.
As a stereotypical tough guy loner and veteran of the Korean War, Mannix naturally prefers to rely on his instincts, and delights in easily outwitting both the machines of Intertect and their technocratic operators. Although commercially successful and on its way to winning multiple Emmys for the studio, after the first season of Mannix, Lucile Ball personally intervened in the show's narrative conceit to request a diminished role for computers in the show. In season 2, Mannix has accordingly resigned from Intertect to open his own detective agency where he is free of the surveillance, control and continual need to resist the dictates of Intertect's technological infrastructure. In Mannix, the alignment of computational devices with an oppressive corporate technoculture is fully and consistently realized, as is the mode of resistance used by the show's eponymous hero. Mannix is positioned in direct opposition to the default characteristics of computing culture of the 1960s, a man of action, non-conformist, street-smart, guided by experience and instinct over statistical probabilities and technological calculations.
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