Abstract/Summary

This chapter analyses the remediation of the James Bond character on television, leading to the first screen Bond in 1954 when CBS broadcast Casino Royale as a live TV drama. In 1956, Ian Fleming wrote a TV pilot, James Gunn – Secret Agent, for a planned episodic television series, then reworked it into the Bond novel Dr No, which would become the first cinema adaptation in 1962. The film led to the cycle of British and American television series in the 1960s that drew on Bondian iconography and narrative tropes, such as The Avengers, Secret Agent, and The Man from UNCLE. The chapter analyses how the early history of Bond adaptations illuminates questions of medium specificity and hybridity, the shifting boundaries of genre, and the significance of specific historical and technological contexts in the 1950s and 1960s.