And young is okay in a hot woman; people are very forgiving of this.
So the only reason you have for suggesting Hill is because you think she's hot? That's hardly a desirable attitude if we're talking about egalitarian casting. To work, the female lead would have to be a strong actress playing a strong, rich character. Of course the casting people would want all their leads, male and female, to be good-looking, but that can't be the sole consideration.
Most of the examples of other shows you give doing better than TOS are spy shows and spies do not do the glamorous things as shown in MI, The Man From Uncle, The Avengers. Unless of course thats what the spies want us to believe and its all martini drinking and gambling and speed boat chases.
I read that these days, real spies pretty much stay in their nations' embassies all the time, because the other side already knows their identities so they can't really go undercover in the field. Instead, they just recruit local assets to pass information to them. So it's basically an office job.
There was a spy show in the '80s called
Scarecrow and Mrs. King, with Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Jackson. I liked it because, while it did have its share of spy action, it also acknowledged that being a spy was often a desk job and had its characters dealing with paperwork and bureaucracy and office politics as often as they dealt with gun battles and undercover missions. I liked that about the show. (USA's
Covert Affairs was kind of in a similar vein in its first couple of seasons, but it seems to have gone in a more hardcore-action direction since then, which was part of why I lost interest in it.)
And Space 1999, Blakes7 etc all came after TOS. 10 years makes a big difference.
Naturally. I just thought it was worth comparing the way things were done in the two different decades to show how things had changed.
Still the other shows aren't without flaws in the Avengers - Emma Peel quit the team because her husband returned and presumably she needed to stop her professional life and be a good wife.
Yup, that was pretty much the attitude in the '40s through the '60s -- you could be an effective, capable career woman, as smart and brave as any man, but only so long as you were single, because a woman's highest priority in life was still to have children and be a good mother.
No women punching? Was that for real?
I believe so. Batgirl was never allowed to throw punches, because it was unladylike. Her fight moves were mostly kicks, throws, and balletic dodges.
But not punching isn't necessarily an impediment. Martha Landon in "The Apple" got to do some nifty martial-arts moves.
Indeed. Spy shows like Mission: Impossible are bad because they romanticize the profession; Science fiction shows like Star Trek are good because...they romanticize the profession?
I don't think M:I romanticized spy work as much as other shows, because it was more a procedural show than an action/romance show. (In fact, it was a really a heist/sting show dressed up as a spy show because the only way the network could accept portraying thieves and con artists as good guys is if they were stealing and scamming in the name of US and global security.) If anything, it was a bit closer to real spy work, since a lot of what the team did was unseen, crawling around in tunnels and ducts and rigging equipment. And as originally conceived, it was about one professional agent recruiting a team of civilian assets, which is, as I said, a bit like how actual intelligence work is done (although in reality that agent would've been recruiting locals in the target country).
