Summary:

The show's first season was in black & white. Rolfe's genius was to create a kind of Alice in Wonderland world, where the monotony of everyday life would intermittently intersect with the looking glass fantasy of international espionage which lay just beyond mundane everyday life. The U.N.C.L.E. universe was one where the weekly "innocent" would get caught up in a series of fantastic adventures, in a battle of good and evil. In its idealistic depiction of an international organization that transcended borders and agents of all nationalities worked together, Rolfe's U.N.C.L.E. anticipated Gene Roddenberry's interstellar United Federation of Planets in "Star Trek" two seasons later. Rolfe also skillfully blended deadly suspense with a light touch, reminiscent of the best of Hitchcock. In fact, U.N.C.L.E. owes just as much to Alfred Hitchcock as it does Ian Fleming, the touchstone being North by Northwest, where an innocent man is mistaken for an agent of a top secret organization, one of whose top members is Leo G. Carroll. This role led to Carroll's "Waverly" role.