Maxwell Smart

Maxwell Smart is Agent 86 of CONTROL, a secret agency battling the forces of KAOS, and he is, by any objective measure, not very good at his job. He is supremely confident anyway, forever trusting shoe phones and cone-of-silence gadgetry that malfunction at the worst moments, undeterred by his own bumbling.

Don Adams plays the self-satisfaction completely straight, which is the whole joke: Smart never notices he's an idiot, delivering catchphrases like "Would you believe..." with total sincerity while the plot collapses around him. The writing hands him a spy plot every week; Adams's deadpan turns each one into a small, precise comic disaster.