And in the meantime, there's always Mrs. Peel, who for my money outclasses even James Bond in looks and smarts and style, and certainly in sex appeal. During its golden era, "The Avengers" starred Patrick Macnee as John Steed and Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, one of the most inspired matches in the history of television, period. Great as the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully was in the best days of "The X-Files," it can't hold a candle to the crackling suberotic sonar signals that passed between Steed and Emma.

Steed had had other partners before (among them Catherine Gale, played by Honor Blackman, who would later go on to portray Pussy Galore in "Goldfinger"). After Steed and Emma had played several seasons together, the show dropped blatant hints, without openly stating it, that they'd slept together. Far from wrecking their chemistry, "Moonlighting"-style, those clues only heightened the charge between them. It was clear that the two were mad for each other, and that they could communicate just as well by the subtle arch of an eyebrow as by actual words.

It was also clear that it would be a lousy idea for them to hook up as an official couple: Their intuitive understanding of one another officially put them in the league of ancient, long-married couples anyway -- and they're much more romantic as a wry, skeptical non-couple. (If you never quite get together, then you can never really split up.) In Diana Rigg's last episode (Emma is leaving her post, since her long-lost and feared-dead husband has miraculously returned), she happens to met her successor, Tara (Linda Thorson), in the hallway of Steed's apartment building just as Tara is arriving to meet him. Emma directs Tara to the proper apartment, turns to leave, and then pauses: "He likes his tea stirred anti-clockwise," she says.

"The Avengers" episodes didn't always move along as smartly as they could have. But the show was never short on touches of pure oddness, like that swirly red-and-white hallucinogenic child's ball in the episode known as "Something Nasty in the Nursery," or the hall-of-mirrors trickery in "The House That Jack Built."

And even when "The Avengers" was slow, you could always just bask in the presence of Steed and Emma. Pierre Cardin, in the days before he became a licensed gold-tone initial on a cheap wallet, designed the suits Macnee wore on the show: pearl-gray three-pieces worn with dove-colored suede boots; subtle golden windowpane plaids; sturdy tweeds for the country that looked molded to Steed's body rather than cut. Macnee's weight was said to have fluctuated somewhat -- a kind way of saying that he had a tendency to pack a little on. But Cardin always dressed him in a way that made him look slim and elegant, and Macnee's bearing took care of the rest. When I was a little girl watching the show in reruns, I could never understand why my big sister swooned over John Steed. Needless to say, I get it now.

At the time, though, it was Mrs. Peel I loved best, and I've never really stopped. Mrs. Peel wasn't just a girl spy -- she was a scientist who did spy's work simply because she felt like it. As Rigg played her, she met every baddie full-on with a sly smirk and a karate chop. Her outfits were tailor-made for the girl on the go: jersey zip-up jumpsuits with flat boots attached; leather vests and catsuits that didn't cling to her shape as much as echo its every movement; bell-shaped mini dresses for evening, which she'd wear with her hair piled high. She drove everywhere in a bright, tiny sportscar. When she got into trouble, Steed would sense it and step in at the last minute to save her. But she saved his skin in the same way, and just about as often. You could say that this very non-married couple represented the perfect married couple: They lived their lives as sharply defined individuals but were fiercely protective of each other when it mattered.

And if Steed and Mrs. Peel had nothing else, they had high style that hasn't been matched in any contemporary example of the spy genre. Last season, the woefully short-lived television series "Thieves," starring John Stamos and Melissa George, came closer than anything else I'd seen in recent memory. I was hooked during the first one, as I watched them rappeling down the front of a skyscraper (dressed in matching black catsuits -- the universal '60s thief uniform). Unfortunately, the show was canceled after only eight episodes.

But there's still plenty of evidence that the look and the feel of '60s spy shows and movies haven't been forgotten. Roman Coppola's recent "CQ," the story of a young, overserious filmmaker who's signed on to complete a junky futuristic spy thriller, blows lip-gloss kisses to pictures like "Modesty Blaise" and "Barbarella." But Coppola borrows most heavily -- and most lovingly -- from Bava's "Diabolik."

In "Diabolik" -- also known as "Danger: Diabolik" -- John Philip Law (who also starred opposite Jane Fonda in "Barbarella") plays a dispassionate thief who enjoys thumbing his nose at authority even more than he gets off on stealing money, jewels and bars of gold. He and his girlfriend, played by the equally beautiful and blank-faced Marisa Mell, pull off caper after caper, sabotaging a politico's press conference with laughing gas one minute and dashing off with a visiting dignitary's emerald necklace the next.

And in the evenings, they return to their underground pad, which is kitted out with a glass-walled shower (when Mell steps into it, her private parts are tastefully hidden by a large frosted dot on the side) and a huge bed onto which they've tossed their piles of stolen money. They don't so much make love among the bills as writhe around in their embrace, but the effect is still erotically luxurious, as well as winkingly honest -- these are hedonists who are so tuned in to their own desires that they can barely tell the difference between the feel of money-on-skin and skin-on-skin.

It's an over-the-top image -- but then, why would anyone be interested in one that stopped just below the top? The world of '60s pop culture spies was one of excess, luxury and humor -- not safety. Why walk when you can drive? And if you've got a Little Nellie, then why not fly? But only, of course, after you've pushed every knob and pulled every lever on the dash of that Aston Martin, just to find out what it can do. Necessity may be the mother of invention. But her indulgent father is Q.

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