mark worrell I Led Three Lives was shown in Akron, Ohio, on now defunct WAKR channel 49 as reruns in the late 70's-early 80's, and thank goodness for it. I remember gathering around the television at my father's insistence as a family, as if the news were coming on, during its original broadcasting. Don't believe a word of the nonsense posted here that this was more of a documentary and true story premise. Yes, this kind of paranoia reigned supreme, but Senator Joe McCarthy was and will always be a proved fraud, the HUAC Hearings were a national disgrace, and whatever the KGB spent on agents here, and no matter the intent, it was all absurdly harmless. pc-privconfounder has the only realistic review here, and just as an aside, one I personally remember watching was about the lead character, Herbert Philbrick, noticing what appeared to be single men buying large carts of groceries, reporting this to his FBI connection, and then discovering that commies were actually buying more groceries than they could eat! Why? Because they were deliberately driving the prices up, causing inflation. Common sense would tell anyone the KGB would need millions of shoppers every week buying hundreds of carts full of groceries each (that they threw away into a nearby dumpster in the show) to actually have any noticeable result like claimed, but that didn't stop many millions (some posting here) from truly believing inflation and higher milk and bread costs were a commie plot to disrupt normalcy in the United States. Yeah, right, sure, sure; that's the ticket. Yeah. Well, it was the '50's; what else can one say? Its not about liberal or conservative viewpoints; its about perception and intelligence. This was one of the funniest unintentionally-so shows ever created, and SHOULD be watched by every American just to see what truly was paralyzing intelligent growth in America for several decades. Unfortunately, the newest suspicion involving the show is that it also unintentionally promotes marijuana use. Watch it, and see if you don't light up for a more profound appreciation of its hilarious plot lines.

reptilicus I watched this show at first out of curiosity and I laughed just as many of my generation probably have . . .or will. Then I started researching that era and now I know they were deadly serious when they made that series! This was the sort of thing that Americans were truly fearful of, a Communist takeover. This was just as serious in the 50's as a Chinese invasion was in the late 1930's. Okay so maybe they dramatised things but they did that in "Dragnet" too, right? This was American propaganda made to make Mr and Mrs. Average American believe that Commies were around every conner trying to subvert the mentality of Post (Korean) War America. This could have been what led to people building fallout shelters instead of swimming pools and schools teaching kids to "duck and cover".Okay, so maybe I got a little heavy handed in that last paragraph but watching the adventures of Mr. Philbrick led me to wonder just how much of it was Hollywood and how much was real? A certain Mr. Kruschev did promise "We will bury you without firing a shot!" so I really began to wonder and started watching the episodes with a less cynical eye. The one about vacuum cleaners that were really missile launchers smacked of the gadgetry that proliferated the James Bond movies of the 1960's but then, where did they get that idea? The one about taking over an American newsreel company and making propaganda movies seems unreal too but then, remember wasn't the US Government doing the same thing at the same time too?Today watching "I Led Three Lives" gives me a chill. Everything they were talking about might really have happened. Perhaps all that paranoia was not unfounded. Mr. Herbert Philbrick, wherever you are, thank you.

mryerson Ah, for the good old days of rampant paranoia. This show's silly two dimensional world view, coupled with a modest production budget, left the screenwriters little to work with each week, the plots basically revolving around two or three predictable situations, to bring the audience to a peak of breathless anxiety. Richard Carlson was earnest and workmanlike as was the overall feel of the series. 'Secret' meetings on park benches, 'secret' notes folded into newspapers, microfilm, typewritten code, 'hide-in-plain-sight' signals, droning narration and an iconic theme. Although it seems to still appeal to the political fringe today, it is nevertheless, a true artifact of the fifties. Not to be missed. Somewhere John Foster Dulles is smiling.

Phillip Schearer In my childhood Richard Carlson was perhaps my favorite actor because of his many appearances in '50s sci-fi movies (Magnetic Monster, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc.). In these and similar movies he consistently portrayed a model of calm, intelligent, thoughtful bravery in the face of strange new dangers, and he continued in this vein in the TV series "I Led Three Lives".As a child I had no reason to disbelieve the show's portrayals of subversive Communist activities in the United States. Later I read Herbert Philbrick's book that served as the source of the name and background for the series, and it too had the ring of truth.Yet as other comments here about this show reveal, the idea that America was the target of conspiracy and espionage is derided as paranoid. The investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee are described as a witch hunt, on the implicit premise that since there are no witches, there must not have been Communists either. We still hear laments for the Hollywood writers, directors, etc., who found it difficult to find work after being blacklisted for refusing to admit to their membership in the Communist Party.Well, folks, the cat is out of the bag. As if the world was not already full of enough evidence of the evil of Communism, the fall of the Soviet Union led to the opening of the KGB archives in Moscow to researchers, and guess what... At the direction of the Soviet Union, there were Communist agents and sympathizers in the US Army, the Manhattan Project, the State Department, many labor unions, and other strategic targets. The archives show that the Communist Party USA received millions of dollars each year from the Soviet Union for purposes of undermining America, with Hollywood being specifically targeted for infiltration.In that atmosphere I think it is remarkable that "I Led Three Lives" ever got produced. I whole-heartedly hope that this show does get re-released. However much it may have been dramatized, "I Led Three Lives" shows how America was in fact endangered by its enemies, foreign and domestic.