Mission: Impossible (TV series)/YMMV

• Crowning Music of Awesome: Lalo Schifrin's iconic theme tune, still used in parodies and commercials to this day.)
• Ear Worm: It goes hand-in-hand with the Crowning Music of Awesome. Everybody knows the Mission Impossible theme song.
  • If you watch a few episodes, you'll also find the incidental music running through your head.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Landau quickly eclipsed star Steven Hill, even though he was only intended as an occasional guest star.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One episode centered around a staged film purporting to show atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam. In light of what was later revealed, it gets uncomfortable fast.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: "Mindbend".
• Magnificent Bastard: So very many.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The show's whole concept - Impossible Mission is a trope of its own.
  • The theme tune still represents clever operations to outwit a target, from jewel heists to squirrels looking for nuts.
  • "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds" - especially popular for parodies, where the self-destruct is often over-powered and bad news for the person close to it.
• Narm: "Some of that dialogue is terrible, isn't it?" - Mission: Impossible writer-producer William Read Woodfield. (Example, from "A Game Of Chess": "Then we're all set except for the typhoid. Who's got it?")
• Values Dissonance: Originally, the IMF were a group of people choosing to use their specific talents in spy work purely for the good of their nation. (Starting in 1966, still the era of "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.") This wouldn't have worked in the 1996 movie, so it made the IMF a deeply covert part of the US intelligence services. Even in the time of Richard Nixon, the idea of American agents covertly manipulating foreign countries as heroes was going out of fashion, and the IMF spent some time working their wiles on organised crime.