In the year 2000, everyone wanted a female James Bond

polygon.com:

In the early to mid-2000s, the coolest main character was a female spy. TV brought Alias’ Sydney Bristow to young adults and Kim Possible to kids. Charlie’s Angels was rebooted for film. And in games, Joanna Dark became the heroine of Perfect Dark, the spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007. The era was swimming in female James Bonds. Even Die Another Day got in on the trend, introducing Halle Berry as Jinx, Bond’s NSA counterpart.

The genre was open for reimagining, at a time when representations of women on screen were moving away from damsels in distress and into action heroines and protagonists. We recently spoke with some of the key figures involved to find out more about how the trend came about, and how its legacy has continued.

Jeff Pinkner, writer and executive producer on Alias, credits the moment the show was in more than anything else. Although he says the Alias writing team didn’t set out to make a show about female empowerment, he points to a media shift happening after the male-centric spy stories of the ’60s and ’70s.

“It was overdue,” says Kim Possible co-creator Robert Schooley. With a few decades of distance from the peak of Cold War-era espionage media, the team was keen to subvert their old tropes. The over-the-top, fantastical villain schemes, like shark tanks and mountain lairs, could stay, but Kim, as a fresh face for a new generation, wouldn’t be shy about saying how played out they were.

“We looked at the spy and hero characters [we had] when we were growing up and it was the ‘Jims,’” says Schooley. In other words, alongside James Bond, Star Trek’s James T. Kirk and The Wild Wild West’s Jim West were the blueprint. Schooley and co-creator Mark McCorkle were also tasked with creating a series for