Today, dear Discolovers, we remember a television series that, produced by Aaron Spelling and aired from 1976 to 1981 on the US channel ABC, revolutionized the “detective” genre: “Charlie’s Angels”. But let’s start from the beginning …
“Once upon a time, there were three little girls who went to the Police Academy …”
This was the opening sentence of the legendary show, of which 115 episodes were broadcast. The three “Angels” of the first season are Sabrina D
uncan (played by Kate Jackson), Jill Munroe (Farrah Fawcett, then also Fawcett-Majors, being married to actor Lee Majors) and Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith). In subsequent seasons, with Farrah Fawcett leaving at the end of the first season and Kate Jackson at the end of the third, their characters will be replaced by Kris Munroe (Jill’s sister, played by Cheryl Ladd), and Tiffany Welles (Shelley Hack), who will only be present in the fourth season, and then replaced by Julie Rogers (Tanya Roberts)
present only in the last season. Fawcett will return in a few episodes, in the third and fourth series, but only as a guest star. Jaclyn Smith was the only actress to act in all seasons of the series alongside David Doyle, interpreter of the character of John Bosley, assistant and liaison between the “angels” and Charlie.
The main structure of the stories (except in rare cases) is therefore not that of the classic detective story, but the more typical one. of the adventure model, the lure and the trap. The latter also works by virtue of the attractiveness of the three girls, who are nevertheless kept far from any explicit sexual implication. Theirs is a
to completely abstract femininity: from Angels, in fact.
The episodes focus on the activity of a private investigation agency, Charlie Townsend Investigations, for which three young women work with the help of an assistant. The boss, Charlie, never appears in the face (in some episodes they can be glimpsed from behind the head and arms) and contacts the “Angels” only by telephone through a loudspeaker placed in the office. In the original edition, Charlie’s voice is from John Forsythe. In Italy the first three seasons of the series were broadcast by local broadcasters affiliated with the GPE-Telemond [2] television consortium starting from September 1979. In 1982, the newborn Retequattro aired the fourth season for the first time, while the fifth and final season aired in the spring of 1983. Later the series was replicated by Italia 1 and by local networks linked to the Euro TV consortium, in 1990 in a reduced version on Canale 5.
The first season of Charlie’s Angels caused a kind of fan hysteria and media coverage never seen before in those years. The great success of the show was confirmed by the cover of Time, which analyzed the impact that the series was having on popular culture. Furthermore, an American census at the time highlighted how the name Charlie was more common than in the years before the show was aired.
Two feature films were taken from the show: ‘Charlie’s Angels’ (2000) and ‘Charlie’s Angels: More than Ever’ (2003).
And you Discolovers remember anything about those mythical angels always in action?