The reboot got the axe last week from ABC which had been attempting to kick start Thursday nights with the program. The networks were giddy with backlash fever before the fall season started. The Playboy Club was going to be T&A with a healthy does of sexism (it met that promise and became the first new show of the season to get the axe), Pan Am was going to be a soap opera with 'sexy stews' (like the 2008 Boeing-Boeing revival but with pathos filling in for comedy) and Charlie's Angels which eventually took jiggle TV to levels Angie Dickinson could only dream of.
While Playboy Club was outright sexist, Charlie's Angels had a higher goal but never achieved anything and failed in every way a show can fail.
Take the set up which was wrong from the start. While Angels '88 turned the Angels into idiots, this year's reboot turned them into crooks, convicted crooks. One was a cat burglerer and probably supposed to bring to mind Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch A Thief. That might have worked. A similar device had been used successfully with the Robert Wagner series It Takes A Thief. Team her up with two former police detectives and you could have some interesting character conflicts. But it was decided they were all crooks.
Victor Garber, providing the voice of Charlie, explained in the debut, "Once upon a time there were three young women who got into very big trouble. The first was a Park Avenue princess turned thief. The second was a Marine decorated for valor court-martialed for a deadly mistake. And the third was a dedicated police detective turned dirty cop. They each made mistakes but I gave them a second chance and now they work for me. My name is Charlie." By the second episode, the introduction had changed to, "Once upon a time, there were three young women who got into very big trouble, now they work for me. My name is Charlie."
That didn't take back the "dirty cop." Sorry no one figured it out, but "dirty cops" aren't usually someone the audience cheers and roots for.
Little girls across the country (and some boys as well, we're sure) played Jill, Kelly and Sabrina in the seventies. They played the smart detectives who had learned their craft via police training. For all but it's fifth season, the show aired in the last or second hour of prime time. Even so, it had a lot of kids in the audience. ABC decided to air the reboot in the first hour of prime time and it breaks our hearts to picture 10-year-old girls fighting over who gets to play the dirty cop, who gets to play the robber and who gets to play the car thief.
"Car thief? You mean Marine, right?"
No, we mean "car thief." The Marine was Gloria, played by Nadine Velazquez. She died in the first fifteen or so minutes of the season opener and was replaced with a car thief. During the five year run of the original show, it went from Charlie declaring, "Once upon a time there were three little girls who went to the police academy" (Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Jacyln Smith), to "Once upon a time there were three little girls who went to the police academy -- two in Los Angeles, the other in San Francisco" (Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, Chery Ladd), "Once upon a time there were three little girls who went to the police academy -- one in Los Angeles, one in San Francisco, the other in Boston" (Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd, Shelley Hack), and, "Once upon a time there were three beautiful girls, two of them graduated from the police academy, the other graduated from a top school for models" (Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd, Tanya Roberts). While the original branched out geographically, had the reboot lasted we no doubt could have looked forward to the loan shark Angel, the cop killer Angel. The possibilities were endless . . .
Almost. They couldn't offer up the first hooker Angel or first drug dealer Angel because Tanya Roberts had already played that in her role of Julie. That was when the show jumped the shark as if it had both a death wish and a desire to punish the viewers who had stuck with it. Julie was clearly not qualified to be an Angel and, sadly, the reboot seemed to go out of its way to find not one but three Julies to populate the show with.
Going with crooks for Angels might have meant the characters were more complex and the acting was superior. Might have but didn't. Watching the eventual three in the reboot, people should have really appreciated what Farrah, Jaclyn and Kate did. In the reboot, the Charlie segments near the start and at the end were studies of three actresses who didn't know what to do except say the lines as written. Go back to the first season of the original series, to those opening scenes with Charlie on the squawk box and those closing scenes with Charlie, where Farrah, Jaclyn and Kate provided business that wasn't in the scripts. You'd find, yes, an Angel trying to balance her checkbook, you'd find a shared joke between two of them, you'd get some physical movement or contact between them. All three actresses coming up with business that would flesh out the characters and portray a friendship as well as a working partnership. In the reboot, it appeared that latest crop of Angels taxed themselves with close ups and had little energy left for anything else.
They glowered a great deal, the three women, while bullying various men and women. One man who had information they wanted got his head repeatedly held under water in a toilet while they flushed. Maybe when you're not trained detectives, when you're just three convicts, maybe all you know is bully, beating and blackmail?
That would explain their knocking around a photographer, interrogating him about his meds and more while coming off like thugs and bullies. The first three Angels used brains, guns and brawn. All the new three had to offer was brawn, despite the fact that they were forever waiving around guns. (In one ridiculous scene, Bosley and an old flame run to a food van to chase after a car and, as they run, they pull their guns out and waive them around although, as they get into the van seconds later, neither is holding a gun.) The message from the scripts appeared to be: Bulk up, girls, cause you're going to need to be a bad ass.
The scripts failed in every way: by refusing to give the Angels interesting situations and, too often, embracing torture and the worst abuses. "Angel in Chains" was the title of the highest rated episode of the original Charlie's Angels. For some strange reason, the reboot decided to do its own "Angels in Chains" which, fittingly, lost even more viewers and led to the show's cancellation. In the original, Jill, Kelly and Sabrina have to go into a prison to rescue a woman, a US prison. The prison's a prostitute ring. In the reboot, they go to Cuba. And there's one slam at Fidel Castro (and his brother) after another leaving you to wonder if they dusted off a script from the Cold War era? When not attacking the Castros or the people of Cuba, the script concerned itself with gloating over how this or that person could be sent to Guantanamo where they would disappear forever. In the original, Farrah, Jaclyn and Kate have fun in the chase scenes. Chained together, Kelly wants to go one way, Sabrina the other and Jill, in the middle, warns them she's not a yo-yo. Escaping in an old truck that creaks along, they end up having to dump potatoes on the crooked cops pursuing them. There was no humor in the reboot though they seemed to think bad attempts at Dirty Harry one liners qualified as humor.
The set-up was wrong, the acting was flat, the scripts were awful. The only thing left that might have pulled in the audience was the fluff factor.
In the reboot, the three angels, eventually, were Kate (Annie Ilonzeh), Eve (Minka Kelly) and Rachael (Abby Sampson). For it to be fluff, they would have had to have been highly attractive and sexy. Kelley pulled that off all the time, Taylor was more often just highly attractive and Ilonzeh forever looked like she'd just been hired for the fourth hour of The Today Show on NBC.
She wasn't ugly, she was just plain. Not at all heavenly. In a lot of ways, that was the wardrobe. We have no idea why they dressed her in those awful, usually shapeless clothes. But we were even more confused when she'd be wearing a blue-green, shapeless shift without a bra and her erect nipples were clearly visible. Her hair was awful, dry little ringlets that needed to be shorter or longer to qualify as sexy but, as they were, telegraphed, "I want to play Suburban TV Mom." She also tended to carry herself like a man. We're especially referring to the way she sat, the way she spread her legs when sitting. It wasn't Sharon Stone tease, it was all bow-legged John Wayne -- although one friend who's got a hit on CBS liked to refer Ilonzeh as "The new Nancy Walker."
Cotton candy just has to be tasty. If it can't manage that, it's not cotton candy. The reboot failed in every way. If the point was to make a show about powerful women, we'd argue three convicts was never the way to go. But a T&A show that can't even make it as cotton candy is never going to make it as anything; hence the cancellation.
