"Well, anybody can make a mistake, Mr. Johnson. I mean Mr. Sinclair. But you sure look like a Johnson to me!" - David Doyle as John Bosley
Charlie's Angels: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Charlie's Angels is a shining example of bad television at its best. A detective series in which the mysteries make little sense and the detectives seem as if they would have trouble detecting anything beyond what they plan to wear in the next scene, Charlie's Angels nevertheless manages to be an endless source of fun and amusement.
Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, and Jaclyn Smith star as the Angels. Trained to be police officers but underused by their chauvinistic police forces, they are recruited by the mysterious Charles Townsend (Dynasty's John Forsythe) to work at his detective agency. Charlie is never seen by the Angels. He communicates with them only via speakerphone and through John Bosley (David Doyle) who manages the agency.
The individual Angels were chosen by Charlie because of their unique skills. Jackson's Sabrina Duncan is the pretty yet brainy one. Fawcett-Majors' Jill Munroe and Smith's Kelly Garrett are.well, they are pretty, and fill out their bikinis nicely. As for Bosley, he can barely use a telephone, although he sometimes fires up enough brain cells to help save the day. Is it any wonder that many of the cases are solved by Charlie, who never leaves his poolside bevy of beautiful playmates but still manages to find the crucial information needed to crack the cases?
The series began its life as a wildly successful television movie in the spring of 1976. The show returned that fall as a regular series, premiering on September 22 on ABC. Prolific producer Aaron Spelling infused the show with his usual style: fashionable clothing, a highly attractive cast, and plotlines that require very little thought. Not all of his shows turned out to be classics, but Spelling had a flair for turning out this kind of escapist fare.
This boxed set collects all twenty-two episodes from the series' first season along with the original pilot movie. The pilot episode is interesting to watch since the show's formula had not been completely worked out yet. In it, there is another member of the Charles Townsend Investigations team - stuffy Woodville, played by David Ogden Stiers in his usual mock-Shakespearean style. Woodville is the Angels' and Charlie's go-between. Bosley is still around, but is even more incompetent here, if that is possible. Somehow Woodville comes across as worse than Bosley, however, probably because his grating officiousness gives him an air of competence that the character cannot live up to.
The Angels also seem a tad smarter in the pilot than they do in subsequent episodes. For example, the first half hour casts Jaclyn Smith in the spotlight when she goes undercover as a missing heiress. It is unusual that her Kelly character takes the lead like this, and she pulls it off, making Kelly actually seem capable of helping to solve a case.
One of the fan favorites included in season one is "Angels in Chains." In it, the Angels go undercover as prisoners at the Pine Parish Prison Farm in Louisiana to find a missing girl. While there, they discover inmate abuse, political corruption, and a prostitution ring, all while being forced to work on the prison's potato farm. (They also discover that Louisiana, a state almost entirely under sea level, is surrounded by mountains and populated by palm trees, but that is a story that National Geographic can tackle in its review of the series).
In one classic "Chains" scene, the Angels are sprayed with insecticide by butch prison matron Max ("My name's MAXINE"), played by B-movie Ethel Barrymore Mary Woronov. Woronov, star of Rock and Roll High School, helps to elevate this episode above mere exploitation. She knows how to deliver lines like "You stay put. I see your head outside the door, I knock it off" with just the right amount of understatement and disdain. Not content with chewing the scenery, she almost throws her lines away, playing Max as a bored, blasé sadist.
Kim Basinger also appears in this episode as a fellow inmate. At the end of the show, it is announced that Charlie has hired her as a receptionist at the agency. Her character is never seen again yet, oddly enough, the Angels never investigate her disappearance.
Almost every episode stars a variety of seventies character actors like Richard Mulligan (Soap) and Robert Loggia in guest roles. The pilot episode also features a very young Tommy Lee Jones.
Magnum, P.I.'s Tom Selleck appears as Kelly's boyfriend in the episode "Target: Angels." This episode is unusual because it presents quite a bit of personal background on the Angels and Charlie. A hired killer stalks the Angels in an attempt to find Charlie, and in the process we learn that Jill coaches basketball, Kelly was raised in an orphanage, and that Sabrina has both an ex-husband on the police force and a worried dad. We also get an extended look at one of Charlie's bachelor pads. Who knew that Charlie lives in a frat house?
Sure, the cases are dumb and the methods the Angels use to solve them are ridiculous, but all of these episodes manage to be entertaining. The deliberate humor and "jokes" more often than not fall flat, but who cares when the "serious" stuff is so funny in itself? Even when undercover as people who could not possibly know each other, the Angels often confer with each other in plain view of their suspects. Also amusing are the constant car explosions. Apparently, cars in the 1970s were rolling death traps. In other shows, cars might explode when they hit the bottom of a canyon after flying off of a cliff. In Charlie's Angels, however, the cars explode when flying through the air on the way down. In "Angels in Chains," a car explodes seemingly because it is hit by an errant potato. That's entertainment!
The twenty-two first season episodes and the series pilot are divided onto five discs. The discs are housed in slim keepcases made of translucent flexible plastic. The cases come in two shades of dark blue, two shades of an aqua blue, and one clear. The cases are housed in a cardboard sleeve. One flaw in this design is that the spines of the keepcases are unlabeled, so the spine of the cardboard sleeve will have to face out on collectors' shelves. The lack of labels also makes it impossible to tell which case holds which DVD without completely removing the case from the cardboard sleeve.
The simple menus have a play all feature, or individual episodes may be chosen. Unfortunately, Columbia/Tri-Star has again chosen not to provide chapter stops. It is commendable that they have chosen to commit so strongly to bringing classic TV to DVD, but adding chapter stops is a relatively minor detail that could add much to the value of the sets.
