The Television Academy may have celebrated the 50th anniversary of “Charlie’s Angels” at the Emmys on Monday night with an onstage reunion of the show’s stars Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd, but the TV organization wasn’t as generous to the Aaron Spelling series when it originally aired in the 70s.
“Charlie’s Angels” received only four Emmy nominations and no wins during its five-season run from 1976 to 1981. Jackson earned two acting nods, and David Doyle, who played Bosley, was nominated once. A sound editing nomination was picked up in 1977.
“It would have been nice to have gotten Emmys, but there was a snobbism about it,” Smith told me Wednesday. “They didn’t like all the glamour. They put us down. We were Barbie dolls. They didn’t see the weight or the depth of the devotion of the girls to each other. They thought it was fluff, and Aaron said, ‘It’s eye candy.’ But he also gave it narrative. He gave it mystery. He gave enough danger to keep you leaning forward. It had a little bit of everything.”
Little did most anyone know back then that “Charlie’s Angels” would go on to have a multigenerational fan base for a half-century.
Farrah Fawcett played Jill Munroe with Smith as Kelly Garrett and Jackson as Sabrina Duncan. Ladd joined the series as Jill’s sister, Kris Munroe, after Fawcett left the show following the first season due to contract disputes with Spelling. John Forsythe was the voice of Charlie, the Angels’ boss who was never seen on screen.
Ladd says their off-screen camaraderie mimicked what TV audiences saw on the small screen. “We were women who were completely for each other. We weren’t like, ‘I’m better than you,’” she says. “There was no fighting. I thought that was just such a great way to bring women together and to give them strength.”
Earlier this year, Smith, Jackson and Ladd appeared at a 50-year celebration at PaleyFest in Los Angeles. “It was emotional in the sense that so many years had gone by, and it reminds you of the passage of time, of course and that we don’t have Farrah, David Doyle and John Forsythe,” Smith says. “Those were important people and people I love, certainly. But it’s still rewarding to think that when something has some magic, it’s lasting and it still brings joy to many generations.”
Ladd says of their Emmys reunion, “There was a lot of love in that room for us and I really appreciated that. I could feel it.”
Smith, who is currently on a nationwide tour promoting her new memoir “I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie,” says she enjoyed the two “Charlie ‘Angels” movies in 2000 and 2003 that starred Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. “Drew kept to that winning concept. She took it a step further. She evolved it,” Smith says. “She did it beautifully. It was more spectacular. It was diving off buildings, escaping explosions and still tongue in cheek.”
While Smith calls Elizabeth Banks a “great and talented” filmmaker, she’s not surprised that her 2019 “Charlie’s Angels” movie, toplined by Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska, failed to reach audiences. “She tried to really do a departure, and it didn’t work because what I find is if people love something, they don’t want it to change that much,” Smith says. “They want the original idea. But this had several Bosleys. The girls didn’t get along. Our whole essence was, we were a sisterhood, a fellowship. We had each other. It was loyalty before romance. We used our sex appeal to help us, and yet it still had a strong feminist backbone. I think it changed women’s roles on television.”
