What a sad week for Angels fans everywhere … and I mean the real fans of the original series, not the movie revamp from a couple of years ago. As we say goodbye to Farrah Fawcett, let’s remember the good times with the first season of Charlie’s Angels.

The Original Charlie’s Angels
This five-disc compilation features the entire First Season with the original Angels Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith and all their adventures from one of the most classic shows in television history.

Once upon a time, Jill, Sabrina and Kelly were police officers whose skills were being wasted in menial duties such as answering phones and filing. A mysterious millionaire named Charles Townsend took them away from all that by opening his own private investigation agency and hiring these gorgeous ladies as his operatives with John Bosley acting as their assistant and liaison.

Charlie’s Angels – The Complete First Season DVD Review
America’s guiltiest pleasure of 1976–the inaugural season of Charlie’s Angels–has returned in all its jiggly, jolly glory in this tidy boxed set. It’s hard to describe just how captivated the nation’s media and viewing public were with cheesemeister Aaron Spelling’s ABC-TV hit, but for awhile Charlie’s Angels was wildly popular appointment television at its most self-consciously banal. The first season’s three (and best-remembered) belles–lioness Farrah Fawcett (then Farrah Fawcett-Majors), pin-up babe Jaclyn Smith, and Thinking Man’s beauty Kate Jackson–were something like primetime Spice Girls, gracing countless magazine covers and bestselling posters. The idea (even if a fan of the show didn’t happen to be a straight male) was that one was compelled to choose a favorite angel as a kind of ink-blot window onto one’s subconscious life.

Basically, the three leading characters were bored policewomen wooed away to a private firm owned and operated by the unseen sybarite, Charlie (voiced–over speakerphone–by an uncredited John Forsythe). After a long set-up each week, the girls’ investigations typically saw them going undercover: as fashion models–no great stretch–in “Night of the Strangler”; nurses in “Terror on Ward One”; roller-derby stars in “Angels on Wheels”; and vulnerable convicts (of course) in “Angels In Chains.” The exploitation factor is not as bad as it might have been.

The cast was so glamorous, their chemistry so perfect, Charlie’s Angels never became a mere meat market. Despite such nods to modernity as Fawcett’s no-bra look, the episodes were old-fashioned in their heroine-in-peril appeal, yet there was a difference: The Angels looked out for themselves and each other. –Tom Keogh