Business Insider has a really depressing slideshow about the sheer number of times folks have tried to remake Charlie’s Angels that’s one of the best illustrations I’ve ever seen of the way Hollywood will glom on to a completely nonsensical idea and milk it for all that it’s worth. Because let’s be clear: Charlie’s Angels, a story about a group of women who work through traumatic pasts by taking jobs as detectives for a man they never meet, is a completely ludicrous premise. I’ve told this story before, but my grandfather mistook the original for a parody back in the day and was devastated when it turned out to be an actual thing. And with the exception of an attempt to spin off the show with Barbara Stanwyck as the head of a squad of dudes, which sounds like literally the best thing of all time, and is available on YouTube:
All of these ideas are really not very good. And that’s what’s so sad. Charlie’s Angels is not the single worst idea ever to make it to network television, but it’s hardly the best. It’s not a concept that lends itself to anything more substantive than underpants dancing and hot girls giggling and running around together. Which I understand is a profitable concept, but an all-female detective agency is not the only way that it’s possible to produce this outcome. It’s just a setup that produced that outcome once in the past, and so we’re stuck with it forever.
