Good Morning, Angels!

Epsiode 5: Good Morning, Angels! I’ve noticed a real resurgence of an in my living memory – that seems like too early 2000s aesthetic amongst the many times to be totally honest with you. youth lately, and it’s making me a little Sort of like how I’m old enough to have bit concerned. Not because I’m feeling seen three iterations of Spiderman, and uncool or anything. I’m 30 – it would be in each one Uncle Ben died. Like if you’re weird if I cared whether or not the Tik going to keep flogging a dead horse, at Tok teens liked my haircut. Mostly, I’m least pretend you’re using a different concerned about low-rise jeans making riding crop each time. Sorry – I wasn’t a comeback. I’m hoarding high waisted sure how to round out that dead horse pants like some sort of dragon, sitting on metaphor. I went with riding crop, and top of a fabric mountain and hissing any I kind of regret it. And instead of fixing time a pair of pants sits under my belly it, I’m talking about, thereby flogging button. another, separate dead horse. Anyway, there’s too many Angels, was the point This fear was solidified recently when I of all that. re-watched the 2000s reboot of Charlie’s Angels. There are three extremely I’m Alex. This is Pop Culture Boner – the beautiful women in that film and every podcast edition – and today I’m thinking single one of them at some point has on a about Charlie’s Angels. pair of pants that are just the right level of low-rise to be like “this has made So, Charlie’s Angels premiered as a TV show your torso look like that of an alien”. in 1976 on the ABC network, introducing If Lucy Liu, my girl Drew and Cameron D three feisty female investigators who cannot make that look good all the time solve crime and look great doing it, all then I think it’s fair to say we shouldn’t backed by a faceless millionaire. It was be loosing them on impressionable teen an enormous success that ran for five girls who haven’t yet developed a firm seasons and 115 episodes. It was also grip on their self-esteem. pioneered what would come to be known as “jiggle TV”, in which the sex appeal Aside from the jeans, watching the 2000s of its female leads was used as a selling Charlie’s Angels was such a nostalgic point for the show. The “jiggle” referring good time that I decided to re-watch the to the fact that many of the women’s 2019 re-reboot, which was decidedly less costumes were designed to allow some of a good time despite trying its absolute free movement in areas that the good darnedest. Which made me realise that puritan public of the US of A found highly Charlie’s Angels has been rebooted twice immoral. Mysteriously, each episode one or more of the Angels would end up in a iconography, are wildly varied, bikini or something similar. particularly in regards to its original television iteration. On the one hand, After the show ended in 1981, the concept the show is about three independent and lay dormant until year 2000, when Sony successful women working to fight crime. had picked it back up. Word of the project They’re smart, capable and athletic – as got to Drew Barrymore at Flower Films exampled by their undercover work as and they rushed over, determined to be journalists, stunt women, magicians, involved. After presenting the execs with nurses, cheerleaders, knife throwers, a sizzle reel featuring snippets from 200 models, prison inmates, violinists and films explaining how the action should lifeguards, to name but a few. They can take place and why, Sony let her have it. do literally anything, and they don’t even It was a box office smash that resulted in need super powers to make it happen. On a sequel two years later and launched a the other hand, critics were quick to point million gay crushes. out the show’s reliance on sex appeal for ratings – I did mention it was seen as Then in 2019, Elizabeth Banks decided ‘jiggle TV’, which was a term coined by an to revamp the spicy trio once more, NBC executive to criticize ABC’s television expanding the concept so that the production and marketing strategy and Townsend Agency had become a global link it to the moral panic surrounding spy syndicate featuring Kristen Stewart pornography. as gay and sexy. It was much less of a smash hit, unfortunately, and has quietly Even the women who were cast as Angels faded into the worst kind of contemporary have different opinions on what the show obscurity – no sequel. actually achieved. Breakout star Farrah Fawcett said her assumption was that the I think ultimately, I find Charlie’s Angels show’s success was largely based on their interesting because it’s still pretty sex appeal, saying, “When the show was difficult to find female-lead crime or number three, I figured it was our acting. action franchises. Unlike a contemporary When it got to be number one, I decided it of the 2000s reboot, Starsky and Hutch, could only be because none of us wears a which stays set in the 1970s, the Angels bra.” (For what it’s worth, several other get an update every time. And as such, Angels came forward saying that they our fixation on rebooting the Angels did, in fact, wear bras.) shows us something about popular feminism each time we re-work them for In contrast, Cheryl Ladd, who was a new audience. So, I thought today we Fawcett’s replacement after she exited could take a look at what the each of the the show following the first season, said iterations says about women and popular “We were very inspirational to a lot of feminism, what gets updated, what stays young women. Young women would the same, and why it’s still so goddamn write us and say, ‘I want to be like you. hard to find a decent female action hero. I want to be a cop when I grow up and So, people’s opinions on the success of taking chances to be something else Charlie’s Angels as a kind of feminist other than the acceptable school teacher or secretary’.” airwaves, they appear at the tail end of 70s, where second wave feminism Regardless of how you feel about was kind of knocking it out of the park inspiring women to join the police force in terms of achieving goals (in the US at (not good), ultimately, both of these least). You had the passing of laws like women are correct. You can find endless the Women’s Educational Equity Act and written praise from women who were the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the tweens and teens in the late 70s and early outlawing of things like marital rape and 80s who loved what felt like a fresh new the legalisation of no-fault divorce, as way to be a woman on screen. You can well as landmark court cases, like Roe vs. also find a slew of think pieces about how Wade. Obviously, we’re still working on the show’s feminism is so deeply flawed a lot of these things today, but progress that it’s non-existent. Both things can was being made pretty rapidly. be true. Media representation is always going to be flawed, particularly in spaces Folded into that progress you have what like television, which has less ability to some would call more radical elements of cater to niche markets. And when you second wave feminism, which were tied have burgeoning social movements that up with other radical social movements are having a quantifiable social impact, of the 70s and acknowledge intersections reflecting that is a good business move, (some) with race and class, and which even when it scares the establishment. have anti-imperialist bent tied to the Optimistically, you’re walking a line anti- war movement that ran from the late between what you can get away with and 60s up to the end of the Vietnam War in what you can’t. Pessimistically, capitalism 1975. That stuff is a lot scarier and more is the devil and you gotta get the people anti-establishment than saying like, to buy in somehow. “maybe a woman doing the same job as a man should be paid at the same rate” When I was reading up on Charlie’s or “maybe we shouldn’t fire women Angels, I came across an article on Farrah when they get pregnant”. So, what you Fawcett by Chadwick Roberts, which get with a show like Charlie’s Angels is says that “Farrah represented a kind of a kind of enlightened conformity, which enlightened conformity. Farrah showed mutes all of the radical impulses of us that women could drive race cars and feminism and turns them into something wear lip gloss… As one of Charlie’s aspirational. The Angels have great hair, “Angels” Farrah Fawcett embodies the great clothes, and they’re beautiful – fantastic. She is athletic and feminine, their work taking down criminals doesn’t tough but soft, fearless and physically compromise on their femininity. They can flawless, made-up but natural, a cop and kick butt and look great. Plus, they’re a cover-girl.” While it’s talking about still controlled by a male anonymous Farrah Fawcett specifically, the phrase millionaire backer, who they still defer to that really stuck out to me was this even when they’re shown to be exercising idea of an ‘enlightened conformity’ that their autonomy.

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