Today's evidence that Hollywood's creativity tank is more in debt than the USFG:
Yes, Charlie's long-legged, sexy, "don't fuck with us" ninja-esque warriors are returning to ABC, some 35 years after the original Bad Girls strutted their collective stuff on network television. The reboot (starring Annie Ilonzeh, Minka Kelly and Rachael Taylor, plus the irritatingly gravel voiced presence of Ramon Rodriguez) is set in Miami (as opposed to the original's California), because ... well hey, why the hell not have it set in Miami?
From the synopsis it appears ABC is reinventing the show that once was. I anticipate this will result in a quick, painless death for the series, for a few reasons:
1: The General Plotline
In doing some background research, I happened upon the generic premise behind each show. You tell me, which is more believable?
1976: Three women graduate from the Los Angeles police academy, only to be assigned wonderful duties like handling switchboards and directing traffic. They quit and are hired to work for the Charles Townsend Agency as private investigators.
For those of you who are too young to understand life in the 1970s, that "thing" Kate Jackson approaches on horseback is what we old folks call a "pay telephone." Even though they were available in the mid-70s, her wealthy-as-all-hell boss apparently could not afford to buy her a pager. Apparently the same was true for both Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Jaclyn Smith (as well as for Cheryl Ladd when she replaced Fawcett-Majors, and for Shelly Hack when she replaced Jackson, and Tanya Roberts when she replaced Hack.) Cheap, technologically-ignorant bastard.
2011: Three beautiful women (a former Miami police officer, a mysterious street racer, and a well-to-do thief) are given a chance at redemption when they are recruited by an anonymous millionaire named Charlie Townsend to solve crimes (while struggling with their own personal problems, love lives and each others' friendship).
Call me sentimental, but 1976 easily outweighs the new edition in the "believability" quotient. OK, maybe not "easily," but ...
2: The Jiggle Factor.
1976: The show became known as "Jiggle TV" and "T&A TV" by critics who felt the show had no intelligence or substance, and that the scantily or provocatively dressed Angels (generally as part of their undercover character - whether roller derby girls, beauty pageant contestants, maids, female prisoners, or just bikini-clad) did so to showcase the figures and/or sexuality of the actresses as a sole means of attracting viewers. Critics weren't the only ones who believed this to be the case; Fawcett-Majors once attributed the show's success to this: "When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra."
2011: Who needs gratuitous network TV cleavage when you have gratuitous nudity on cable and the Internet? Seriously! Duh!
3: The Death of Creativity.
Recent major network reboots of classic shows like The Bionic Woman and Knight Rider have sputtered and died quick and painful deaths. Rumor has it executive producer Drew Barrymore is pushing the TV series because she couldn't get a third movie version green-lit by the studios. The vast majority of reader comments on various websites discussing the show have no faith it will survive anything remotely close to the original's five-year TV stint.
Of course, this isn't the first time the Angels have been resurrected; there were two film versions put together in the past decade (where Cameron Diaz, Barrymore and Lucy Liu provided the cheesecake poses and dialogue, while Bill Murray and Bernie Mac split time as Bosley). Both scored not-so-surprisingly low audience reviews and equally not-so-surprisingly decent financial returns, probably because like the USFG, there are a lot of people out there with nothing better to do with their money than waste it on horrid ideas.
Full Throttle even made Cracked.com's list of The 5 Most Pointless Movie Adaptations of TV Shows four years ago. Shocker, I know ...
This is not to say that all reboots are bad. For example, Batman Begins is pretty sweet for two reasons: (1) it gave us The Dark Knight, and (2) it wiped all most of our memories of the horrid suck of time that was Batman Forever. And the entire Star Trek/Star Trek: The Next Generation thing worked out very well.
But history has shown - and will continue to show - that no matter how bad the original may have been (and no one ever claimed the original Charlie's Angels was a sophisticated art form), reinventing the wheel is almost always a horrid idea. Peter Sellers is turning in his grave over the putrid mess that was Steve Martin's The Pink Panther (perhaps the single-worst movie that could be offensive to a dead actor). Superman Returns was a disaster, as was Tom Cruise's The War of the Worlds. Nicholas Cage's The Wicker Man, Russell Brand's Arthur, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, Frank Oz’s The Stepford Wives, Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away - seriously? Seriously awful is more like it. The 2001 Planet of the Apes movie sucked bananas. The abysmal 1998 remake of Lost in Space was ... did anyone actually see it? Hello? Hello?
At least there's no plans to reboot the worst movie ever created, 1984's Red Dawn, which starred Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, Harry Dean Stanton, Powers Boothe, and ... wait, what the hell?
Holy shit! Send in the Angels, Charlie - pronto!
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