Camille Paglia Defends Charlie's Angels! + Guide to First Three Seasons (Links)

Camille Paglia was writing about Taylor Swift's "obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine" of "exhibitionistic overkill that Lara Marie Schoenhals brilliantly parodied in her scathing viral video "Please Welcome to the Stage."

" A warmer model of female friendship was embodied in Aaron Spelling's blockbuster Charlie's Angels TV show, which was denounced by feminists as a "tits-and-ass" parade but was in fact an effervescent action-adventure showing smart, bold women working side by side in fruitful collaboration."(Full)

I may have sold my Angels scrapbook when I was thirteen, but I still go back to them now that they're on DVD, whenever the real world gets too much and even the intensity of modern thrillers feels toxic.  Come with me now... to the past, episode by episode, merrily, slowly... even happily, with these smart, bold, fruitful women.

Season I: Acidemic's Episode by Episode Guide (1976-1977)

"There's rarely if ever any overt sexual violence. No matter how compromised our heroines become, they're free of all molestation, allowing for humanistic compassion and adaptability; if they talk a bad guy into dropping his gun or coming down from a ledge, for example, they don't run over and pin him to the ground, they help him up, give him a nurturing smile, and walk him down the hill, his hands in theirs (with another Angel bringing up the rear, with the gun, just in case, but unobtrusive)."
"Every so often Charlie (or Aaron) rewards the girls by bringing them outside the dingy studios of LA. Most of the time they don't end up using any of the footage they shot there, and just having half the scenes on the usual wood paneled sets but this time the Hawaiian stuff is all over the joint. You got Don Ho. You got a luau; a sassy massage parlor receptionist; our first introduction to Kris Munroe, Jill's sister, in her first episode/s--looking adorably like she's going to her first day at my elementary school in a 'windbreaker' (then a new term); and there's a big yacht raid finale in which, among other things, she storms the engine room in a hot brown two piece bathing suit. We were agog and thoroughly convinced, shortness be damned. If you see only one episode/s, make it these two, with some coco de oro in the air. You will be transported."
"Purists say that, like some crooked boxer, Charlies Angels took a dive in the third. It definitely kind of peters off after occasional flashes of the old magic. The Angels had been around long enough now I guess they figured they could take it easy. EASY!? How else had they been taking it? Kate Jackson left afterward, replaced in a stunningly wrong move, by high end London model Shelly Hack, way too skinny and posh for the mellow LA vibe of the other two. By the end of season four she was gone, and in came the very cool and enchanting Tanya Roberts. Critics all say that if she came in on season four instead of Hack then it might still be running today. It was just too little too late."

"She was a genuinely mythic goddess, ruling in the final decade where goddesses still commanded archetypal mystique, before videotapes made the remoteness required for such ascendancy completely impossible, the 1970s. You might even say she was the 1970s."