Original ‘Angels’ Series Didn’t Have Great Chops

Here’s an idea for a Sunday-night holy series designed to produce a spiritual awakening: “Touched by Charlie’s Angels.”

Well, not all that spiritual.

“Charlie’s Angels” is the talk these days because of big business being done by the movie version of this popular series, which ran on ABC from 1976 to 1981. Why popular? Go figure. As clanky as a clunker could get, it wasn’t good enough to be watchable, bad enough to be good or erotic enough to be titillating.

Plots? What plots? Like the panoramic blondness of its most famous original star, Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as she was known then), “Charlie’s Angels” was there just to be noticed. And in those days, TV was so self-consciously prim that a mere hair flip could beckon ogling viewers to their sets.

Not that Hollywood necessarily raises a high bar when choosing TV material for movies. From “McHale’s Navy” and “The Munsters” to “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Brady Bunch,” rarely has there been much to live up to. And in many cases, the taller the screen, the shorter the achievement.

Among good series nuked by filmmakers, none took a bigger hit than “The Avengers,” a tasty (when teaming Patrick Macnee with Diana Rigg) spoof of fictional British spies and old-school manners that U.S. viewers got their first aromatic whiff of in the late 1960s. In theaters three decades later, it resurfaced as an empty suit, its high IQ erased by high tech.

On the top end, “Marty,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “Days of Wine and Roses” first surfaced as excellent one-shot TV dramas in the 1950s. And more recently, “Star Trek” has translated well to the big screen in most instances, as have “The Fugitive” and “Mission: Impossible,” the latter in one of two attempts, at least.

Arguably the most rewarding movie redo of a TV show was “Dennis the Menace,” a 1993 effort all the more impressive--thanks in part to Walter Matthau’s crotchety Mr. Wilson--because its amiable nonsense rose from a dreadful prime-time series unworthy of the Hank Ketcham cartoon strip on which it was based. On CBS from 1959 to 1963, peroxided, artificially cowlicked Dennis was arrrrrrrgh time. Nuke him. On the big screen, his impishness was great, seductive fun.

The lucrative tradition of movie-makers fishing around for inspiration in the trash bins of television is hardly arbitrary. Rediscovering something old provides help with the bottom line--the built-in promotional advantage of deploying characters or character types with whom Americans are already intimately familiar.

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Before Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu even thought about kung-fuing their first male butt across the big screen in the movie, for example, probably half the nation knew something of TV’s Angeldom from which their characters sprang. It’s like this:

Police-trained lovelies go perilously undercover as sisterly private eyes for unseen mogul Charlie Townsend, voiced by John Forsythe. They receive their assignments (“This is where you come in, angels”) via speakerphone in the presence of Charlie’s avuncular assistant, Bosley, played by David Doyle, who hovers in the wings to provide benign assistance.

Although the original “Charlie’s Angels” met ABC’s anatomical criteria, it was no acting clinic. Not that many viewers were keeping track, but, of the charter Angels, only Kate Jackson approached competence. Jaclyn Smith couldn’t act at all, and Farrah didn’t learn to act until years after leaving the show. And if the arrival of Cheryl Ladd provided a modest performance bump (she, too, would later improve), subsequent angels Shelley Hack and Tanya Roberts were line-memorizing bricks.

To its credit, “Charlie’s Angels” never took itself seriously, something it was unable to convey, unfortunately, with humor or flair. It bears comparing with the urbane tongue-in-cheekiness of “The Avengers,” in which Rigg, a superior actress even then, wore playfulness as stylishly as she did her sexy jumpsuits.

The “Charlie’s Angels” movie itself is light on grace and Meryl Streeps. Its agenda is legs, legs and more legs, its occasional joys generated mostly by special effects and Bill Murray’s bankable goofiness as Bosley.

Yet even the movie yields better self-mockery than the aplomb-challenged TV original with its karate-posing Barbies.

One of its better moments, in fact, has Liu’s Alex vacantly cluing in her boyfriend that she’s more than just a looker who can send his testosterone soaring: “I’m one-third of an elite crime-fighting team backed by an anonymous millionaire.” Now that is funny.

As is the new “Charlie’s Angels” making fun of itself in its opening by mentioning “T.J. Hooker: The Movie.” Which, given William Shatner’s new prominence as a farceur deluxe in those Priceline.com commercials, may not be a bad idea.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.