‘TV Tales’ recounts how ‘Angels’ earned its wings

It was a shooting-star phenomenon, a dolled-up piece of TV fluff that flounced its way into ratings history before the wild surge eventually crested and fell back.

Yet “Charlie’s Angels,” based on a concept so flimsy that its success astounded even its creators, still stalks the American consciousness. A knockoff theatrical release spawned two decades after the show’s cancellation was box-office gold, a sequel is on the way and, Sunday night at 8, the E! Network comes up with an exhaustive, if also a bit exhausting, two-hour bone-picking of the original series on the cable outfit’s “TV Tales.”

It helps that the special is as much an examination of the fickleness of pop culture as of the show itself. When executive producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg hit upon the idea of casting three women as action-series leads in 1975, it was a sex-role innovation for the times but, without another piece of the puzzle, it might have fallen flat.

Although the 90-minute pilot that aired March 21, 1976, was a huge hit, it was the release of the famous bathing-suit poster of one of the three series principals, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, several weeks later that kick-started the show’s fall premiere and helped “Charlie’s Angels” finish as the season’s No. 1 show.

Fawcett-Majors left fellow Angels Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith after that first season, setting in motion the revolving-door casting that gradually eroded the show’s glitz, and all involved weigh in quite candidly here on what it was like to ride the rocket.

Sniffs Smith to critics of the show: “Uh, it wasn’t meant to be Shakespeare.”