A Television History

To begin, Charlie's Angels was a remarkable show for ABC. The network had ranked third of the three networks since it had formed and had only had a couple of hit shows. One of these hits was Happy Days, which started only a year before Angels premiered. However, despite the enormous popularity of Happy Days ABC was still the overall lowest rated network. Therefore, you can imagine the delight of ABC network executives when Charlie's Angels became the number one show of the '76-'77 season and the only new show of the season on any of the three networks to become an unquestionable hit. In fact, the series' first episode premiered strongly within the top ten Neilsen ratings for that week with no more promotion than any other new show. By the end of the '76-'77 season the series had consistently held a 59% share, meaning that 59% of all TVs in use at the time each show aired were tuned in to catch the action. In other words, 23 million households turned to Charlie's Angels for a weekly dose of TV T&A. In fact, the show never left the Neilsen top ten for the first three of the five years the series ran.

These incredible, and previously unheard of, ratings for a series sent programming analysts scrambling for answers as to the show's popularity. They wanted to know who was watching. The answers surprised marketers who didn't expect much of viewers for such a silly formulaic show. Advertisers were thrilled to discover that the series ranked fourth in metropolitan areas, seventh among college graduates and also seventh among people with incomes over $20,000 (a lot of money back then). Everyone seemed to love the Angels as was reflected in the enormous pile of 18,000 letters the show received weekly. No one loved the show better than ABC which was charging the highest rate ever at the time for a commercial during a series at $100,000 a minute by the end of just the first season.

To understand the success of Charlie's Angels we need to look at the circumstances surrounding its debut on September 22, 1976. The predominant influence of the show was the women's liberation movement that had begun in the sixties and reached its zenith of controversy/popularity in the mid-seventies. Television is always interested in capitalizing on popular trends by representing these cultural changes in TV programs, no matter how feebly they are presented. When the civil rights movement forced equality for blacks into the public eye by the late sixties to early seventies the programming machine pumped out Sanford & Son. By the mid-seventies baby boomers were just beginning to sentimentally reflect upon their childhood in the nineteen-fifties. Again, TV targeted this trend by offering up such nostalgic gems as the before mentioned Happy Days and its spin-off Laverne & Shirley. With the women's movement programmers had offered Police Woman, a very popular show. Next came The Bionic Woman. This show, which was a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man, quickly entered the Neilsen top ten while its predecessor plummeted to the bottom of the ratings pile. Also, just a couple of months before Angels debuted, Wonder Woman was introduced during the summer of our country's bicentennial. With her revealing comic book costume, Wonder Woman heated up the spirit of '76.