What Went Wrong with This Show? (Redux)
In the 1950s, Beverly Garland starred as a cop in DECOY. In 1965, Anne Francis was private eye HONEY WEST. In 1966, Stefanie Powers was a secret agent in THE GIRL FROM UNCLE.
But none of them lasted more than a season. They became cult programs, but weren't successful in primetime.
In early 1974, Angie Dickinson made an appearance in the final episode of the first season of the critically acclaimed POLICE STORY anthology series entitled "The Gamble". Even before filming was complete, there were whispers of it going to series as a spin-off... It seemed an inspired idea
: Angie was gorgeous -- and ridiculously charismatic -- in the installment, the premise seemed right for her, the shoot-'em-up cop show craze of the '70s had yet to produce a successful entry featuring a woman or really even try to do so...
All that was needed was to get the actress to agree, and, reluctant though she was to take on the life-killing schedule of a TV series, she was finally coaxed into saying "yes".
Premiering on a Friday night that September, POLICE WOMAN was in the Top 10 by its second week. It couldn't have been more promising. Angie Dickinson, both sexy and tough, as the improbably-named Sergeant "Pepper" Anderson of the LAPD, trolling undercover in one get-up and disguise after another, week after week, guided by her scowling boss and off-hours pal, Sergeant Crowley (Earl Holliman), with whom she shared a pronounced chemistry. Angie's "Pepper" seemed at first an almost idealized woman
: beautiful, warm, capable, strong, naughty-when-necessary. She became TV's first bonafide over-40 female sex symbol.
The show was, initially, quite edgy for the era
: rapist baiting, undercover hooker investigations, white slavery rings, lesbian murderers, lesbian roommates, go-go dancer assignments --- all new topics for TV and all done with a certain shameless bravura... In its first season, the show was very well-produced, filmed a little bit like a movie, both southern Californian sunny and
neo-
film noir, the repartee saucy, the actors directed in near constant cross-movements in many scenes to keep the kinetic energy flowing.
It was fabulous. A very macho cop show about a very feminine cop.
By the middle of its first season, POLICE WOMAN hit #1 in the Nielsen ratings twice (even tying the Orange Bowl) and by the spring and summer of 1975 had become the hottest show on television, hitting Number One in numerous other countries.
A copycat industry if ever there was one, that same year, AMY PRENTISS with Jessica Walter, and GET CHRISTIE LOVE with Teresa Graves, both made stabs of their own at entering the female police officer TV sweepstakes but, once again, they never got passed their first seasons. But POLICE WOMAN was now the first
successful action series built around a woman and the first successful drama series to feature a woman in the title role in television history.
What could go wrong?
How could a small political activist group bring down NBC's top series?
Well, it happens... The feminists were not pleased with POLICE WOMAN. Perhaps one can understand their discomfort with Dickinson's sexualized (by the standards of the day, as it seems rather tame now) role and the frequent titillating undercover assignments she was given. They complained to the network and the producers with the outset of the filming of Season 2 during the summer of 1975, but some of their demands seemed rather odd (e.g., they only wanted Pepper shot in the line of duty by women, as if her being shot by a man -- statistically far more likely -- was somehow an expression of sexism on the part of
the show itself).
But mostly, they just wanted Angie Dickinson toned down. Not only the Vegas showgirl undercover jobs were discouraged, but the way Angie looked, talked and walked around the squad room was also to be reined in.
Somebody caved.
Journalists in recent years, when interviewing lady cops who got into the crimefighting business decades ago, have been surprised how often POLICE WOMAN with Angie Dickinson is referenced as an inspiration and motivator. So, given that the series created a significant wave of applications around the country from women for employment in law enforcement agencies, why wouldn't the '70s feminists place
any value on what the show and character of Pepper were achieving?? But, no, they would have none of it
: the show was "a step backward", all those resultant new real-life female cops be damned.
There were stories "of downright unhappiness" coming from the set of POLICE WOMAN during that summer of 1975, despite the show being the top program on the tube at that moment. For a show so well done in its first season, one can only imagine the anxiety these new constraints were creating... And, that fall, when Season 2 began airing, it didn't take long to see the difference -- and the result wasn't good
: particularly obvious in early Season 2, when the Squelch Angie Directive was new, you can actually see her in numerous scenes catching herself from smiling when her natural impulse was to do so. She's now cautious not to carry herself too provocatively, too freely, even around the police station, lest she appear slutty and therefore "degrading to women".
What the network executives didn't seem to understand about Angie Dickinson (and her detractors no doubt didn't care) was that the
Sexy thing and the
Tough thing in Angie come from the same place in her brain
: suppress one and you lose the other... That enigmatic
purrrr, so controlled and deliberate and so present in Season One, wasn't merely a "sexy" thing from Angie. It had a consciousness. It had an irony. It was the moral compass of the show. That purr told you everything about what Pepper was thinking, what she wanted the bad guys to
think she was thinking, and the inherent contradictions between the two.
That purr provided the dramatic tension, deepened the subtext, guiding and correcting essentially every scene she was in.
That's some purr!
But no more. The purr was gone. Excised from Angie's performance. From mid-Season 2 onward, Pepper began to seem like a secondary character in her own show, a dithery and apologetic hostess, Donna Reed with an empty service revolver. At first it was just the body language and the vocalization. But then the show itself, now denied its original star's full star quality, begins to write away from her. Soon, Pepper ceases to even interrogate witnesses or criminal suspects by herself; she and Crowley now do it together -- always -- and he does all the talking. And if she returns to the office with a new lead or a clue, Crowley's already learned the same thing from his desk... The early "rescue scenarios" from the first year made narrative sense, as Pepper was the undercover agent, but soon those rescues would become contrived and even ridiculous... Pepper could no longer even grin, scowl or just gaze blankly at somebody for more than two seconds, nervously averting eye contact to avoid making them uncomfortable or appear too resolute in her own convictions; even her regal saunter replaced by a floppy shuffle... Suddenly, she can't seem to do the tough stuff
or the sexy stuff. Nor do they demand it of her. It's as if they've told her to "stop acting". And that directive to ambivalently
not mean anything too much creates a neurotic lack of focus in Pepper, pulling her out-of-the-moment far too often... She no longer seems to have any adult authority over herself... The Pepper Anderson of later years just isn't the one from Season One. Her mojo has been stolen, and the scripts and direction quickly follow suit.
In other words, they sucked the
diva right out of her. From the middle of Season 2, that charisma was all but flipped off like a light switch. They'd knocked her out of her frequency, nudged her out of her 'zone'. Her performance changes; it's muted and deliberately so.
Even her lighting and her hair and wardrobe are allowed to slide, seemingly dictated. And possibly by Angie herself, stung by the criticism.
So it could've been Angie's fault.
Oh, sure, the sex crutch was probably passe after Season One anyway -- the show was already a hit. Yes, they still did the occasional porno plotline and still had characters obligatorily swoon here-and-there over Pepper's now-modified beauty, but she was no longer permitted to
play it... So we now had the reverse of what should have happened
: it's okay for her to be called "sexy" and be in compromising situations just as long as she isn't too convincing, as long as she isn't too effervescent and remains fairly bland.
Would that really satisfy either the bra-burners
or the audience??
Plus, there seemed to be other political issues behind the scenes: around the outset of filming for the second year, Dickinson, usually known for her amiable affability on the set, refused to do a scene or an episode in which she was to drive an 18-wheeler, feeling it was implausible that a petite female cop would spontaneously know how to handle a big truck. But, even decades later, Angie conceded that "the producers never forgave me." So she may have made a strategic misstep with her male bosses as well. Did they decide to punish her?
By mid-Season 2, POLICE WOMAN has already dropped out of the Top 30 (a poor timeslot change didn't help). It's mostly now by rote, pedestrian, static, too polite. Sometimes something with great potential, when that potential is squandered or abused, can become far more intolerable than something which had little potential to begin with. And watching this once-dynamic, volatile but now often-listless cop show has become harder and harder to do... Angie's still there, and yet she's not. And only Angie's melancholy romantic quality lurking discretely behind the newly subdued facade helps the project survive.
Listen to the dialogue between Pepper and Crowley in the darkened bedroom scene three-quarters of the way thru "Pawns of Power", the first episode of Season Two: someone is editorializing in the script about the behind-the-scenes politics of the show (e.g., "it's all downhill from here").
Even Angie's fellow TV stars noticed the decline at the time, RHODA's Valerie Harper observing that, "POLICE WOMAN was good at first, but then Angie started getting shoved aside by the guys."
There's still the goodish episode, but it's just not the same. The energy is just gone. There is the constant feeling of the show holding back -- or constantly holding Angie back. They're no longer respecting their own
femme fatale, so the program ceases to grow after the first season, instead devolving as she endlessly tries to avoid seeming overly assertive. Once perched and ready for action, her original cagey, coquettish competence had given way to an ineffectual, unassuming pleasantness.
A potential classic marginalized on the altar of political correctness and/or perhaps by producers who'd dismissed their star for daring to put her foot down over something.
After the advent of CHARLIE'S ANGELS in 1976, there seemed to be a slight move towards re-energizing charismatic Pepper for Season Four of POLICE WOMAN, but the effort felt half-hearted and eleventh hour. In fact, the only substantive element the show picked up by this point from The Three Bimbos at ABC is a certain cartoonishness which infected POLICE WOMAN's final season, and it wasn't to the show's benefit. It didn't fit. (And when the boringly by-the-numbers Virgil W. Vogel begins directing a number of your series' installments, it's never a good sign).
The splashy but admittedly vapid CHARLIE'S ANGELS, and the fantastical WONDER WOMAN and THE BIONIC WOMAN -- and the later more legit CAGNEY AND LACEY -- would never have happened if it weren't for Angie Dickinson's series (nor would countless new police women across America).
It changed television, and even the law enforcement culture.
So it begs the question
: were the '70s feminists (who, curiously, mostly left ANGELS alone) correct to try and pull down POLICE WOMAN and then bash it for years? Or can we dare to ask if a feminist is capable of common, routine sexual jealousy masquerading as something else?? Angie Dickinson had, after all, initially struck a rare and memorable balance between credible
ability and traditional femininity as Pepper, and, despite being older and singular, had twice the sex appeal of Charlie's Angels combined.
Was that somehow too threatening? And is such a question in itself sexist?
And were the show-runners really all that permanently mad at Angie?, as her suppression after Season 1 does feel almost
personal.
The mind reels.
But the first season --- with Angie tough and competent and gorgeous and lit and soft-lensed from exactly the correct angle and to exactly the right degree, and almost insanely alluring --- presented an image of feminine power so resonant, so unthreateningly threatening, that
even other women felt compelled to put a stop to it (under the pretense that they were protecting the dignity of the gender) while others just marched down to their local police departments and signed up.
