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to return. My concern was also how any critic could ever be brought back to the show so that we might demonstrate the effective changes we were making.
    My concerns aside, the opening night ratings for Rick Husky’s version of the series were immense. The numbers were precedent setting. Hopefully, the drop off the following week would not kill us. There were some jokes from all quarters about the taste of the viewing public. The next week’s numbers on Rick’s second episode came out on the first day of production of the first episode under my aegis. They were higher than the previous week. Charlie’s Angels was a bona fide, major hit.
    Mr. Goldberg was not being facetious when he then reversed himself, saying, “Let’s not make this show too good.” He thought he was onto something, however accidental. I would argue that the show was a smash in spite of the fact that it was awful, not because of it, but more and more I was being tuned out.
    Goldberg believed the audience to be masturbating adolescent males. I felt the majority of viewers were young girls delighted to see fantasy role models on the screen, just as girls of my generation had been all too happy to read the exploits of Nancy Drew. Of course the girls wanted their heroines to be good looking. Didn’t Mr. Goldberg and I want Errol Flynn and Clark Gable to be handsome? I had been in that Westwood movie theater a few years before when Cotton Comes to Harlem made its debut in 1970. It was the first of the so-called Blacksploitation flicks, and I attended it with an audience primarily composed of people of color. They cheered the film. All their lives they had, along with me, applauded the exploits of John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart. Now, for the first time, someone who looked and sounded like them was doing all the star turns and getting the gal at the end. They loved it, and why shouldn’t they? It made perfect sense to me then, and it made the same kind of sense to me when I conceived Cagney & Lacey as well as when I argued with Spelling and Goldberg as to who the audience was for Charlie’s Angels .
    The disputes were more than esoteric. My recollection is that they centered on the cheap, sexist jokes that my executive producers wanted inserted. I would fight and argue that it was a fundamental mistake to insult the very audience that was most loyally supporting the show. Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Farrah Fawcett helped to make many of the arguments moot, as more and more they refused to say many of those double-entendre lines. Perhaps it was the critical comments they were reading about the show in the nation’s press; perhaps we simply underestimated them. Whatever it was, their consciousnesses were obviously being raised as well.
    The mail, and ultimately several key articles by psychologists and sociologists, would confirm that the primary core of the Charlie’s Angels ’ audience were teenage girls and young women. It didn’t matter. The arguments with my bosses continued to escalate. The honeymoon was definitely over.
    There was more going on than was readily apparent. Despite protestations to the contrary and their allegiance to an ever-growing empire, Messrs. Spelling and Goldberg were having a tough time letting go of this project and, apparently, dealing with my popularity with the stars, saying at one point to Ms. Fawcett: “We don’t need anyone telling us how to make a hit of our show.” It was to get even pettier.
    Editorial sessions were held on episodes, and I would not be notified. Projectionists would phone in sick and then appear at other parts of the lot to screen the show for either Mr. Spelling or Mr. Goldberg, excluding me from the process. These bosses could, of course, at any time squash me like a bug, but they actually appeared (at least from my perspective) to prefer this sort of psychological warfare to direct confrontation. Their operation was one where everyone was constantly off-balance. Chaos was the norm. I