How Frank Sinatra helped to inspire ‘Charlie’s Angels’
Even though he never came anywhere near Charlie’s Angels in an on-screen capacity, Frank Sinatra had a massive impact on a TV series that would do much more than spawn one of the most popular shows of its era.
Beyond its initial run on the small screen that spanned five seasons and 115 episodes between 1976 and 1981, co-creators Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts – with an inadvertent assist from ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ – would launch a sprawling multimedia empire that stretched across decades.
In addition to crossovers with crime drama Vegas and hit romantic comedy The Love Boat, Charlie’s Angels would be rebooted by McG at the turn of the millennium for a pair of hit blockbuster action movies, a short-lived animated series that tied in with the release of sequel Full Throttle, a doomed episodic reboot that was axed after eight episodes in 2011, and another reboot helmed by Elizabeth Banks that failed to gain much traction in cinemas in 2019.
That’s quite the empire for a production that was denigrated by many within the industry, with NBC executive Paul Klein coining the term “jiggle television” for projects that relied on sex appeal and telegenic stars to draw in a wide audience, a disparaging generalisation that drew Charlie’s Angels, Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, and Three’s Company into its unsavoury orbit.
Goff and Roberts had concocted the idea for a series revolving around a trio of female private investigators years previously but struggled to settle on an appropriate title. Actor Kate Jackson had been considered for a lead role since the start and through the various subsequent iterations as the concept was honed and refined, which is where Sinatra’s inspiration came in.
Producer Aaron Spelling’s office on the 20th Century Fox lot at the time was previously occupied by Sinatra, who’d left a particularly angelic painting hanging on the wall. During a meeting before the title of the show had been decided upon, Jackson made a suggestion that would ultimately become an iconic part of the pop culture lexicon when she said, “Why not call them Angels?”
Once Harry’s Angels was taken off the table to avoid unwanted comparisons to police procedural Harry O, Charlie was in, and the rest was history. Spelling had been sitting in front of the painting the whole time he was working out of Sinatra’s former headquarters on the Fox lot, but it wasn’t until Jackson pointed towards something that was literally looming above his head that Charlie’s Angels settled on a moniker that would become known the world over.
Sinatra was likely completely unaware of the way he influenced a major TV success story, but there’s no denying that Charlie’s Angels is vastly superior to The Alley Cats, another prospective title floated by the creators.
