'Police Woman'

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One of the kids from PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES recently died, making POLICE WOMAN the oldest network series where all four leads are still alive.


Here, David Selby plays a pre-Richard Channing villain abusing Nick Hogan's unrecognizable wife (a nubile Mark Harmon makes a cameo) in a Season 1 episode, "No Place to Hide," which aired in January 1975 when the show was hitting #1 for the week for a few times:


Meredith Baxter guests as a doomed police officer -- DALLAS' Jerrold Immel composed the creepy original score for this episode from Season 3:

 
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Angie said her new show, the private eye series CASSIE & CO., was an opportunity "to correct some of the mistakes we made with POLICE WOMAN," but when it was trounced by the first season of FALCON CREST on Friday night, Angie said "it didn't deserve ,to make it -- it was just warmed-over POLICE WOMAN." (it started out as a sitcom called THE ANGIE DICKINSON SHOW which she pulled plug on after two episodes because she thought she stunk at comedy). When ex-hubby, Burt Bacharach, refused yet again to write her theme song, Grover Washington supplied one:

 

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Miss Angie turns 90 on September 30th !!

Earl Holliman turned 93 a few days ago... so POLICE WOMAN remains the oldest show in network primetime history where all the principles as still alive (Ed Bernard is 82 and Charles Dierkop is 85).

A nice Season 2 episode, "Silence," with guest star Joanna Pettet:


 
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LWT had a weird screening order running in the seventies as I've found out recently! Flowers of Evil even ended up amongst the season three episodes! They didn't complete the entire series and some shows were pre-empted by late night golf but the big kill for the series was the weeks long strike on ITV in 1979 and after it ended Police Woman had vanished from LWTs Friday night or Saturday night line-up forever!
JB
 

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No, but it was probably what the rest of us thought: Pepper became too squelched, too hookered, and too frequently rescued.

Angie did say at one point that the difficult thing about doing a long-running show is that you "stop focusing on character, and in just getting it physically done," and having to face "another lousy script."

 

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Tangent: Joanna Pettet is another of those actresses who should have been a household name as a lead in a TV series, but it never really happened for her (or maybe she didn’t want it). But I always thought she was beautiful with charisma to spare.
I couldn't agree more. I've always been a fan of hers and wondered why she didn't get cast as the lead in a series; she certainly appeared in her share of made for TV movies. According to Wikipedia she retired in the early 90s.
 

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Angie did say at one point that the difficult thing about doing a long-running show is that you "stop focusing on character, and in just getting it physically done," and having to face "another lousy script."

This episode, from early Season 2, was the first time I thought something was now wrong with the show. It's well-directed by Barry Shear (with guest stars like Ian McShane and Ida Lupino) and it has lots of action sequences, but Pepper is essentially incompetent in all of them:

 
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Brown-eyed Angel

Oh, how I luv me some pre-1976 Angie.... In case you didn't know, her '70s cop show almost ruined her. The first season was good, but by the middle of the second season, her luscious feminine charm was rolled-back (due to complaints that she was "too sexy") and, in my mind, it killed the show and she never quite recovered career-wise. She still worked here-and-there, but it just wasn't the same, and what was so special about her screen presence was removed...

And it was probably partly her fault. She said decades later that "when I tried to be sexy, I was ludicrous!" --- which was not true at all, but she was apparently charisma-shamed by her detractors into taking the edge out of her focusing purr in order to avoid seeming foolish. Whatever the impetus for the change, it hurt her. So someone psyched her out.

Sometimes you just need to ignore the criticism and go with your instincts.


'60s critics were generally kind to Angie Dickinson -- if not always her movies, granting that if she'd come up during the earlier studio system of the '30s and '40s, she might have fared better... She's a good actress, coming off as almost as a living Venus whose enigmatic delivery is a measured and ironic purr, seductive yet focused. All that stopped by the middle of the second season of her TV series, and she rarely got a good review again:
 
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