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The crowd that collects around the Angels every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. E.S.T. is truly astonishing. According to the latest Nielsen rating figures, 59% of all the television sets in use in the U.S. are tuned to them. This kind of audience share is usually achieved only by special events like the World Series. It means that people in 23 million households choose to get their weekly fix of girl watching, double-entendre sex jokes and mild violence here. It is not, apparently, a show for mental prepubescents only. Angels ranks fourth among all programs in metropolitan areas, seventh among college graduates, seventh among viewers with incomes above $20,000. Most important, it ranks first with adult viewers regardless of their station in life—which may or may not say something about the state of adulthood in the U.S. these days.
It certainly says something about the shrewdness with which the American Broadcasting Co. has calculated the mood of the moment. Traditionally the No. 3 network, ABC has been coming on strong in the past couple of seasons. This year it has finally taken a firm grip on the top of the ratings, if not on the hearts and minds of television critics and the other amateur moral philosophers who keep outraged eyes on the tube. Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, its vulgarly nostalgic sitcoms, so far this season rank first and second among regularly scheduled programs, while Baretta, the ethnic undercover cop, and The Bionic Woman are right up there near Charlie's Angels among the leading action-adventure shows.
What distinguishes all these programs is a frank and total lack of pretense. They all seem to proceed from the belief that a television series should not aspire to any greater intellectual or emotional depth than the comic books that seem to have inspired them. The dialogue is apparently borrowed from old Batman balloons. Brightly lit and crudely shot, the visual style indeed reminds one of comic art at its least sophisticated level.
Sometimes it is necessary to put the mind in neutral and let it idle for a while. The uncampy sobriety with which these shows offer their childlike simplicities can be curiously refreshing, a time trip back to the simple pleasures of trash fiction for kids. Wonder Woman, which ABC so far runs as a recurring special rather than as a series, is a particularly satisfying show in which Lynda Carter plays a World War II female Superman, lap-dissolve costume changes and all. Nevertheless, after admiring Lynda's sexy little red, white and blue suit and her golden lasso, one mostly feels that after decades of painstaking research, much trial and error, many false reports of success, the ABC gang has finally found television's Holy Grail—the one, true least common denominator.
All that aside, it is actually difficult not to admire the sheer brilliance of the network's commercial calculation, its bold strategies in positioning and promoting its products as it scrambles for an edge in its battles with CBS and NBC.