Bullet Points: Long Overdue Edition

During the four days I spent in San Francisco this last February, attending the latest Left Coast Crime convention, more than one fellow attendee came up to me to say how much they like my periodic, multiple-subject “Bullet Points” posts. While that gladdened my heart, it also reminded me of how long it had been since I’d produced such a compilation. I think the last one went up in October, which in these tense, turbulent times seems like a lifetime ago.

With a few free hours on my hands today, I went trolling through my computer bookmarks to find new subjects worth sharing.

• Well, what do you know: In Reference to Murder reports that the American author who, since 2013, has published best-selling psychological thrillers (such as The Housemaid, The Tenant, and The Divorce) under the name Freida McFadden has finally revealed her true identity. She is “in reality Sara Cohen, a doctor who treats brain disorders and only created the pseudonym because she didn’t want her writing career to conflict with her hospital job. ‘My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn’t be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job,’ McFadden says. In late 2023, she stopped working full-time.” But even her nom de plume is rooted in the medical profession; Cohen told the BBC that “She chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke—after a hospital training registry, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.”

• April 1 marked the 28th anniversary of Kevin Burton Smith launching that essential online crime-fiction resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. His page went live on that date back in 1998! Congratulations to my old friend Kevin for sticking with this project for so long and growing it so expertly.

• Speaking of milestones, it was half a century ago this year—on September 22, 1976, to be precise—that the hour-long “jiggle TV” crime drama Charlie’s Angels debuted on America’s ABC network. In early commemoration of that fact, three of the show’s stars, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd, “reunited” earlier this week at PaleyFest in Los Angeles (“an annual television festival hosted by the Paley Center”). According to the Associated Press, “They were greeted with a standing ovation and whoops and cheers from an audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.” Smith, now 80 years old (!), may have delivered the occasion’s best line: “I knew the show was different, special and unique. Three women chasing danger instead of getting rescued.” Charlie’s Angels aired for five seasons and was a pop-culture hit (despite talk of it undermining feminism), but underwent several cast changes over time, the first of those coming in 1977, when Fawcett left amid a contract dispute. She was replaced by Ladd.

• London’s two-day Capital Crime festival has issued its full program of 2026 events, which are set to kick off at the Leonardo Royal Hotel on Thursday, June 18. Among the headliners will be authors Elly Griffiths, Jeffrey Archer, Jane Harper, and Sophie Hannah, with Irish comedian and actor Ardal O’Hanlon (formerly of Death in Paradise) also participating. An overview of events can be found here. Winners of the annual Fingerprint Awards, celebrating the foremost crime and thriller fiction in more than half a dozen categories, will be honored in a special ceremony on the 18th.

• Erle Stanley Gardner’s The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937)—the first of his legal mysteries starring small-town California district attorney Douglas Selby—was reissued last summer through Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics imprint. What I hadn’t realized until recently, however, was that publisher Open Road Integrated Media has also returned to print seven of the eight other entries in the Selby line. Which is good news! As I wrote in CrimeReads, “While those stories never enjoyed the same level of reader enthusiasm Perry Mason’s escapades did, and were neither as humorous nor as briskly paced as another series Gardner launched in 1939, built around mismatched L.A. gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, they certainly offered plenty in the way of knotty plots, ill-starred suspects, and razzle-dazzle legal shenanigans.” Click here for more about those paperbacks.

• By the way, the remaining Selby novel, 1948’s The D.A. Takes a Chance, was last reprinted in 2014 by The Murder Room, an imprint of UK publisher Orion. Although The Murder Room is evidently now defunct, Open Road hasn’t yet added it to its catalogue. Maybe soon?

• There seems be no end of television-related news lately, beginning with word that the ITV and BritBox “reimaginging” of Dalziel and Pascoe has begun filming in the North of England. This sex-switching update of characters born in novels by Reginald Hill—and made additionally famous in a 1996-2007 BBC One series—finds grumpy, intransigent, and very politically incorrect Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel (played in the original show by Warren Clarke) being transformed into Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel and portrayed by Kerry Godliman, while Dalziel’s more forward-thinking police partner, DI Peter Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) becomes Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe, brought to the small screen by Nina Singh. The opening season of this new crime drama will comprise six episodes; there’s no official debut date at present. Jon Farrar, executive vice president of programming, BritBox, is quoted in Variety as assuring fans of the earlier production that this one will hew to familiar themes: “Dalziel and Pascoe has always been about friction, intellect, and the uneasy bond of opposites, forged in pursuit of truth. Dalziel and Pascoe’s chemistry, wit, and moral clarity perfectly complement this richly layered mystery. It’s timeless crime storytelling that not only honours but sharpens its legacy.” I look forward to judging for myself.

• For all of those people who, like me, watched and enjoyed the slow-burning “cat-and-mouse thriller” The Game, and thought its ambiguous but not unsatisfying ending offered zero chance of a sequel … well, what the hell do we know? Even the Web site TVGuide.co.uk concedes this is “rather surprising” news; Channel 5 thrillers are usually one-season wonders, “self-contained nuggets of deliciously daft drama” (e.g., The Au Pair and The Rumour). But The Game, which had its UK airing in 2025 and found Jason Watkins (McDonald & Dodds) playing Huw Miller, a recently retired police detective who becomes convinced that his suave new neighbor, Patrick Harbottle (Grantchester’s Robson Green), is the repeat killer he’s long pursued, “left viewers wanting more,” says TVGuide.co.uk. At the close of Series 1, Patrick was being arrested and Huw was seriously injured. The follow-up is set a year on. It sees Huw having survived and thinking himself free of the psychological grip Patrick held him in. “Retreating with his wife, Alice (Sunetra Sarker), to an isolated house by the sea,” The Killing Times explains, “Huw is determined to rebuild a quiet life, far from the violence that nearly destroyed them. But peace, he soon realises, is an illusion.” Channel 5 says The Game will return in 2027.

• Robson Green is much in demand. The Killing Times reports that, with his work done on Grantchester’s 11th and final season (set to premiere on PBS Masterpiece come June 14), he will assume one of the leading roles in an eight-part BBC serial, The Northumbria Mysteries.

Set against the sweeping Northumberland coastline and its surrounding market towns, the series centres on an unlikely crime-solving duo.

Green will star as Joe Ruby, a jack-of-all-trades whose life has been shaped by mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities, alongside Oxford-educated DI Rose O’Connell (casting to be announced), a rarefied intellectual, a deep thinker with a brilliant mind and an ice-cool disposition. In a classic odd-couple pairing, Joe and Rose combine their talents as they frustrate, confound, and ultimately surprise one another while unravelling a series of compelling crime mysteries.

• Something I should have mentioned long ago: HBO-TV has ordered an eight-episode drama based on Adrian McKinty’s best-selling 2019 child-abduction novel, The Chain. Behind this project is Damon Lindelof, who previously gave us Lost and The Leftovers, and was once a writer on Nash Bridges and Crossing Jordan. As The Wrap recalls, Irish author McKinty’s chilling tale “follows Rachel, a divorcée who is undergoing treatment for cancer, who gets a call that her daughter, Kylie, has been kidnapped and is now part of The Chain. To get Kylie back, she must kidnap another child after paying a ransom. Kylie will be released when the parents of the child Rachel has kidnapped take yet another child and continue the chain.” The Wrap notes, however, that “Lindelof is said to be expanding the mythology of McKinty’s award-winning thriller.”

• Blogger Lou Armagno points me toward a piece in Variety that’s likely to delight fans of Earl Derr Biggers’ renowned Charlie Chan. It says actor Tzi Ma (Mulan, Kung Fu) will executive produce and headline a possible new Canadian Chan TV series reimagining Biggers’ Chinese-American Honolulu policeman as a Hong Kong immigrant to Vancouver, British Columbia, “who, after retiring from the Vancouver police department in frustration, quietly launches a private investigation agency, taking on cases for the city’s overlooked and forgotten.”

• Meanwhile, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke has signed up to play a criminal investigator in Netflix’s adaptation of Liz Moore’s 2024 hit novel, The God of the Woods. … Actor-writer Stephen Fry will star as a quirky but brilliant former MI6 agent in a forthcoming Fox-TV show called The Interrogator. … See-Saw films, the production company behind Slow Horses, has acquired the rights to develop a fresh TV series from Jonathan Gash’s novels about a British antiques dealer-cum-sleuth known only as Lovejoy—books that were already the source material for a 1986-1984 BBC1 comedy-drama featuring Ian McShane. … Filming is underway on the sophomore season of Lynley, based on Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley yarns. … And Murder, She Wrote, a Universal Pictures film inspired by the 1984-1996 CBS-TV series starring Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer and amateur crime-solver, is slated to reach theaters just in time for Christmas, 2027. Jamie Lee Curtis will play Fletcher in this version.

• My other blog, Killer Covers, returns from a too-long hiatus with proof that there are simply too many crime, mystery, and thriller novels fronted by silhouettes of people in windows.

• We still await any information regarding the next James Bond feature film (now under the control of Amazon). But in the meantime, we can look forward to a new Bond novel for adults. Titled King Zero, it’s by Charlie Higson, the author of a half a dozen Young Bond yarns, as well as the 2023 007 adventure, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. Shotsmag Confidential provides this plot précis:

Beginning with the murder of an agent in Saudi Arabia by a weapon never before seen by the Secret Service and spanning the globe in an epic race against time to avert global catastrophe, the novel brings the literary Bond squarely into the twenty-first century, where the old world that made him is crumbling and a terrifying new order emerges while a dangerous villain—the most distinctive since Goldfinger –moves in the shadows. Higson explores themes of power, technology, and international tensions over resources in an extraordinarily timely story.

UK publisher Michael Joseph has promised to deliver King Zero to bookshops on the other side of the pond by September 24.

• Wow, a Kickstarter campaign to create action figures based on monster-hunting reporter Carl Kolchak and other characters featured in two 1970s teleflicks (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler) and a subsequent TV series collected way more money than was sought! I guess old Carl hasn’t been forgotten, after all.

• Finally, this CrimeReads piece by writer and artist Frank Ladd, comparing the oeuvres of American private eye novelists Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, deserves attention from fans of both. He concludes that “In a way, Macdonald is writing moral ghost stories. The present is haunted by the past, and the novel becomes a kind of exorcism. Chandler is writing moral fever dreams, hallucinatory journeys through corruption. There is no past worth redeeming.”

Angels Rise Again?

Seriously, there’s another Charlie’s Angels reboot on the way? In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson reports that “Sony has lined up Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn to pen the latest incarnation of the Charlie’s Angels franchise, to be directed by Elizabeth Banks. It might seem an odd choice to tackle a franchise that began as a TV showcase for bikini-clad detectives in the 1970s, but the move is strategic on the part of Sony and Banks, who are seeking rich, fully developed characters and not just pretty faces plugged into action, or as Hollywood Reporter put it, ‘less ass, more class.’”

Finding “Angels” a Voice

With former It Takes a Thief star Robert Wagner having bowed out as the voice of never-seen detective agency head Charles Townsend on this fall’s rebooted Charlie’s Angels series (reportedly “due to his scheduling conflicts”), the search is on for a replacement. In The Huffington Post, screenwriter Greg Archer proposes a few articulate alternatives, including former Rockford Files star James Garner and Knots Landing’s William Devane (either of whom would probably be great).

But I would also like to suggest three more distinctive-sounding performers: Jeff Goldblum, freed from his stint on Law & Order: Criminal Intent; ex-Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors (an interesting choice, since his onetime wife, Farrah Fawcett, was among the original “angels”); and--try this one on for size--71-year-old Welsh former heartthrob, singer Tom Jones. Yes, that Tom Jones.

Any other suggestions?

Making My Rounds

• In Reference to Murder reminds us that tomorrow, January 31, will be the final day of business for Los Angeles’ justly respected Mystery Bookstore, which opened in 1987 and earlier this month announced its decision to close its doors.

They’ll be open all day with bargains throughout the store, but at 6:00 p.m., it’s the official farewell party. You can enjoy what they’re billing as “one last evening with us--and with the many authors who have promised to drop in to join us in celebrating the fun we’ve had and perhaps to shed a tear or two. Food, libation, good company, and great books--new, back stock, and collectibles--on sale.” For every $25 that you spend, you’ll be given a ticket for a drawing to win one of nine gift bags, which include hand-picked books by owners Kirk Pasich and Pamela Woods and other staff, Robert Crais collectibles, and Michael Connelly limited editions.

• This week’s episode of the PBS-TV documentary series Pioneers of Television will focus on classic small-screen crimes dramas, including Mannix, Police Woman, Dragnet, Mission: Impossible, and I Spy. The late Robert Culp and Stephen J. Cannell are both interviewed for this episode, which airs on Tuesday, February 1, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. (Hat tip to Ivan G. Shreve Jr. at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.)

• Completely ignoring my recent casting advice, producers of the forthcoming Charlie’s Angels “reboot” have finally signed on all three of their new female private eyes: Annie Ilonzeh (from General Hospital), Rachel Taylor (Transformers), and Esquire magazine’s most recent “Sexiest Woman Alive,” Minka Kelly (Friday Night Lights). Robert Wagner is still said to be on tap to portray their never-seen boss, Charlie Townsend. Production on this fall 2011 series, which will be set in Miami rather than Los Angeles, is expected to begin late this spring.

• I’m sorry to see that Sarah Weinman has put her once must-read blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, on hiatus as she deals with other editorial responsibilities. Fortunately, she’s continuing to blog (though less regularly) in Off on a Tangent.

• And Weinman has a fine new piece in The Wall Street Journal. Her subject is crime writer Margery Allingham (1904-1966), the English creator of “gentleman sleuth” Albert Campion. It’s Weinman’s opinion that, “of the ‘Four Queens of Crime,’ as [Agatha] Christie, [Dorothy L.] Sayers, [Ngaio] Marsh and Allingham were designated back in the day, Margery has the most distinctive voice--which may or may not explain why, even though her books have never gone out of print, she’s never entered the crime-fiction canon in quite the same way.” Read more here.

• I’ve added another worthy new blog to The Rap Sheet’s right-hand column. It’s Little Known Gems, the work of Kentucky writer-reviewer Richard L. Pangburn, who not long ago contributed a “forgotten books” piece to this page about Money, Money, Money (2001), by Ed McBain. Among Pangburn’s recent posts is this one looking back at Ross Macdonald’s 1948 standalone mystery, The Three Roads (which served as the basis for the 1980 film Deadly Companion).

• R.I.P., The Untouchables’ Bruce Gordon.

• Whatever became of the Republicans’ promise to focus on jobs?

• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp is “Massacre Canyon,” by Wayne D. Dundee, featuring his series sleuth, Joe Hannibal.

• I learned from Lee Goldberg’s blog that Zachary Klein, who published a trio of mystery novels back in the 1990s featuring Boston private eye Matt Jacob, recently began writing his own blog. There’s not much there yet, but maybe a little reader encouragement will help.

• Interviews worth your notice: Paul D. Brazill chats up NoirCon organizer Lou Boxer; David Cranmer fires seven questions at Fred Zackel, including some about his most generous teacher, Ross Macdonald; Stephen Jay Schwartz talks with Kelli Stanley about her new novels The Curse Maker and City of Secrets, the latter a sequel to last year’s terrific City of Dragons; J. Sydney Jones goes one-on-one with cozy writer Lorraine Bartlett; and Tina Hall of The Damned Interviews quizzes author and screenwriter William Hjortsberg.

• Speaking of Hjortsberg, the blogs Scientist Gone Wordy and Lazy Thoughts from a Boomer offer parallel reviews of that author’s 1978 novel, Falling Angel, and its 1987 film adaptation, Angel Heart.

• The latest installment of Dick Adler’s online serial novel, Forget About It: The First Al Zymer Senile Detective Mystery, has been posted here earlier this week. A complete archive of the chapters can be found here.

• Word is that Kyra Sedgwick’s The Closer, the TNT-TV show that had been scheduled to go off the air after its forthcoming seventh season (due to begin production this coming spring), will now be extended by half a dozen episodes in order to “introduce both new characters and a new storyline for a spin-off.”

Scouting About

• Thankfully, NBC-TV’s rebooting of the classic James Garner series, The Rockford Files, has been shelved--at least for the time being. But ABC appears to have given the go-ahead for a remake of Charlie’s Angels, the 1976-1981 series about three underutilized young women cops--originally Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, and Jaclyn Smith--who abandon the force to become private eyes, working for a never-seen boss, Charlie Townsend. TV Squad says the remake would move all the action to Miami (necessitating a skimpy wardrobe, I presume) and recruit veteran leading man Robert Wagner (of It Takes a Thief, Switch, and Hart to Hart fame) as Charlie. There’s no word yet on who might play his “three little girls who went to the police academy,” but I’m in agreement with a couple of TV Squad’s suggestions: ex-Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell and Gugu Mbatha-Raw of the short-lived Undercovers. Plus, I would throw in Without a Trace’s Roselyn Sánchez. And to play Charlie’s day-to-day liaison, Bosley? Well, since Dermot Mulroney won’t be getting the keys to Jim Rockford’s Firebird at anytime soon, maybe he’d like to take a shot at the role.

• I was quite skeptical about a British version of American television’s most enduring cops-and-prosecutors drama, but Law & Order: UK has managed to set itself apart, thanks to some fine performances (especially by Bradley Walsh as Detective Sergeant Ronnie Brooks and Ben Daniels as Senior Crown Prosecutor James Steel). The series’ second season will begin tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on BBC America.

• “Tired of writing weepy things about bookstores closing in L.A.,” author-journalist Denise Hamilton took an unusual direction in her report, for L.A. Observed, on the imminent shuttering of Westwood’s Mystery Bookstore. You can find her piece here.

• Photos from last weekend’s David Goodis Memorial in Philly.

• Irish novelist and blogger Declan Burke looks ahead to what 2011 will offer in the way of crime fiction, including new books by Tana French, John Connolly, and Gene Kerrigan.

• With the start of Noir City, the ninth annual San Francisco Film Noir festival, coming up this Friday, “cultural archaeologist” Eddie Muller (who’s also president and founder of the Film Noir Foundation) talks with Indianapolis Star correspondent Joe Shearer about “the cultural and historical importance of film noir and film preservation--and whether Batman can truly be considered noir.” Read their exchange here.

• Meanwhile, Pulp Serenade’s Cullen Gallagher interviews Jonathon Woods, author of the short-story collection Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (New Pulp Press), which he calls “one of the wildest literary rides of 2010.”

• The espionage-fiction blog Double O Section offers up a belated but entertaining collection of “bests”--movies, TV, DVDs--from 2010.

• Vince Keenan turns his magnifying glass on Ellery Queen.

• And R.I.P., David Nelson.

“Three Heaven-sent Hell Raisers”

Funny. I was of prime-time TV-watching age when the Aaron Spelling series Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976, but I have no memory of tie-in novels having been published. Then again, I wasn’t a regular Angels watcher, and when I did take in an episode, I was probably too distracted by the generous displays of skin (they didn’t call this “Jiggle TV” for nothing) to wonder whether I could purchase books that would force me only to imagine what Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Jaclyn Smith looked like while carrying out their undercover investigations for Los Angeles’ Charles Townsend Agency.

It wasn’t until after Fawcett’s death last Thursday that I happened across the cover of one of five Angels novels published between 1977 and 1978, and then went looking for the rest. These slender volumes were penned by “Max Franklin,” which was one of several pseudonyms employed by Richard Deming, a prolific writer of novels, short fiction, and stories for television. Deming/Franklin also composed novels based on episodes of Dragnet, Starsky & Hutch, The Mod Squad, and Vega$. The first four of his Charlie’s Angels books were adapted from Season One installments of that Wednesday-night series, though the fifth and last one, Charlie’s Angels: Angels on Ice, was based on an episode from Season Two, after Fawcett had left the show and been replaced by the equally blonde Cheryl Ladd.

These book covers offer nothing spectacular in the way of design. They’re simply decorated with photographs of the series’ three female investigators and catchy lines about “TV’s Troubletracking Trio” and the show’s “Three Curvaceous Crimestoppers.” But they are part of American TV crime-drama history--a history that seemed to become even more distant and gauzy last week.

Click on any of the covers for an enlargement.





READ MORE: “It’s All in the Game: TV P.I. Tie-ins” (The Thrilling Detective Web Site); “Spying, Anyone?” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot).

An Angel Gets Her Wings

This comes as no surprise, given all of the reports about her declining health over the last couple of years, but the news is sad nonetheless: Farrah Fawcett, the blond and bright-smiling, Texas-born model and actress who starred in the 1970s TV hit Charlie’s Angels, died today in Santa Monica, California, at age 62. She succumbed to anal cancer.

I was never a big fan of Aaron Spelling’s Angels series. But I did enjoy watching Fawcett--then credited as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, because of her marriage to The Six Million Dollar Man’s Lee Majors--on the mid-’70s David Janssen TV series Harry O (she played private eye Orwell’s bouncy next-door neighbor, Sue Ingham). And I remember appreciating her in the lead role in a 1989 teleflick called Margaret Bourke-White, about the famous 20th-century U.S. photographer. During the late ’70s and early ’80s, a poster of Fawcett wrapped up in a red bathing suit made her the No. 1 sex symbol in America, rivaled only by The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas.

Even sadder than word about Fawcett’s passing this morning may be reports that she and her longtime love, actor Ryan O’Neal, who had planned to wed while she remained on her deathbed, weren’t able to follow through on that wish. “There just wasn’t time, and Farrah wasn’t in any condition to do it,” O’Neill is quoted in People magazine as saying.

In fond memory of Fawcett, here’s a video tribute to the actress in her best-remembered role, as Jill Munroe on Charlie’s Angels:



READ MORE: “What Was It About Farrah?” by Mary Elizabeth Williams (Salon); “Hollywood Pays Tribute to Farrah Fawcett,” by Mike Fleeman (People); “Farrah Fawcett Dies at 62; Actress Soared with, then Beyond, Charlie’s Angels,” by Valerie J. Nelson (Los Angeles Times); “Farrah Fawcett, Actress and Iconic Beauty, Dies at 62,” by Susan Stewart (The New York Times); “Good-bye Farrah,” by Sandra Stephens (You Call Yourself a Writer--Me Too); “Former Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett Dies,” by Jesse Baker (NPR); “Farrah Fawcett (1947-2009),” by Edward Copeland (Edward Copeland on Film); “Why We Loved Farrah Fawcett,” by James Ledbetter (Slate); “Farrah Is Dead at 62,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); and video tributes to the actress can be found here, here, and here.

Sorry, Charlie

Who knew that actor Robert Wagner (It Takes a Thief, Switch, Hart to Hart) had anything to do with the Aaron Spelling series Charlie’s Angels? Or that, earlier this week, he would lose a lawsuit brought against Columbia Pictures for a substantial share of the profits from the two Charlie’s Angels movies?

The specifics of this lawsuit are evidently rooted in a deal Wagner made with Spelling back in the early ’70s. According to BBC News, Wagner and his now-late wife, the actress Natalie Wood, agreed to appear together in a 1973 teleflick called The Affair (produced by Spelling and Leonard Goldberg), partly in exchange for an interest in “five further TV shows.” “If ABC agreed to produce a series pilot based on one of those ideas, Wagner and Wood were to receive one-half the net profits derived from the ‘exploitation of all ancillary, music and subsidiary rights ... in connection with’ the ‘right to exhibit photoplays of the series,’” reports the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, a Los Angeles business newspaper. “One of the concepts was for a series called ‘Harry’s Angels,’ later renamed ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ The series ran for five years.”

However, the California State Appeals Court finally ruled this week that “the unambiguous language of the contract supported Columbia Pictures’ argument that Wagner had no rights in the films.” (To read the ruling, click here.) Wagner has reason to be upset about this decision: The first Sony film, Charlie’s Angels (2000), brought in “more than $125 million at the U.S. box office and grossed over $260 million worldwide,” according to Wikipedia, while its sequel, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), is said to have grossed $100.9 million at American box offices. Fifty-percent of those receipts is ... well, more than I’m likely to bank in my lifetime.

(Hat tip to Lee Goldberg.)

Say Good-bye, Aaron Spelling

Aaron Spelling, the prolific television producer who gave viewers such crime series as Charlie’s Angels, Hart to Hart, Vega$, Starsky and Hutch, and The Mod Squad, passed away on Friday after suffering a stroke on June 18. He was 83 years old.

Reared in one of the more decrepit corners of Dallas, Texas, Spelling joined the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and after returning home, attended Southern Methodist University, where he composed and directed plays. Post-graduation, he sought acting jobs in New York and Los Angeles, appearing in episodes of Dragnet, Gunsmoke, and I Love Lucy. However, following his marriage (the second of three) to actress Carolyn Jones, who later played Morticia Addams in The Addams Family, Spelling began to make a bigger name for himself as a TV writer and producer. Teaming up with actor-producer Dick Powell, he created the series Burke’s Law (1963-1966), which starred the ever-suave Gene Barry as a wealthy LAPD chief of detectives who was chauffered between clue-packed crime scenes in a Rolls-Royce. A few years later, he scored big with The Mod Squad (1968-1973), a police drama featuring a racially mixed trio of “hip” young crime-fighters. Spelling went on to create some of the best-remembered crime shows of the 1970s and ’80s, including those mentioned before, as well as The Rookies, S.W.A.T., Matt Houston, and T.J. Hooker (1982-1985), the last of which starred William Shatner and a seductive young Heather Locklear as street cops. Over this last decade, he was behind both the regrettably short-lived Buddy Faro (1998, starring Dennis Farina) and Kingpin, a 2003 dramatic mini-series about Mexican drug-traffickers.

He was responsible, too, for a wide range of non-crime serials, such as Dynasty, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Hotel, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Charmed, and 7th Heaven. As every obituary of this writer-producer seems to note, there was a time during the ’70s when Spelling had so many series running on the ABC-TV network, that folks joked about its initials standing for “Aaron’s Broadcasting Company.”

Chided for having introduced “jiggle TV” (a reference to the skimpy attire and deliberate sexual objectifying of Charlie’s Angels), Spelling sought to counter his low-brow reputation with a few TV series and movies-of-the-week that boasted greater social merit. He won Emmy Awards for both Day One (1981), about the dawn of nuclear warfare, and the AIDS-related movie And the Band Played On (1993). Spelling was also behind Family, a 1976-1980 drama series that built around particularly topical issues, such as breast cancer, teen sex, and alcoholism. But it seemed inevitably to be his cheesier, commercial ventures that made him the most money--enough to build the largest single-family home in California, a $12 million, 123-room mansion in Los Angeles’ Holmby Hills, complete with bowling alley, swimming pool, gymnasium, tennis court, screening room, and a quartet of two-car garages. And, much to his dismay, those projects rarely stirred the admiration of critics. “There is good and there is bad Spelling,” the Los Angeles Times Magazine proclaimed in 1996, “but there is never great Spelling, only degrees of terribleness.”

Not exactly the sort of inscription a guy wants forever plastered on his frickin’ headstone.

READ MORE: “TV Mogul Spun Fluff Into Gold,” by Brian Lowry (Los Angeles Times); “Aaron Spelling, 83; Prolific TV Hit Maker,” by Adam Bernstein (The Washington Post); “Aaron Spelling, Prolific TV Producer, Dies at 83,” by Bill Carter (The New York Times).