Police Woman

Okay,so I read two comments made about Angie Dickinson's classic 70's show Policewoman. The year this show came on in 1974,I was about nine years old.The year it when off the air I was 13 years old in 1978. I was fascinated by what I saw in the first two seasons of the show since Dickinson's character was always going undercover or in some of the episodes bounded and gagged,drugged or even at times kidnapped and it was always her male counterparts who were cops themselves,one of them played by Earl Holliman to save her but there were times that she mostly caught the bad guy(or in some instances they got away)who was running after them in high heels and those big ass shoes they had back then. The show premiered the same time as James Garner's Rockford Files and another cop show Police Story who were on the same network.This show had a lot going for it since the first two seasons of the show were compelling,but by the time the shows final two seasons came,it lost interest with its audience,and it was taken off the air by the executives at NBC-TV(which ran the series),and almost sent Angie Dickinson into a unknown abyss for more than 20 years after the original broadcast. The last time this show was seen was on New York's WOR-TV back in the 80's,and lost in space ever since.

This started a movement in TV crime shows where females weren't just the passive victims of male dominated fantasy crimes. This lady hit back. And what a punch she packed. An action packed series that introduced us to some great supporting characters and kept mums as well as dads on the edge of their seat. Angie Dickinson never camped it up (as much as you couldn't in the 1970's) It was as gritty as the execs would allow. Despite the pilot episode being called Police Story - it was obvious from the outset who the star of the show was.

In its prime I had reached the grand old age of 10 - whereby this was the first adult TV series I was allowed to stay up and watch. Thanks Mom & Dad

After I graduated from college, had a job, I'd sit in my single-girl's apartment, watching this show about a single woman working. In 1977-1978, the network would show Policewoman, Kojak and another cop show after the late night news. Angie was right up there with the boys. That pretty much sums up her image. Pepper liked being one of the guys. The media focused on her sexy qualities, especially the first half of the first season, but Pepper really evolved into a great character. The topics were often ahead of their time. I remember one episode that began with Pepper and her boss watching that French dance act where the man slaps the woman around. Pepper didn't like it. Darned if a new neighbor in her apartment complex stops by, showing signs of being slapped around. Spousal abuse! This was before Farrah Fawcett starred in the TV movie, "The Burning Bed", the TV movie that brought this issue to the mainstream. In two other episodes, Pepper supported the wife or ex-wife of one of her coworkers diagnosed with cancer. The '70's were a decade when women ceased to hide their medical ailments, including disfiguring ones like breast cancer. These episodes showed that the Police Woman supported women as well as men. Back to Pepper's apartment, it was one a city employee could afford, unlike the spectacular, designer decorated living quarters one usually sees like in Will & Grace, Living Single, etc.

This definitely was the first cop show to feature a female in the lead. Angie Dickinson was quite convincing as the tough no nonsense Pepper Anderson and Earl Holliman was great as her fellow officer Bill Crowley. Within a few years, however, this show would later be upstaged by the more light-hearted "Charlie's Angels" and would later inspire that other female cop show "Cagney and Lacey". Too bad they don't show this on television anymore. It is definitely a lost classic.

Hi, again, folks. It's me, Michael Reiter. Listen, This time it's about Angie Dickinson in Police Woman. I saw the show back in the seventies, when I was about 11 or so. By the time it was cancelled, I was 15 or so. By then, I was old enough to be titillated by beautiful women. . . Of course I am still that way now, but what the hey? Enjoy them when you get them. Any how, When they made this show, It was still the fashion for women to wear Polyester Leisure suits or some combination there of with tee shirts and or mock t-neck sweaters. That and a London Fog or worthy imitator, Lilly Trenchcoat. Those were the days, my friends. Onwards; Those were also the days of political Incorrectness, in every thing and seen every where. Given that It was just a scant four to eight years after the end of the sixties, when goofy fashions and goofier social behaviour/mores. I read in the preceding comment that there was a concern for political correctness by feminists over the "erotic" nature of the first season; Good God, Even then. The seventies were a fun and peaceful, wonderfully erotic and titillating time unless you happened to be unlucky enough to encounter some of the girls in your class, who were rabid Police Woman Fans. Than you were careful or you got hissed, yowled and cursed at.

Of course, during that time, actresses were bound and gagged, or what have you during the course of a story regularly and nobody questioned anything, because every body knew the difference between right, wrong and the ridiculously fine but obvious line between fact and fiction. What happened to those days?

Ah, Me.