Angels, Assassins, and the Evolution of Female Power in American Television

Historically, television’s depictions of female agency and expressions of violence by women have been limited to the fringes, often initiated as part of a grander plan led by a male protagonist. This theme of male control over female actions runs deep, tying into television’s traditional role in representing, and thus reinforcing, patriarchal structures that only made room for women as supporting characters. The original version of the American crime drama Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981) illustrates mid to late- twentieth-century patriarchal views of women in a time of male network dominance and the early women’s liberation movement. The show follows the missions of an extremely attractive three-woman band of crime fighters as they do the bidding of an unseen male presence named Charlie. In contrast, the BBC show Killing Eve (2018-present) that aired 42 years prior to Charlie’s Angels possesses similar spy-themes, while differing greatly in its depiction of female agency. This contrast primarily manifests in the complicated relationship between the leading women, an MI6 agent named Eve (Sandra Oh), and a skilled assassin by the name of Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Killing Eve reveals a marked shift in representations of female power within television narratives while highlighting the impact of post-modern feminism on television as a whole. The evolution of the feminist movement in America brought about a dramatic transformation in the stories we see portrayed on television as evidenced in the stark contrast between the narratives and depictions of female agency in Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve.

Beginning with a close examination of the pilot episode of Charlie’s Angels, a wealthy and unseen man by the name of Charlie tasks his team of three skilled and attractive female spies with the first of their endless missions, which they accomplish with flying colors for the first time in a continued pattern of barely differentiable plots, all of which result in Charlie’s praise. The original show starred Farrah Fawcett as Jill Munroe, Jaclyn Smith as Kelly Garrett, and Kate Jackson as Sabrina Duncan. The show makes little effort to set apart the personalities of the three women, relying heavily on their difference in hair color as differentiation. As Michele Hilmes of Only Connect: a Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States states, “[the show’s] gorgeous, sexy, self-reliant, and capable heroines rescued themselves and others from danger, and often made fools out of men. They fired guns, effectively, and frequently told piggish, dismissive men where to go” (305). Despite their homogeneity, the angels operated as an entity, lightly defying gender norms and consistently proving their efficacy and abilities.

Charlie’s Angels’ moderate female empowerment themes make up part of the appeal for the show’s female audience while broadening that appeal through the overt sexualization of the three central characters. It is precisely this dichotomy that made the show a widespread success and allowed it to draw an impressively large audience. As Hilmes notes, “[the angels] remained sexually objectified and under the control of a father figure, and the show never tried to be realistic but remained in the realm of fantasy” (305). While the angels are the ones driving the narrative forward, their efforts are all extensions of Charlie’s plan, while their every move is performed with an awareness of the male gaze.

Yet while many of the themes of the show center on Charlie’s patriarchal presence, it is worth noting that the agency, comradery, and power granted to the angels’ characters was unheard of at the time, showing signs of the beginnings of modern-day feminism, or “lip gloss feminism” as Rosie White of Lipgloss Feminists: Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman describes. Elana Levine describes this further in Remaking Charlie’s Angels as “the relationship between the newly visible feminism of the women’s liberation movement and the conventional sex symbol femininity produced by Hollywood.” Charlie’s Angels exemplifies a specific moment in time at the convergence of burgeoning progressive feminist ideals that had begun to fuel stories of female empowerment while pointing to a closer examination of women’s ownership of their own sexuality.

Charlie’s Angels can be seen as a stepping stone towards a more progressive feminist reality, being born from the “old” while influenced by the “new” social movements. As Sara Evans accounts in Women’s Liberation: Seeing the Revolution Clearly, “Women’s Liberation was a radical, multiracial feminist movement that grew directly out of the New Left, civil rights, antiwar, and related freedom movements of the 1960s… After 1970 ‘women’s liberation’ was a label appropriated by a very wide variety of groups of women who may have had little or no connection to its originators” (140). The impact of the complex cultural themes of Charlie’s Angels time adds complexity and nuance to the show’s underpinning dynamics. As Hilmes explains, “the show [Charlie’s Angels] ‘exploited, perfectly, the tensions between antifeminism and feminism’ (205). White digs further, noting that “the success of series such as Charlie’s Angels… is indicative of the popular media’s ability to incorporate feminist issues and language for consumerist ends” (88). In a similar vein, White makes the case that “Charlie’s Angels tapped into contemporary concerns regarding race and gender. That is not to say that a liberal ethos was behind such programs, rather that these were shows that people would watch in large numbers’’ (83). This commercial strategy proved highly successful on behalf of the show’s network, ABC, leading to Charlie’s Angels airing for a total of five seasons.

In full contrast to Charlie’s Angels lightweight feminist underpinnings, BBC’s Killing Eve represents a full embrace of post-feminist themes, while putting forth a narrative rooted in a mature feminist movement. The pilot episode of the show paints a vibrant picture of two complex female characters, both women complete with distinctively defiant personalities and anti-patriarchal sentiments. Eve Plastri, the MI6 agent, is a sharp and strong-headed Asian woman in her thirties living in London who is obsessed with female assassins. In the pilot episode, Eve’s curiosity lands her a job on the MI6 team as a by-product of botching an investigation while intently following Villanelle, the skilled, quirky, and impulsive female assassin and the soon-to-be object of Eve’s obsession. The two women are immediately transfixed with each other after their first chance encounter and proceed to intently follow one another in an increasingly dangerous game of cat-and-mouse over the course of the following two seasons. The stakes and body count only grow higher on both sides of the violent and elaborate game played between Eve and Villanelle. It is television shows such as Killing Eve that are emblematic of today’s abundance of quality narrative-driven shows that tell authentic stories defining the female experience in all of its inner and outer complexity.

In comparing Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve, it is worth first contextualizing the contrast in the titles of the two shows. While Charlie’s Angels focuses the attention and ownership on an unseen male presence, Killing Eve’s title flips the focus and points the attention exclusively on the show’s female lead, Eve. As Higashi further explains, “The possessive, “Charlie’s,” indicates that the discourse is his and that the women are in his employ-money talks” (51). Meanwhile, Killing Eve’s title emphasizes both Eve, as well as the killing and violence that characterizes the show’s narrative. This stark difference in title epitomizes the contrast in ownership and agency over oneself as a woman in Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve.

While similarly led by strong female characters marked by high intellect and prowess, marked differences become immediately apparent when analyzing the narrative differences between Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve. These differentiators primarily lie in the shift from watching women enact violence in the interest of advancing a man’s plan, as seen in Charlie’s Angels, and viewing women committing violent acts for their own interest, as seen in Killing Eve. However, there is complexity to be examined in the case of Killing Eve. While Villanelle operates autonomously and frequently disobeys orders, she still has male handlers that dictate her targets, revealing her lack of full independence from the patriarchy. Similarly, another notable contrast between the two shows can be found in who is behind the camera dictating the narrative. As Sumiko Higashi states in “Charlie’s Angels”: Gumshoes in Drag, “The program’s producers, writers, and directors are men, and the Angels are the employees of a man who sets the perimeters of their existence. Consequently, women assume male acts, postures, and speech as detectives” (51). In contrast, Killing Eve’s production crew is predominantly made up of women and led by the female director Shannon Murphy.

It is also interesting to examine the differences between Killing Eve and Charlie’s Angels’ female stars. Both Eve and Villanelle are remarkably flawed and defiant characters, consistently failing to follow orders, and frequently showing signs of underlying psychological issues. In comparison, it is Charlie’s Angels’ lack of defiance or even awareness of the systems that confine them that makes the three indistinguishable women feel so blase and two-dimensional, pointing to their characters being the result of the feminist liberation movement not being fully reflected on the screen at the time of the show’s being created. Consequently, it is precisely the aforementioned qualities of imperfection that make Killing Eve’s protagonists feel authentic to its audience, and also what situates the show’s themes solidly in the realm of modern feminist television. As Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber describe in Independent women: from film to television, “in centering “imperfect” and “vulnerable” women who are openly struggling with the commands of gendered neoliberalism that structure twenty-first-century life, these representations push back — to an extent — against the postfeminist expectation for women to be resilient above all else” (1). Watching Eve and Villanelle struggle against the external forces that confine them differentiates their characters as independent, feminist individuals while shedding light on the patriarchal system in which they operate.

However, despite the blatant differences between the two shows, it is worth noting their similarities. This viewpoint poses the question of whether Killing Eve could have come to be without Charlie’s Angels serving as a stepping stone in television’s depictions of women, especially as seen through the lens of the female spy genre. As Rosie White made clear in her book Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture, “Female spies are particularly significant for feminist criticism not only because these characters are strong and capable women who challenge traditional gender binaries, but also because their ability to adopt new identities mirrors the notion of gender as performance. Because spies are always acting, in other words, female spies provide a means of acknowledging and potentially criticizing the standards of femininity that women are constantly expected to imitate” (876). In this way, Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve bear a marked similarity in acknowledging the act of performance that they are playing out as a woman in different cultural moments. We see this dichotomy play out in both the limited range of emotions expressed by Charlie’s Angels, as well as Eve’s visible struggles against the female and male MI6 powers that attempt to tame and limit her.

The similarities between the two shows can also be found in their reflection of the socio-economic context of the time, specifically the social impacts of feminism’s evolution. Diving deeper, White asserts that “Women spies in a variety of media… maps the construction and reconstruction of femininity as a shifting, multiple discourses. Women as spies in popular culture are read as commentaries on specific temporal and cultural femininities… aligning them with other indicators of cultural anxiety about femininity, such as the femme fatale and the New Woman” (1). The workings of the female spy genre are complex and highly variable according to the cultural context in which it is written, as explicitly seen in Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve’s characters’ authenticity to their time. However, the most notable and obvious similarity between the shows can be found in their narratives being led by strong female characters. As Jane Arthurs of Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama states in relation to female dramas such as Killing Eve, “A focus on women as protagonists, whose actions drive the narrative, replaced the marginal and narrow range of roles available previously to women characters in these genres” (83).

The dichotomy between Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve’s narratives, themes, and characters is emblematic of the inherent tension between ingrained social constructs and progressive ideals. Furthermore, “women in television programs like Charlie’s Angels have rarely been just women… Women’s roles remain stereotypes necessary for the development of myths about women in the survival of a sexist ideology” (55). As seen in Charlie’s Angels and Killing Eve, the empowerment of women continues to evolve in television, and it is interesting to imagine what shape female television characters will take in the next span of 42 years.

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