Was Kate Jackson Fired from ‘Charlie’s Angels’?
Most fans of the TV series Charlie’s Angels know that Kate Jackson exited the show after the third season. Her departure left Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd to welcome a new angel to the Charles Townsend Detective Agency during each of the next two seasons, while the show’s ratings took a serious nosedive. What is uncertain, however, is whether Kate was booted off the show or if she left on her own. Along with Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Kate was one of the original three lovely ladies brought on board to the production. At the time, I think it’s fair to say that she was the biggest star. Fans of daytime television knew her for her work on the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, and after that, Kate found even greater success during prime time in another Aaron Spelling-produced crime drama, The Rookies.
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Because of all that, when Kate was brought on board for what would become Charlie’s Angels, there was no reason to believe that she wouldn’t be the show’s biggest star. As such, at least originally, Kate had the ear of producer Aaron Spelling. In fact, there are those who believe that Kate deserved a co-creator credit on the show due to the fact that it was Kate who came up with the idea that the ladies would be called “angels,” as well as the fact that Charlie would not be seen and only heard through a desktop intercom. When Kate was cast for the show, it was going to be called The Alley Cats, and the three heroines of the program were nothing like Kelly, Jill and Sabrina.
Finally, on March 21, 1976, the Charlie’s Angels pilot film aired on ABC. That particular story focused heavily on Kelly, played by Jaclyn Smith, which was the role that Kate had originally been offered. When the ratings for that movie were off the chart, Spelling and his team knew they had a hit. However, when the show debuted as a weekly series in the fall of 1976, everyone involved in the program quickly became aware that the breakout star was not Kate Jackson or, for that matter, Jaclyn Smith. Instead, it was Mrs. Lee Majors. Yep, she — Farrah Fawcett — was the lady on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
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Farrah was huge. So huge, in fact, that the inevitable salary renegotiation process ultimately led to her departure from the show. She would, of course, return from time to time and make a special appearance, but Jill Monroe was no longer on the show each and every week. So, at the beginning of the second season, a new angel joined the show: Jill’s little sister, Kris, played by Cheryl Ladd. And, wouldn’t you know it, just like that, Cheryl became something of a breakout star as well.
It was during season two that rumors started appearing that Kate was unhappy with the quality of the scripts. I remember an article in the February 18, 1978, issue of TV Guide Magazine where Kate addressed those rumors with journalist Carolyn See. In that article, Kate said this: “I would like to take this opportunity to say that in many ways I have been mistagged by the press. I have been called the difficult one. And I’m not!”
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That said, there are reasons why some folks may have felt like Kate was less than happy with the way things had worked out on Charlie’s Angels. The character of Sabrina was the smart and sensible one of the three angels, and in a way, that made her character less likely to have the same appeal as Jill, Kris or Kelly. But this was a choice that Kate had made because she’d wanted to be treated as more of a serious actress. When you couple that with the fact that Kate was forced by Aaron Spelling to turn down an offer to be in the Oscar-winning film Kramer vs. Kramer, in the role that ultimately went to Meryl Streep, it’s easy to understand why Kate might not have always been happy.
Kate left the show at the end of Season 3. I believe that at some point, Spelling himself may have said that Kate had been fired. But was she really?
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For the record, I personally believe that Kate walked away from the show, and while it’s possible that Aaron Spelling and others weren’t heartbroken, she still left on her own accord. As proof, I offer up the issue of TV Guide Magazine dated December 29, 1979, which had an article about the show by Arnold Hano. That article mentions that, over time, Kate had become increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the scripts. More importantly, the article states “when Jackson asked to be relieved of the remaining time on her contract, Spelling and Goldberg were glad to accommodate her.”
And with that, Kate was gone. A couple of years later, the program would be off the air, but like all good TV shows of that era, it was never truly out of our hearts and minds. And while there have been numerous attempts to reboot the franchise since that time, nothing quite compares to the original Charlie’s Angels, especially those first three seasons.
Kate would go on to find huge success on television again with Scarecrow and Mrs. King, a fun TV show that also starred Bruce Boxleitner. That program, which mixed romance with international espionage, ran on CBS for four seasons during the mid-’80s, and during the show’s entire run, never once did I read or hear about Kate being unhappy. Maybe it was just a Charlie’s Angels thing, after all.
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