Angie

This show had the longest theme song of any sitcom that I have ever seen!

I remember watching this show every day. This show was as much a part of my childhood as most of the other sitcoms.

The time I watched it was during the summer before I started fifth grade.

The mother on this show is the same mother on Everybody Loves Raymond. She had brown hair back then!

I don't remember much about this show.

I just remember the extremely long theme song.

I can't believe I actually heard a minister quote the lyrics to this theme song almost 20 years later.

I had a bit of a crush on Donna Pescow when I first saw her in Saturday Night Fever, so when Angie premiered in the spring of 1979, I was ecstatic. She was even more gorgeous on this show, and this was a pretty decent sitcom. It also was in the Top 5 for its first few weeks, but unfortunately it only ran about a season and a half. The basic premise was Angie Falco, a waitress at a Philadelphia coffee shop, falls in love with Brad, a pediatrician and one of her regular customers. It's basically a "working-class Cinderella meets her knight in shining armor" story, and they elope when the two families cannot agree on the upcoming wedding details. The show actually changed quite a bit during its short run. After the wedding, Angie still works as a waitress and moves into Brad's lavish mansion, complete with butler. Shortly thereafter, Brad surprises Angie by purchasing the coffee shop and Angie becomes the manager. Not long after that, Angie puts the mansion on the market and they move to a smaller, cozier, but still opulent home (with Brad's office located downstairs). No sooner are they settled in, then Angie sells the coffee shop and purchases a beauty salon, which she manages and where her mother (Doris Roberts, in a role where she truly shines) works after giving up her newsstand job. There was plenty of good acting and well-written comedy here, but the constant changes in a relatively short series life apparently made the regular viewer dizzy (and the "every once in a while" viewer wonder what the hell happened if they missed a couple episodes!). Despite all that I still enjoyed this show and would love to see it make a comeback on TV Land someday, or perhaps be issued as a DVD set.

"Angie" was a program that was doomed to last no more than one season. First of all, it ran on ABC in the late 1970s, which pretty much sealed its fate as a ratings flop. Moreover, it had all of the right elements, in the wrong combination. In a way, the show was very ahead of its time. In another, it had very little new to offer.

Donna Pescow played Angie, a working class Italian-American woman working as a waitress in a Philadelphia Diner, who dreamed of a better life. She was often visited by her "rough around the edges" sister, who criticized her conservative nature, and her smothering mother who criticized her lack of a husband. In the third episode, she married Brad, a regular customer at the diner, only to discover AFTER the wedding that Brad was the heir to a huge family fortune. But her new found wealth didn't keep her from working at the diner, especially after Brad bought her the diner for her birthday. Angie turned her downtown restaurant into a success, while living in her uptown penthouse apartment.

"Angie" had a strong cast. It was well written and it's "working class humor" was right for the times. But the "rags to riches" storyline and slapstick humor did little to set it apart from the sea of sitcoms that filled the airwaves in 1979.

The sitcom was initially the highest-rated new series of 1978-1979 TV series, appearing on schedule in January 1979 (tying with "Mork and Mindy" for that honor). However, unlike the Orsonian goofball, "Angie" was the victim of a massive revamp during its second season and a victim of constant schedule shuffling--moved from night to night, time slot to time slot, repeatedly for months, by ABC until viewers lost interest in searching for it, then abandoned the ship. The only rats here, however, were the ABC executives who, like all network suits, failed to realize the damage that instability does to a potential hit series with immediate high ratings, a lovable heroine, a cast of crazies and the audience. I truly miss this show one-quarter of a century later. Robin Fletcher

What went wrong? Debralee Scott, Donna Pescow, Robert Hays, awesome theme song. Too bad I was too young to truly appreciate the writing and character development. How about a reunion?