She Spies
A fairly blatant copy of “Charlie’s Angels” (I didn’t create it so don’t sue, ghost of Aaron Spelling!), this syndicated action-adventure series got off to a rough start and my friends Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn were hired to turn it into a comedy; they brought me along.
It was great fun – we got to write stage directions like “She spin-kicks him in the gut.” We tried some unusual things for what was ostensibly still a gorgeous-girl-spies show: lots of rapid-fire banter (a Reno & Osborn specialty), dream sequences, dancing.
And light opera. When I learned actress Kristen Miller had a musical-theater background, I had her character kidnapped
and injected with sodium pentathol, but instead of spilling sec-
rets she sings an aria from “The Pirates of Penzance” (right).
The director of that episode, Krishna Rao, had a sly sense of humor. When Kristen asked how to react to the sodium pen-
tathol he said “Well, you know that first rush you get from a
shot of heroin…”
One of my favorite sequences was in that same show, “Betrayal”. Cassie and Shane are told their partner D.D. is selling secrets. Refusing to believe it, they get a surveil-
lance van and follow her to an apartment complex; here’s what the script had next…
