Charlie was a mainframe

A perfectly reasonable theory about two ridiculous television shows

There is a specific kind of television that only exists because three networks were throwing everything at the wall in the late seventies and had no idea which parts were going to stick. A talking car. A boat where everybody falls in love. Three women who solve crimes for a voice in a box. Nobody was building a franchise. Nobody had a five year plan. They were making forty-eight minutes of something by Friday, and if it worked they made more of it, and if it did not they made a different thing about a helicopter.

I have been chewing on one of those shows for a while, and then I started chewing on a second one, and the two of them have gotten stuck together in my head in a way I cannot shake loose.

Charles Townsend was never a man. He was a computer, he belonged to Knight Industries, and the Angels were the field trial.

Nobody at Spelling-Goldberg ever called anybody at Universal about this. There is no shared universe here in any legal sense, no crossover, no rights deal, no handshake in a parking garage. What there is instead is a shape that two commercial television shows arrived at six years apart without consulting each other, and I have not been able to put it down since.

Part one: what we are even talking about

If you were not around for either of these, or if you were around but were four years old…