Unlikely TV Crossover Episodes - Charlie’s Angels – The Love Boat

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1979’s two part Love Boat Angels episode of Charlie’s Angels was the debut story for Tiffany Welles (Shelley Hack) as the replacement Angel after the departure of Sabrina (Kate Jackson). The excuse for the girl detectives cruising on the Sea Princess (The Love Boat) was that an international art thief, played by Bert Convy, was among the passengers. In the spirit of the Love Boat premise that anyone travelling on The Sea Princess falls in love, Angel Cris (Cheryl Ladd) fell in love with the art thief, who turned out to be a modern day Robin Hood, who was using money from art heists to fund his work smuggling people into the West over the Iron Curtain. He and an increasingly collaborative sympathetic Cris found themselves pursued by more dangerous crooks with the other Angels coming to the rescue. Both Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat were Aaron Spelling productions and The Love Boat always used a real cruise ship (actually two, the Pacific Princess and The Island Princess) for location filming. A great deal of what we saw, such as the swimming pool deck scenes involved studio filming too. It made sense for the studios to double up use of the ships they had access to for the Charlie’s Angels plot, so why not let the cast of each show interact too? Except they barely did interact. The male crewmen got to see the bikini clad Angels walking by or lounging on deck-chairs and ogled them approvingly. The crew greeted the Angels as they embarked. The ever-grinning barman served them drinks, Gopher assisted with luggage and then it quickly became pure Charlie’s Angels. Much of the action happened during shore leave rather than on the ship itself. The episode really ought to have put its new Angel at the heart of the story rather than Cris. Shelley Hack was dumped by the end of the season and never really got a chance to show what she could do beside her established co-stars. It was an odd idea to put a thrilling crime drama, complete with a spectacular robbery and a well filmed tense underwater fight scene against a comedy-romance show backdrop. After showing The Love Boat regulars in the first fifteen minutes of ship time, the familiar crew were totally absent. Arthur Chappell