Angel (1960 TV series)

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Angel
Format	Sitcom
Starring	Annie Fargé Marshall Thompson Doris Singleton Don Keefer
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	33
Production
Running time	30 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	CBS
Picture format	Black and white
Original run	October 6, 1960 – May 10, 1961
External links
IMDb profile

Angel is a 33-episode CBS sitcom in the 1960-1961 season about a pretty young scatterbrained Frenchwoman, Angelique "Angel" Smith, played by Annie Fargé (pronounced far-ZHAY), who comes to the United States and marries a young architect, John Smith, portrayed by Marshall Thompson (1925-1992). Angel, with her distinct French accent, gets into various problems with the culture, language, and procedures in her new country.^[1] Though it had much less slapstick comedy, Angel was somewhat akin to two other CBS sitcoms, the already concluded Lucille Ball's I Love Lucy and the then newly-premiered Cara Williams and Harry Morgan series Pete and Gladys, a spinoff of CBS's successful December Bride, starring Spring Byington.

Angel was broadcast at 9 p.m. Eastern on Thursday evenings between October 6, 1960, and May 10, 1961. It switched to Wednesdays at the same time for the summer reruns. Segments included "Voting Can Be Fun" (when the Smith home was turned into a voter precinct), "Angel's Temper", "The Valedictorian", "The Dowry", "The Joint Bank Account", "The Driving Lesson", "The French Lesson", "The Trusting Wife", and the concluding episode, "The Trailer". In the latter, Angel thinks that she has won a house trailer but was instead agreeing to make payments on the vehicle. John tries to get out of the contract, and then the company sends a model more extravagant than Angel had unwittingly agreed to purchase.^[2]

The series costarred Doris Singleton as Angel's sympathetic friend Susie and Don Keefer as Susie's husband George, somewhat like the Ethel and Fred roles of I Love Lucy.^[3]

The competititon included two other sitcoms, Fred MacMurray's first season of My Three Sons, which went on to a twelve-year run, first on ABC and then CBS, and Bachelor Father, starring John Forsythe, Noreen Corcoran, and Sammee Tong, then in its last year on NBC, but having been on all three networks during its total five-year run from 1957-1962. Angel followed the final season of Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater and preceded what turned out to have been the last of the three-year run of The Ann Sothern Show, which had been highly rated in its two earlier years. ^[4].

When CBS announced early in 1961 that Angel had been cancelled because of low ratings, Time magazine suggested that at least the talented Fargé should be "salvaged from the wreckage" for another enterprise.^[5] Earlier, Time had commented that Fargé "triumphantly resists being merely Lucille Ball with a French accent. She is easily the brightest newcomer to situation comedy—small, pert, winsome, and somehow giving the impression of being attractively feathered."^[6]

Fargé (age unavailable) did little acting after Angel, but Thompson, the brother-in-law of actor Richard Long starred in the mid-1960s CBS series Daktari about a veterinarian in Africa.

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