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.
