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Police Woman DVD cover

Police Woman was an American television police drama starring Angie Dickinson that ran from 1974 to 1978 on NBC. It is considered the first "successful" primetime drama series to feature a woman in the title role, and the first successful series to focus on a female police officer.

In this show, Dickinson portrayed the role of Sgt. Leann "Pepper" Anderson, an undercover agent working in the Criminal Conspiracy Unit of the LAPD. Sergeant William "Bill" Crowley (Earl Holliman) was her immediate superior and "friend with benefits". Pete Royster (Charles Dierkop) and Joe Styles (Ed Bernard) were the other half of the undercover team that investigated everything from murders, to rape and drug crimes. In many episodes, Pepper must go undercover (as a hooker, teacher, nurse, go go dancer, waitress) in order to get close enough to the suspects to gain valuable information that will lead to busts.

The first spin-off of the critically acclaimed Police Story (1973-1978) anthology series, "Police Woman" was so successful in its first season in particular, that during that first Spring and Summer rerun season, the show hit Number One on the ratings charts and in many countries in which it aired. And while pressure caused the tone of the series to become somewhat muted afterwards, its focused and foreboding film noir style subdued from season 2 onward, that early success paved the way for the more fanciful (and more highly-hyped) late-'70s gorgeous-tough-girl programs that followed in its wake, such as Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman, as well as the more-serious Cagney and Lacey in the 1980s. Charismatic Angie Dickinson also pioneered over-40 TV sex-symbolism several years before Dynasty (TV series) ever occurred.

"Police Woman" also caused an avalanche of applications for employment from women to police departments around the United States. Sociologists who have in recent years examined the inspiration for long-term female law enforcement officials to adopt this vocation as their own have been surprised by how often "Police Woman" with Angie Dickinson has been referenced, thus neutralizing more strident feminist arguments from the 1970s that the initial portrait of "Pepper" was too sexualized to be constructive, suggesting that many women viewers found the character's balance of toughness in a male-oriented career with that of "traditional" femininity to be appealing.

• Police Woman at the Internet Movie Database
• tv.com

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