Fargé portrayed Angelique "Angel" Smith, a pretty, young scatterbrained Frenchwoman who comes to the United States and marries a young architect, John Smith, played by Marshall Thompson. With her distinct French accent, Angel gets into various problems with the culture, language, and procedures in her new country. In the episode "The Dentist", for instance, she learns she must pay when late for her appointment with the dentist. Although it had much less slapstick comedy, Angel was somewhat akin to two other CBS sitcoms, I Love Lucy and Pete and Gladys, a spin-off of CBS's December Bride. The series co-starred Doris Singleton as Angel's sympathetic friend Susie and Don Keefer as Susie's husband George, roughly akin to the Ethel and Fred roles from I Love Lucy. Co-sponsored by General Foods and Johnson's Wax, Angel was initially broadcast at 9 pm Eastern on Thursday evenings between October 6, 1960, and April 13, 1961. On April 19, it moved to Wednesdays in the same time slot for the remaining first-run episodes, and then summer reruns.
Reception and cancellation
The series' competition included two other sitcoms, My Three Sons, which went on to a 12-year run, first on ABC and then CBS, and Bachelor Father, then in its last year on NBC, but having been on all three networks during its total five-year run from 1957 to 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. When CBS announced early in 1961 that Angel had been canceled because of low ratings, Timemagazine suggested that at least the talented Fargé should be "salvaged from the wreckage" for another enterprise. 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." Despite the good personal reviews, Fargé left U.S. television within a few years for a career in France, where she was often credited as "Annie Fargue".
