Can Charlie 's Angels escape the remake curse?

Despite the wretched fates of recent Knight Rider and Bionic Woman remakes, tenacious TV execs keep attempting to revamp old shows for a millennial audience. In Charlie 's Angels, the latest rebirth (premiering Thursday at 10 pm on ABC), actresses Minka Kelly, Rachel Taylor, and Annie Ilonzeh step into the butt-kicking, private-investigator shoes of Farrah Fawcett and Co. By most accounts, it doesn 't go well: Critics are already proclaiming the straightforward series "offensively bland" and "DOA (dumb on arrival)." Is Charlie 's Angels doomed to suffer the TV remake curse? Yep. Especially with writing this bad: The new crimefighting trio is burdened by "comically bad writing," says David Hinckley at the New York Daily News. When a perceptive kidnap victim remarks, "You don 't look like cops," the girls respond: "We ' re not. We 're Angels." This stiffly delivered repartee is better suited for a "dialogue balloon in a comic book" than a primetime series.