The Week in Review

Last year TV was having a crime wave; now it is waiving crime. Many a producer has proved to his dissatisfaction that, with stereotyped plots and persistently uniform characters, crime does not pay. But while a large number of crime shows have been canceled, a select few have survived and even been joined by a handful of new ones.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Sun. 9:30 p.m., CBS) is the naked title of one of the new crime shows, and the movie director with the fine hand for murder and mayhem should be recommendation enough for TV fans of terror and torment. Unhappily, the best part of the show is Hitchcock's own sardonic introductions of the sponsor ("And now for that part of the program you have all been waiting for") and his description of his TV spot (a series of "situation tragedies"). But his play last week was the tired tale about the girl who turns up in Paris during the Exposition with her mother and is terrified when her mother vanishes--whisked away, of course, because she has bubonic plague.

A survivor that continues to race along in a well-worn rut is Dragnet (Thurs. 9 p.m., NBC). Jack Webb's face is still stony, his voice still flat and he still says, "My name's Friday. I'm a cop." Last week he was after a confidence man (and caught him, of course, within the prescribed 26^ minutes). The story, like all Dragnet stories, was authentic. It proved that authenticity is something that a discriminating storyteller can overwork.

Two new crime shows, CBS's Wanted (Thurs. 10:30 p.m.) and The Lineup (Fri. 10 p.m.), follow the Dragnet pattern of sticking to fact, however stranger fiction may be. Wanted told the unhappy story of a sadistic wife-beater and general no-good, who accidentally killed a girl by running her down with his car. After being sentenced to a maximum ten years for manslaughter, he jumped bail and is now WANTED. The deplorable principle of the show was to portray the villain as so abhorrent that all viewers would ride along to the very end having a happy hate fest. The Lineup (starring Tom Tully and Warner Anderson) gets its material from the San Francisco police files, and that is where last week's story of an actor with a leaning toward armed robbery and mystifying disguises ought to remain.

The Vise (Fri. 9:30, NBC) makes no pretense at handling fact, nor does it seem very handy with fiction. It claims to tell stories of "people caught in the jaws of a vise, in a dilemma of their own making." Last week The Vise had a famous English actress meet a married real-estate agent in a small English town. Sample dialogue: "She: I'm in love with you. He: But you have the whole world at your feet. She: But it's you I want." She gets him. But then he gets her. It seems he is worried about his good name, and to keep the actress from talking to his wife, he kills her--which doesn't help his good name any, when he is found out. The Vise describes this resolution as "the inexorable qualities of fate as it closes in on men and women when they attempt to tamper with destiny."

A couple of other crime shows came through with stories equally uninspired. In Appointment with Adventure (Sun. 10 p.m., CBS), an Italian mother (Lili Darvas) broods about the murder of her partisan son by the Germans, but "instead of seeking revenge on the Germans, somewhat irrationally goes after the U.S. soldier who commanded her son's unit. In Justice (Sun. 10:30 p.m., NBC), a schoolteacher is framed by a tart and a fake cop, and pays blackmail until it is about time for the show to end. Then the schoolteacher rebels and the blackmailers get their comeuppance.

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