And Next Season?

Short of certified juvenile delinquents, few adolescents have ever absorbed such deserved and damning criticism. All summer long the twelve-year-old television industry has been clobbered by critics and cold-shouldered by advertisers. Last week it took its worst tongue lashing yet. TV, reported Variety in its annual radio-television review and preview, is in such sad shape that the tube lights are going out in living rooms all across the land.

"If the past season was a dud," asks Variety, "what will the next season be like?" Answer: awful.

The success of ABC as a third network, competing with NBC and CBS for sponsors,' has led to all sorts of secret deals and cut-rate shenanigans, as the TV pitchmen try to sell their big fall programs. But the shortage of the advertising dollar, argues West Coast TV Writer Carroll Carroll, one Variety contributor, is not half so serious as the shortage of talent. "There is not enough creative brainpower alive today to keep the TV monster intelligently or even satisfactorily nourished. The result is that TV has become the world's No. 1 copycat." Most of the new programs are merely duplicates of shows that had good ratings last year--notably quizzes (see above).

"As that once promising baby, television, moves straight from infancy into senility," adds TV Writer Dale Wasserman, the writers themselves must bear the brunt of the blame. "Sometimes I dream of a truly controversial play--oh, say, one in defense of intolerance. A fine case could be, made. Think of the fun of galvanizing the sleepy, postprandial audience, goading it into sitting up and saying: 'What? What was that?' But this demands extraordinary effort. Thinking takes work . . . Thus the quick-and-lucrative looks better every day."

Of all the contributors to Variety's review, only the network brass sounds satisfied. "I have read about how the next season's television schedules will be 'stale and pedestrian,' " says NBC President Robert Kintner. "If by these words the critics mean that programs that the public likes will return to television, then the schedules will be stale and pedestrian.

"I have never known a period in television when all three networks were more receptive to considerations of new programing ideas . . . However, as a former reporter, I can testify that no matter what the networks do next season, it makes bigger headlines to report that the programing is 'stale and pedestrian' and that business is not too good."

According to Variety, the biggest headlines are also the most-accurate.

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