Premi

Pastore's Complaint. (Passb't rsbez K msb'plant), n. A phobia against violence and sex on television, exacerbated by recent disturbances in American society and by the Noxzema "take-it-all-off" commercial. [Named after Rhode Island Senator John O. Pastore.]

JOHN PASTORE is chairman of the powerful Senate Communications Subcommittee, and when he has a complaint, the television industry has a sympathetic reaction verging on panic. As early as last may, Michael Dann, CBS senior vice president for programming, warned a national meeting of his network's station managers that the political atmosphere discouraged innovation and that the 1969-70 series would be "the same crap as last."

After viewing twelve of the season's 23 new shows, one concludes that Dann's foreboding is all too true. Rarely has a season seemed so regressive. The stars are primarily safe and established, the formats are past their prime, and most of the scripts are an insult to intelligence. The fault is certainly not all Pastore's; the television industry is completely capable of hitting bottom all by itself. And if a people gets the television it deserves, the American people should be ashamed of themselves.

Unprecedentedly, not one of those 23 new series is a western or an old-fashioned cops-and-robbers show. Instead, there is a swing back to the situation comedy and, for action, to the less lethal lawyers, teachers and, especially, doctors. Sex is out, but procreation is certainly in. The eight new situation comedies will introduce at least eleven kids among them, and some of the holdover shows are hugely pregnant. Samantha in Bewitched will bear her second child in November; Agents 86 and 99 in Get Smart are expecting twins.

DRAMATIC SERIES

Perhaps the opening week's most promising premiere is Room 222 (ABC), in which Lloyd Haynes plays a black Mr. Novak, a masterful and empathic teacher of history in an urban high school. Supporting characters include an iconoclastic Jewish principal (Michael Constantine) who openly hates PTA meetings, and a stereotypical, wide-eyed, white apprentice teacher (Karen Valentine) capable of telling Haynes, "I think it's so significant that you're colored." Except for such sappy moments, Room 222 may prove to be more good-humoredly wise on the problems of school prejudice and board-of-education bureaucracy than that overpraised book and film Up the Down Staircase.

The drama of Man v. Disease is as old as Hippocrates, but it still works --witness Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, The Nurses. And, this season, witness CBS's Medical Center. One minor problem seems to be that the scriptwriters are running out of diseases. In this week's premiere, for example, O. J. Simpson plays a guest role as an All-America college halfback desperately trying to suppress symptoms of a mystery ailment lest it jeopardize a $500,000 pro offer. (A nice bit of casting, that, although in real life O.J. got an estimated $350,000 from the Buffalo Bills.) The rest of the program rang changes on the versus pattern: Young Doctor Chad Everett v. Old Doctor James Daly; modern technology v. pheochromocytoma, of all things. Simpson, incidentally, seemed headed for recovery.

The medical generation gap was even more dramatically dominant in the generally engrossing premiere of NBC's The Bold Ones, which starred E. G. Marshall, David Hartman and John Saxon. In this case, the old-school practitioner, played flawlessly by Guest Star Pat Hingle, refused to declare a dying patient legally dead, thus exasperating an overeager young surgeon (Saxon) in search of a kidney to transplant. Hingle, it turned out, didn't have all those gray hairs for nothing; the dying patient miraculously improved. Bold Ones is a trilogy series, running in three-week cycles of lawyer stories, police dramas and medical shows.

A typical one-man itinerant series is . . . Then Came Bronson (NBC), a motorcycle version of Route 66. The star, Michael Parks, 31, has for several years been called Hollywood's next James Dean or next Marlon Brando, probably because he doesn't talk much. In the premiere, Parks laconically brought an autistic child to his senses in a scenic Wyoming camp for disturbed children and then varoomed off, presumably toward a less tearjerking episode.

Saddest of all the new drama series is Bracken's World (NBC), a sort of Peyton Place set in a movie lot that ABC had the sense to reject in 1963 and CBS gave up on in 1965. Bracken, a Howard Hughes-like studio chief, is never seen, and the day-to-day operation of the studio is handled by his executive secretary (Eleanor Parker). All told, the series includes eleven running parts and more cliches per foot than any other film in memory. Among them: a young contract player who comes on as a kind of poor man's Michael Parks; a starlet who will do anything for a part ("One thing I'm sure of is nobody can give you what I can"); a stage mother who says with a straight face that wearing a scarf that was the wrong color one day "cost me the part that made Rita Hayworth." It is theoretically possible that a shoddier and more tiresome series than Bracken will emerge in the second week of premieres, but it is almost inconceivable.

SITUATION COMEDIES

No one can say that the makers of this year's new situation comedies didn't innovate. They invented the instant rerun. NBC's The Debbie Reynolds Show, for example, is an instant rerun of I Love Lucy, and small wonder; it is the handiwork of Lucy Producer Jess Oppenheimer. The only reason Debbie doesn't scheme to get into show business like her husband is that Debbie's husband Lew (Don Chastain) happens to be in the newspaper business. The only reason Debbie does not pose as a drummer auditioning for a band is that she happens to be posing as a caddie snooping on a politician's golf game. And the only reason it doesn't work is that Debbie isn't half the clown that Lucy is and the initial script was half-clowning and halfwit.

Once The Bill Cosby Show gets rolling on NBC, it promises to be an instant rerun of Our Miss Brooks, or maybe Mr. Peepers. Cosby is supposed to play a high school coach, although in last week's premiere he got nowhere near a school, a gym or a teenager. Instead, he jogged what might have been a good five-minute Cosby monologue into a 30-minute yawn about mistaken identity and false arrest.

ABC's Courtship of Eddie's Father is an instant rerun of Julia. Bill Bixby, the ersatz nephew of My Favorite Martian, plays the widowed parent, and an accomplished seven year old named Brandon Cruz is the son searching for a mom --any old mom. By happy circumstance, Brandon is far less objectionable than Diahann Carroll's TV offspring, and he even seems to like his father. The show also appropriates a few gimmicks from contemporary cinema--stop-action photography, voice-over conversation and background bursts of rock music--but Eddie remains one of those programs that show the inherent dangers of borrowing from the neighbors.

My World and Welcome to It might have been the only original comedy on TV this fall. The idea was to base the series on James Thurber's cartoons, using them to illustrate some of his fables and weave the make-believe into the life of a cartoonist played by William Windom. But as the barbs were dulled, what was left took on a distinct resemblance to Father Knows Best.

The Governor and J.J. is CBS's instant rerun of Slattery's People, with overtones of My Little Margie. It is heartwarming only for its familiarity: Dan Dailey is not only a struggling public servant, but also a widowed and overweight father who must bridge the chasm between himself and his 23-year-old daughter J.J. (Julie Sommars). The only praiseworthy thing about the show is that CBS, following an enlightened new policy, allowed it--and their other shows --to be seen and reviewed by the press in advance of air time--a practice that NBC and ABC refuse to adopt.

VARIETY

A major gamble of the new season is the Jim Nabors Hour (CBS). Nabors, who, as Corner Pyle, USMC, had the second-highest-rated show last season, is venturing into variety. Those who can stand Jim will discover that he has a big baritone voice in addition to the familiar grits-eating grin and the stage-rustic accent. For those who can't, the Jim Nabors Hour will be only as entertaining as its guests.

A quasi-new variety hour is The Andy Williams Show (NBC), a Nielsen success that began in 1962 and ran until Andy wearied of the routine in 1967. The current show is taped in a new theater in the round. Everything else about the show is still inoffensively square.

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