The New Season: Perspiring with Relevance

By Richard Burgheim

What did the Manhattan moguls of prime-time television do with the new season? To hear them talk, they discovered America. Blurb writers who could not spell "relevant" collected severance. Faster than a speeding memo, the West Coast got the word that the medium must have a message: entertainment TV could be cool no more but must be aflame, or at least perspiring, with social consciousness.

The premieres of NBC's and CBS's new shows last week (ABC held its fire until this week) suggest that life in televisionland is no more real this season than it ever was. It is just more earnest. The Beverly Hillbillies lit out for the White House to donate $95 million for pollution control. Lassie taped a show battling the same cause last week. Not to be out-involved, other series are tackling the grievances of migrant workers, the excesses of twitchy-fingered National Guardsmen, the spread of gonorrhea, the need for penal reform, the problems of abortion, and the Senate seniority system.

In self-conscious emulation of the youth they have helped to alienate, TV producers and writers keep proclaiming that their programming has suddenly become "heavy." Yet from the series already unveiled and the scenarios of those due this week, one can only conclude that the heaviness is not in the writers' hearts but in their hands.

Dramatic Series

Most pretentious of the new shows is The Senator, which will appear every third week on NBC's catchall The Bold Ones series. But except for an authoritative performance by Hal Holbrook and a patina of knowingness (terms like "Evans and Novak" popped up without explanation), the premiere was just another action show about an assassination plot.

Four-In-One (NBC) is really four different six-week series. The first, subtitled "McCloud," features old Gunsmoke Deputy Dennis Weaver. The gimmick is that McCloud is a New Mexico marshal assigned temporarily to take lessons from the New York City police. Naturally he turns the tables, proving himself Manhattan's fastest gun, lowest tipper, and the lucky stud who stashes his boots under the sofa of the police commissioner's worldly cousin. It is all hokum, of course, but more entertaining than most of the competition.

The Storefront Lawyers (CBS) and The Interns (CBS) both exploit Mod Squad's multihero angle, but neither one is genuinely mod or engrossing. The three attorneys, one a woman, earn their bread by serving a stuffy Los Angeles firm, and their kicks by melodramatically providing legal aid from a ghetto storefront. The five interns, including one female and one black, churn in a centrifuge of subplots as soaperific as any afternoon hospital show.

Situation Comedies

Andy Griffith and Mary Tyler Moore have been coaxed back to CBS and situation comedy this season, but only for Andy does it seem like a halfway happy return. In Headmaster, the old sheriff of Mayberry smartens up and takes over a coed prep school in California. The series' intention, says Griffith, is "to tell it like it is for the young people while remaining palatable to older audiences." The premiere involved a student who refused to pop "uppers" and "downers" like the rest of the kids. The comic relief, provided mostly by the school's bicep-brained athletic director (Jerry Van Dyke), was a downer. As usual, Griffith came off as platitudinous but rather engaging.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show, on opening night at least, was a disaster for the old co-star of the Dick Van Dyke Show. She plays an inadvertent career girl, jilted by the rounder she put through medical school, and working as a "gofer" at a Minneapolis TV station. Her bosses, a drunken clown of a news director and a narcissistic nincompoop of an anchorman, do an injustice to even the worst of local TV news.

Herschel Bernardi is another talent entombed in a seemingly moribund CBS property. Arnie, as his series is titled, has a possibly workable premise: a lifelong blue-collar worker is suddenly hoisted from the loading dock to an executive desk. But what laughs there were in the first episode belonged to the firm's fatuous, polo-playing president (Roger Bowen), whose main professional interest seems to be avoiding handclasps lest he endanger his mallet hand. Arnie is around obviously to provide hardhat wisdom and wit, but the premiere script suggests that Eric Hoffer he isn't.

Without question, the most contemptible show of the season so far is Nancy (NBC), a sappy comedy about the President's daughter (Renne Jarrett) and her fiance, a clod-kicking Iowa veterinarian (John Fink). Producer Sidney Sheldon denies lifting the idea from CBS's Governor and J.J. He got the idea, he says, during the Johnson Administration (which, in possibly its wisest decision, was unofficially unreceptive). The Nixon girls saw the pilot and found it "cute." Nancy's most embarrassing character, actually, is a wisecracking White House woman aide (Celeste Holm) with some of the most pitiable material on the air. Liz Carpenter should sue for equal time.

Variety

The Don Knotts Show (NBC) and the Tim Conway Comedy Hour (CBS) attempt to elevate two old situation comics to variety headliners. Conway, late of

McHale's Navy and the short-lived sitcom bearing his own name, made it obvious that he is, at best, a second banana. Knotts, the Milquetoast deputy sheriff on the old Andy Griffith Show, tried to make a virtue of his inability to sing, dance or string a show together. Opening night, Guest Anthony Newley pushed Knotts around and took command--a running gag that provoked a feeling of sympathy. But can other guests and the same gag make a season?

The most promising variety hour --and in fact the liveliest premiere of any description all week--was the Flip Wilson Show (NBC). Flip is black and cool, and the first night played as easily off David Frost as James Brown. He does not do quotable one-liners but routines, of which the standards include a sassy drag bit and his "Church of What's Happening Now" sermon.

Judging by the returning shows and the eleven new ones, viewers can safely dismiss the pseudo-hip, summer-long promotion pushes--NBC's "Don't let it happen without you" and CBS's "We've put it all together." The two networks might, if they truly wanted to be relevant, begin by taking it all apart.

-Richard Burg helm

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