Viewpoints

By Judy Fayard

Television's summertime miniseason is even more mini than usual this year. The 16-week Writers Guild of America strike, settled six weeks ago, reduced both the quantity and quality of new summer-replacement shows. With fresh scripts unavailable, CBS opted out of the season altogether; ABC and NBC scrimped up four and two new entries respectively. Most of them reinforce the notion that summer is the time to enjoy the great outdoors. A sampling:

FLIP WILSON PRESENTS: The Helen Ready Show (NBC, Thursday, 8-9 p.m. E.D.T.). Helen Reddy won a Grammy last year for her recording of I Am Woman, which has since become a sort of anthem for the Women's Liberation movement. The show's timid overtones of feminism, however, are not allowed to disturb its stolid, unimaginative variety-show format. Hampered by painfully writer-stricken interim patter, Ms. Reddy has neither the presence nor the experience to spark the old string-of-guests routine to life.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR (ABC, Friday, 9:30-10 p.m. E.D.T.). All in the Family became TV's No. 1 hit by making light of bigotry and prejudice, right? So why not do a show about a white couple in middle-class suburbia who suddenly discover that the new couple next door is black, and then twisting things around so that the black guy is just as prejudiced against white folks as the white guy is against blacks? Right on, right? Thanks to the grace of Janet MacLachlan and Joyce Bulifant, the pilot episode managed to be nearly inoffensive, despite such lines as "I believe in calling a spade a spade," and "Show me a blue collar and I'll show you a red neck." But it has been downhill from there--a leftover lunch of cold jokes relying solely, it seems, on the word chocolate for chuckles.

THICKER THAN WATER (ABC, Wednesday, 8-8:30 p.m. E.D.T.). The summer's nadir. Julie Harris and Richard Long battle various relatives and each other for the pickle-factory fortune of their crotchety, dying paterfamilias. Harris and Long struggle like a pair of flies in a glue pot trying to wrest laughs from lines about death and pickles.

DEAN MARTIN PRESENTS: MUSIC COUNTRY (NBC, Thursday, 10-11 p.m. E.D.T.). Filmed entirely on location in and around Nashville, Tenn., last week's premiere hour in this seven-part series promised an amiable music-cum-open-air aimlessness--Mel Tillis grinning through Neon Rose at the bar of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, 91-year-old Uncle Pete Pillington picking his banjo on his front porch, the Statler Brothers singing dauntlessly in the driving Tennessee rain. Country music fans will probably find the pop-crossover material impure, but if the appealing mood--and the lineup of top name performers--is sustained, this show could pave the way for a regular-season show celebrating country sounds.

THE BURNS AND SCHREIBER COMEDY HOUR (ABC, Saturday, 10-11 p.m. E.D.T.). Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber seem to have lost all the sharpness of their Second City heritage in this one-after-the-other collection of seemingly interminable sketches. All too typical was last week's episode in which Julius Caesar was taxied by a charioteer whose previous fare had been Brutus. "Did you drop him off at the Forum?" asked Caesar. "No," said the charioteer, "at the knife sharpener's." Clearly, the problem with the "old B-S gang," as the show's regulars like to call themselves, is that they are all straight men, B and S included. . JudyFayard

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