The New Season: Under Arrest

Television programming has often been described as a crime, but this fall it is literally so. Or at least one-third of it is. In the new season that opened last week, 29 shows, accounting for approximately one out of every three prime-time hours, will be devoted to cops, robbers, prosecutors and most of the imaginable variants thereof. Of 24 new shows, 13 promulgate law and order.

Private eyes will peer around every corner of the schedule. There are two black sleuths, CBS'S James-Bonded superstud Shaft (played by Richard Roundtree, who created the role in the film of the same title), and NBC'S Tenafly, a harassed family man who is just another employee at an outfit called Hightower Investigations, Inc. ABC's Griff (Lome Greene) is an ex-cop while in NBC's Faraday and Company Dan Dailey is an ex-con who, after 28 years in a South American jail, is slated to battle future shock as well as his crooked quarry. ABC even has an ex-human: Lee Majors as The Six Million Dollar Man, rebuilt after a near-fatal plane crash into a cyborg (cybernetic organism, that is, with two legs, one arm and one eye that are nuclear-powered synthetics).

Hatful of Tricks. The police delegation includes NBC's Chase, starring Mitchell Ryan as the head of an undercover unit specializing in impossible missions, and ABC's Torna, starring Tony Musante as a one-man undercover unit specializing in disguises. NBC'S Police Story, created by Police Sergeant and Author Joseph Wambaugh (The New Centurions), promises to be of the more official uniformed badge-flipping genre.

The pros will also be aided by some volunteers: a pair of busybody spinsters called The Snoop Sisters (Helen Hayes, Mildred Natwick) and The Magician (Bill Bixby), an all-American vaudevillian version of the nonviolent Kung-Fu, who conquers evil with birds and bunnies from his hatful of tricks.

Two new lawyers will come before the bar on CBS. Monte Markham will try to erase the solid image of Raymond Burr in the title role of The New Perry Mason. Jimmy Stewart will display wits that are as quick as his drawl is slow as the country lawyer Hawkins, a sort of skinny Sam Ervin.

Some of this may be funnier than the networks intended, but if not, the viewer can try one of the new sitcoms. Several comedy half-hours have jumped aboard Archie Bunker's blue-collar bus -one, NBC's Lotsa Luck, quite literally. The show stars Dom DeLuise as an ex-bus driver promoted to clerk in the lost-and-found department. (In its first episode last week, Lotsa Luck stretched Bunker bluntness into common vulgarity with a plot that revolved entirely around a purple-lidded, tangerine-colored toilet.) Just as DeLuise contends with his crotchety/lazy/dumb family relations, James Coco as CBS'S Calucci is plagued by his crotchety/lazy/dumb staff at the local unemployment department, and Norman Fell, on NBC'S Needles and Pins, suffers crotchety/lazy/ dumb family relations and employees in his garment factory.

The new shows that do not line up in the lower-middle class seem to fall into the cutesy class, where sex is more explicitly winked at than in previous years. In last week's first episode of NBC's Diana, starring Diana Rigg as what the producers identify as a "fun-loving divorcee" (a somewhat more sophisticated Mary Tyler Moore?), Diana slept in the same bed with a drunken stranger. In NBC's The Girl with Something Extra, E.S.P. is the coyly reconcilable difference between Newlyweds Sally Field (the former Flying Nun) and John Davidson. ABC's Adam's Rib, based on the 1949 Tracy and Hepburn film, claims to inject a touch of Women's Lib, with Blythe Danner and Ken Howard as a lady lawyer and her lawyer husband. Example of feminist viewpoint in first episode: to prove that men are allowed to pick up women while women who pick up men are presumed to be prostitutes, Danner gets herself arrested. At her trial the next day, the barely mussed carefully made-up liberated lady is so stupefied by her night in jail that she is unable to open her mouth, whereupon hubby gallantly wins the case for her. Sic transit Gloria Steinem.

All the shows will be faced with something new from the A.C. Nielsen Co. this season -national "overnight" ratings available within 48 hours instead of the usual two weeks. This probably will not mean that duds will be replaced earlier in the season, however. As one network executive points out: "It's an effort to get a new show going by January as it is." Thus, although some shows may be condemned sooner, the viewers will still have to serve out their terms.

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