Viewpoints: Tiger on the Tube

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A first glance at the new television season suggests that the mewing pussycat trademark of Mary Tyler Moore's M.T.M. Enterprises Inc. could turn out to be the tiger of TV situation comedy. M.T.M. is responsible for three of the five new sitcoms on the tube: Rhoda, Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers and The Texas Wheelers. All three seem to have the potential to join Moore's own show (and The Odd Couple, when it is at its erratic best) as the tube's few regular offerings showing something like recognizable human behavior.

The top of the new Moore line, of course, is RHODA (CBS, Monday, 9:30 p.m. E.D.T.), featuring M.T.M.'s best buddy all these years in that small Minneapolis apartment house. Valerie Harper's character is now taking up a life of her own in a show of her own in her native New York City. Naturally, since her last name is Morgenstern, Rhoda has a Jewish mother (Nancy Walker) who is a classic yenta. "So how come you're not wearing a bra?" she says to her returning daughter. "Ma, I'm 33 years old." "All the more reason," comes the topper. As a character, Rhoda's ma may be predictable, but good, realistic, almost earthy comedy writing on television is not. Neither is the show's third major character, Rhoda's younger sister Brenda (Julie Kavner). She is sleepy-voiced, sad-eyed and overweight from trying to eat her way out of a mild but chronic depression. In short, like so many characters emerging from the Moore atelier, she is a type we know better from our daily rounds than we do from our nightly viewing: an individual waging a quiet, stubborn struggle to stay on the sunny side of neurosis. She succeeds, as do most of the inhabitants of Mary's small-town TV newsroom, because she is blessed with self-knowledge and the ability to summarize it in a truthful gag line.

PAUL SAND in FRIENDS and LOVERS (CBS, Saturday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.) exemplifies another virtue of the Moore style, which is to get people out of bland Brady Bunch suburban housing and show them working at jobs that are odd and interesting. Having Moore herself work in a local TV newsroom was a stroke of genius, since the setting provides endless possibilities for novel situations; similarly, it is a relief that Rhoda's new boy friend is not an ad man or an architect, but in the wrecking and salvage business. As for Sand, he lives in a jumbled old walk-up and occupies himself as, of all things, a string-bass player with the Boston Symphony.

Sand comes equipped with a financially harassed brother-in-law (Michael Pataki) who lives in the failed subdivision he designed ("the only FHA-approved ghost town"). Pataki's wife (Penny Marshall) provides another standard element in the Moore formula, a voice for the reality principle, keeping everyone's fantasies within bounds. Trying to borrow money to keep a perpetual-student sister in school, Pataki inquires whether Marshall would like to see the girl "out in the streets." "No, she wouldn't do too well there either," she replies thoughtfully. Sand, who starred in the superb Story Theater a few seasons back, is a quirky blend of shy preoccupation and blurting enthusiasm, quick starts and sudden hesitations. If his premiere show lacked Rhoda's slickness and deteriorated into formula writing on occasion, it nevertheless introduced a character capable of both surprise and maybe even growth--not qualities that are automatically associated with the central figures of most television sitcoms.

The most intriguing new M.T.M. offering is THE TEXAS WHEELERS (ABC, Friday, 9:30 p.m. E.D.T.). They are yet another extended rural family, but their resemblance to the warm, wonderful Waltons ("the only people who put mayonnaise on their venison," as Johnny Carson once said) goes no further. Dad (Jack Elam) is a shaggy boozer with an itchy foot and no talent at all for drawing uplifting morals from life's little disasters. "Hard work gives a man character--and a slight stoop," he says. Mom is dead, and the head of the family is Truckie (Gary Busey) a 24-year-old high school dropout who is more admired by his siblings because he has done time for "grand theft, auto" than for his efforts to raise them respectably while completing his self-reformation by returning to school and getting a job.

In the first episode, Truckie had to cope with his old man's disruptive return from a prospecting expedition, a brother who wants to quit the local high school because Truckie is coming back to it ("you'll be the only student with wrinkles"), and the death of his little sister's favorite pet, Jonathan Livingston Duck. Truckie's method of handling all this would make Walton's mountain collapse. He brawls lustily with his father, and tricks his brother (Mark Hamill) into a return to scholarship. Instead of giving the distraught little girl a homely homily on mortality, he breaks her grief with a tall story. "Poor Ducky," she says, pulling herself together in the quick way of real kids, "maybe they'll make a movie out of him."

In short, as sitcoms go, The Texas Wheelers is tough-minded and daring --a sly, understated assault on the nation's favorite fantasy of bucolic innocence, its weird belief that scrabbling along the poverty line somehow strengthens morals, straightens thoughts and leads to enhanced appreciation of the simple things. In television's present climate, this show probably faces as tough a struggle for survival as its leading characters, but one cannot help pulling for it, especially when considering the caliber of the competition among the other new poor-people shows.

Aside from the M.T.M. entries, there are two other new sitcoms. CHICO AND THE MAN (NBC, Friday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.) brings a new minority--the Chicanos --to situation comedy. Freddie Prinze is the hip young man who cheerfully elbows his way into partnership with Jack Albertson, as the prejudiced and bitter old man who owns a moribund garage in a "changing" neighborhood. He shares Tevye the Milkman's distressing habit of speaking directly, with self-conscious adorableness, to God. He also shares Archie Bunker's even more distressing habit of being really funny only when he is at his most bigoted. Prinze and Albertson are expert comic actors, and within its limits it must be admitted that the program is quick paced and generous with its one-liners. But those limits also seem to guarantee almost instant sterility.

As for THAT'S MY MAMA (ABC, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m. E.D.T.), it is a straight rip-off on Good Times. Like Esther Rolle's brood, Mama Theresa Merritt's offspring are permitted to be a little bawdier about sex than their white counterparts in sitcom land, which is a relief, and they are allowed the standard ration of two to three jokes a show about their color. The comic program's situations and most of the gags could be used with safety on either side of the color line on any mediocre show. Lacking even the minimal social awareness of Good Times, That's My Mama is --well--a pale imitation of a pretty pallid original. . Richard Schickel

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