Some Old, Some New, a Lot Borrowed, a Little Blue

Can gruff but likable Lou Grant, who lost his newsroom job at WJM-TV, cut the mustard on a daily newspaper? Can gimpy Fred Sanford dance out of a ghetto junkyard and onto a variety-show stage? Will a web-footed survivor from Atlantis surface as this season's TV hero?

The answers will come from 1,200 U.S. households, the chosen few whose daily tube-watching translates into Nielsen ratings. In combining new inspirations with hardy old shows, the networks have mildly varying prime-time profiles. NBC, which brought Gone with the Wind to the small screen last year, hopes to fight its way out of the cellar with a barrage of costly, elaborate specials, or "events," as the press releases call them. CBS is still counting on comedy, though not as heavily as in the old days. Up at the top, ABC is the most eclectic network, but it is stressing family shows, light adventure and specials of its own. A channel-switcher's sampling:

Sitcoms For the first time since 1971, there will be no new fall comedy show on the networks from Norman Lear. Still, with TV violence out of fashion, the sitcom mills have been the busiest of all, with eight new shows. If Soap, a Lear-ish entry from ABC, is any indication, sex may replace the Shootout as a video pastime. The half-hour weekly serial is a family farce complete with philandering husband, a mother and daughter who pursue the same tennis pro, a transvestite son, and many, many others.

In ABC's Carter Country, a rural police station in the Deep South comes up looking like a country-fried version of Barney Miller stuffed with crackers. ("Would you press my dress uniform?" one redneck cop asks a policewoman. "I don't do sheets," she answers.) In its other entries, ABC takes to the sea: The San Pedro Beach Bums are five California boys on a rundown boat; Operation Petticoat, based on the old Gary Grant flick, unites a crew of sailors on a pink submarine and a contingent of bosomy nurses--war is swell, apparently. And in The Love Boat, Gavin McLeod of The Mary Tyler Moore Show steers a cruise ship down the California coast.

Other MTM regulars have found jobs. On The Betty White Show on CBS, the former Happy Homemaker and Georgia Engel, the bubbleheaded wife of Newscaster Ted Baxter, reappear as TV actress and her bubbleheaded roommate. In We've Got Each Other, CBS tries a tamer version of the role-reversal ploy that flopped in All That Glitters. Here, hubby does the housework while wife trudges off to the photography studio. CBS's On Our Own shows what happens when two young girls get into the advertising business.

Sci-fi The emphasis is on fi. In NBC's The Man from Atlantis, a fishy survivor from the lost civilization teams up with a comely lady scientist for some underwater heroics. CBS's Logan s Run, a spin-off from the film, zaps into the 24th century. In it a man and woman are on the run from certain death, and each week they seek shelter in a different society.

Action-adventure Rough-'em-up shows have not really disappeared, though they may be less gory. CHiPS, an acronym for California Highway Patrol, will be the season's one new cop show. (The cops are known as Chippies to California motorists, but NBC quickly saw the problem with that title.) Daniel Boone is back, or rather Young Dan'l Boone. This time he is 25 years old and accompanied by a runaway slave and preteen sidekick on his wilderness walks for CBS. For long-neglected horse opera fans, Rod Taylor will bit The Oregon Trail as a pioneer plodding west for NBC, Big Hawaii will go even farther west on NBC--to Paradise Ranch, where a cantankerous family of cattle ranchers haggle over their island Ponderosa.

Variety Sonny and Cher are gone, but Donny and Marie will be back on ABC. This year Sister Osmond will forsake her clean-teen look for boots, bobbed hair and slinky high fashion. Joining the song-and-skit brigade this season: Richard Pryor, who will bring his jive, streetwise humor to a new NBC variety series, and Redd Foxx, who will sanitize his stand-up act for his own weekly show on ABC.

Family shows While The Waltons (CBS) fight off rural poverty in the South, The Fitzpatricks will soon battle the blue-collar blues up North. But not for long, most likely. The new CBS series about a struggling steelworker and his family looks like dim competition against ABC's Happy Days.

Job dramas The cops and gumshoes who dominate the TV job market will be joined by a few other career men. Actor Ed Asner, former chief of MTM's newsroom, gets a Los Angeles newspaper job--and a crusty lady boss--on CBS's Lou Grant. Lawyers Rosetti and Ryan, having survived a spring tryout, will hang out their shingle on NBC. Patrick McGoohan will scrub up in CBS's Rafferty, the season's only medical show, playing a former Army doctor whose professional skills outshine his bedside manner.

Miniseries Thanks to Roots, the networks are rushing through bestsellers faster than an Evelyn Wood graduate. In addition to Washington: Behind Closed Doors, ABC will crank out mini-series based on Gail Sheehy's Passages and Herman Wouk's The Winds of War. Roots II will follow Kunta Kinte's descendants into modern times.

Not to be outdone by ABC's partnership with John Ehrlichman, CBS will create its own docu-drama based on Watergater John Dean's Blind Ambition. Event-loving NBC plans almost as many of these high-budget miniseries as its network rivals combined. Among them: 79 Park Avenue by Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey's Wheels, James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan, plus a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

Specials Sports, music, beauty contests and holidays--all will be grist for dozens of upcoming specials. The networks' purpose will be purely contentious: to lure viewers out of TV habits or to spoil the debut of a rival's series. In the first week of the new season, NBC will present the first of six Laugh-In specials; in the weeks that follow, there will be a four-bout evening of heavyweight boxing, a Doonesbury cartoon special and The Godfather Saga, a nine-hour, four-night extravaganza combining both movies and some outtake footage too. ABC plans a Star Wars show based on the making of the movie, while CBS is preparing a string of shows devoted to its own 50th anniversary.

Inevitably, many of the new shows will falter, but this year the turkeys will be gone long before Thanksgiving. Replacement series are already in production. "Things were different in the past," notes NBC Executive Vice President Irwin Segelstein. "Now we've got to be ready for anything, any time." The race may be starting next week, but its end is nowhere in sight.

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