Television: The New Season

For critics of television, the time has come to lower the general standard.

Almost everyone but Newton Minow and a small group of diehards have stopped expecting new Shakespeares, or even new Jean Kerrs, to come popping out of the tube. Occasionally, TV specials do dart guiltily into advanced culture, like the flashlights of burglars in the Metropolitan Museum. Prodded by Minow, the industry has raised its public affairs programming to an admirable level, as was evident last week from Oxford, Miss., to Cape Canaveral. But people who really care about TV—the ones who habitually watch it—are devoted to the weekly programs that contain the real stuff of television: all the heroes, heavies and broad comedians in the great video frieze that might be called the Elgin plasters. TV fills too much time to be extraordinarily worthwhile in any but a small part of it, and this will never change.

Inspecting TV’s new series, which have nearly all been put on display by now, the conclusion is, that by these moderated standards, the season is rather good. Responding to Minow’s exhortations, the networks have largely removed from the weekly shows the only really objectionable elements they once displayed—miscellaneous sodomists, dope-addicted teen-agers kicking babies, and so on. The overall impression of the new series suggests a great bowl of mentholated cornflakes. There are exceptions, of course, but most of the corn is healthy, the humor and situations are pugnaciously wholesome, and the killing is largely confined to historic battlefields rather than back alleys. The new material is pretty fair; and if some of it is just no good, it is at least not bad.

The Sitchcoms. The best new situation comedy is ABC’s I’m Dickens—He’s Fenster, a tale of two buddies (played by John Astin and Marty Ingels) who are construction carpenters with sawed-off brains. Both are bucking for foreman, but in the main they are slapsticking away with casual finesse. Dickens cocks his wrist to look at his watch and pours coffee into his lap. The laughter isn’t canned. Mrs. Dickens is a knockout. No one misses Charles.

Another good comedy is Our Man Higgins (ABC), largely because its producers have persuaded Stanley Holloway, the original Doolittle of My Fair Lady, to play an English butler in an American home. Holloway is such a skillful actor that he can engage a line like this one and win: “Here’s your tea, madam. I had a bit of a time getting it out of those little bags you store it in.”

If Our Man Higgins seems a bit of a reach, it is rivaled by some of the most frantically contrived situations in the history of situation comedies. The hero of NBC’s Don’t Call Me Charlie is a young, handsome, naive, lovable veterinarian named Judson McKay (Josh Peine) who is drafted out of Muscatine, Iowa, and sent by the Army to Paris. The Charlie in the title is a colonel (John Hubbard), who is the vet’s superior officer. When his girl (Linda Lawson) falls in love with the boy vet, Charlie tries to ship the boy out—but no chicken colonel can dispose of the fellow who saves the parakeet that belongs to the granddaughter of an old man in blue denims who seems to have been scraped off the deck of a river barge but turns out to be the first cousin of Charles de Gaulle.

The Beverly Hillbillies (ABC) are Yokums in Smogpatch, a family whose basic social status is reflected in this joke: “Them pigs got into the corn,” says Granny. Says Pa: “Did they drink much?” Oil was found on the hillbillies’ land, and they have now moved to a Beverly Hills mansion, where they keep the porcine humor squealing: “What’s a smog?” “A smog’s a small hog.” CBS’s hour-long Fair Exchange is about an American family that trades teen-aged daughters with an English family. It is no bargain on either side.

Set in a military school. NBC’s McKeever and the Colonel is about little boys in battle dress who wipe down their pack horses with windshield blades and sneak off to the movies during maneuvers. No one over ten with an IQ above 36 should care much for it, but it is good amusement for little boys and is on the air at 6:30 p.m. Also on NBC, Cartoonists Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have now followed their prehistoric FHntstones with another family called The Jetsons, who live so far in the future that their school-aged kids learn terms like “crazy” and “way out” in their ancient-history courses. The Jetsons have a robot maid, a sort of Hazel with gears. Father comes home from work and says he has had a hard day at the button. Little Elroy asks his mother to tell him the story about the cow that degravitated over the moon. The show is silly and unpretentious, corny and clever, now and then quite funny.

The Pros. Mr. Smith is back in Washington, more or less. Lifting the title of the old Jimmy Stewart movie, NBC has turned Smith into a “dip me in butter and fry me for a catfish” type, giving the role to Fess Parker. It maybe—to borrow a line from its own dialogue—”in more hot water than a washcloth.” Another old movie, Going My Way, is now a TV series (ABC), with Gene Kelly and Leo G. Carroll doing nicely as Father Bing Crosby and Father Barry Fitzgerald. In other seasons, a cassock opera like this one might have stood out like a High Mass in the Copacabana. But many of the new season’s heroes are so strong on dynamic positivism that these men in black seem almost sinister by comparison.

In addition to the priests, TV’s new professional men include a lawyer and a clutch of newsmen. The tough, quick-thinking, steel-trap lawyer is NBC’s Sam Benedict, played by Edmond O’Brien with sheer nervous drive, solving ten cases an hour, picking up phones, barking, slamming them down, dictating letters at 200 words a minute, grabbing punks by the throat, and so on. Statistically, a man like that ought to have a nervous breakdown at least once a week. Not Sam.

The newsmen are the staff of a New York daily, and they are entombed ina show called. Saints and Sinners (NBC). To give it the benefit of the doubt, it is the worst television program since Playhouse go did Kay Thompson’s Eloise. It is certainly the phoniest city-room drama since The Front Page. “I went out,” says the reporter hero (Nick Adams), “and I dug for it, and the deeper I dug the dirtier it got.” Even the cutting is tabloid cheap. A man puts a gun at another’s temple and prepares to fire. Fadeout.

The Operating Table. Despite the 105° popularity of last season’s Drs. Kilcasey, there is only one new doctor. He is a psychiatrist, played by Wendell Corey, in a program called The Eleventh Hour (NBC). He makes Casey and Kildare look like eight-year-old patsies with nursing kits. He handles a different case each week, plausibly and dramatically, in a part written and acted well.

The only other medical show is called The Nurses (CBS), none of whom should ever have been registered. The commanding figure is a charge nurse (Shirl Conway) who has the voice and manner of a rich Connecticut matron with old money and old blood. The opening episode took place in a maternity ward and was full of knowing chatter about centimeters of dilation and uterine cancer. Women writhed in pain. One died on the operating table. The dialogue was as phony as the obstetrics. Charge Nurse: “Do you want it straight. Miss Lucas?” Some other time.

Back to the Foxholes. ABC’s two new battle shows are good ones. In Combat, a group of World War II infantrymen are working their way east from Normandy, fighting one hour per week. It has some of the dusty menace of A Walk in the Sun. Meanwhile, Gallant Men have landed at Salerno and are moving north through Italy. Roland La Starza, the heavyweight fighter who was decked by Rocky Marciano, makes a splendid soldier. There is plenty of bloodshed, but the worst is to come. By the end of the present season, when the Nazis have collapsed throughout Europe, the two ABC battalions will come face to face near the Franco-Swiss frontier.

Nearly all the new shows are an hour long. So to outdo everybody, NBC has produced TV’s first go-minute western, outdoing themselves as well. Called The Virginian and starring James Drury and Lee J. Cobb this fantastically hyperthyroid oat is only tenuously based on Owen null novel. The background is beautifully filmed in Wyoming in color, and, true enough, the dialogue rings. But the stories could happen in Flatbush, Beirut, or Port of Spain. A real western is an American commedia dell’ arte, a stylized and inviolable cliche that is easily destroyed by subtlety and depth psychology.

Victim of the same sympathetic fallacy is Empire (NBC), the story of a great King, as in Texas’ huge King ranch. Since it is a kidnaped stepson of Giant, it might have been written by somebody called Billie Sol Ferber, who proves that the West ain’t what it was. One ranch hand punches another, and the punched man looks up and says feelingly: “I’m sorry for all your suffering.”

The Retreads. A collection of old stars are either returning to TV after absences or beginning completely new shows. The Lloyd Bridges Show (CBS) has come out of the sea to recast Aquanut Bridges as a journalist who dreams himself into the stories he is researching. Doing a Civil War story, for example, he closes his eyes and reappears behind a rail and post fence, blazing away for the Southern cause. The story he tells—about a temporary cease-fire arranged between men close enough to talk across the lines—is both fresh and moving.

Jack Paar’s new show is a double-distillate of his midnight oil, full of songs, jokes, and home movies of Paar. He so impressed President Kennedy with the part of his opening program that dealt with PT 109 and its crew that Kennedy spent half an hour trying to reach Paar afterward by phone. NBC refused to let the President talk to the King, so Young Jack had to sit back and wait until Big Jack could be contacted elsewhere.

The biggest Jack of all is back too. Something called The Jackie Gleason Show: The American Scene Magazine (CBS) splashed into being last week with a great har-de-har-har. Reggie Van Gleason, Joe the Bartender, even the Honeymooners were on the air again, with Art Carney doing a special guest appearance. The Greatest was not the greatest, but he has 38 weeks to return to form.

Lucille Ball, divorced 2½ years ago from Husband Desi Arnaz, has adapted art to life by setting herself up as a divorcee with a teen-aged daughter, and is clowning as effectively as ever. Even Jack (“dum-de-dum-dum”) Webb is back. This time he is retelling stories from the files of True Magazine. The first one was set on a hospital ship off Okinawa, where a doctor operated on a marine who had a live and sensitive shell in his body capable of blowing a six-foot hole in a steel deck. It was a hell of a moment, but Webb sank it. “At 1830 hours exactly,” he intoned, “the operation began on a human bomb dead center in the circle of death.” He hosts the program in an echo-chambered voice, while he stands beside the word TRUE, spelled out in block letters 22 feet high, or roughly ten times as tall as Jack Webb.