Television: Old Wrinkles

PREMIÈRES

With a couple of notable exceptions, the second week of the new season was about the same as the first: depressing.

CBS’s The Leslie Uggams Show, and its star, contradicted most of the week’s other evidence that the industry is immune to progress. The black singer, after all, made her TV debut in the patronizing Beulah series and then sang along with Mitch before taking over the Smothers’ time slot last week. Now, at 26, she has emerged with a sweet, sassy authority that is just right for a variety-hour headlmer. She sang Those Were the Days with a panache that made the Mary Hopkin original seem lifeless. She played willing straight girl to Impressionist David Frye’s show-stealing rendition of William F. Buckley Jr. She starred in “Sugar Hill,” a slice-of-life sketch that will be a feature of the series; the opener was more pungent than The Goldbergs, if not in a class with The Honeymooners.

Another new weekly variety series, ABC’s Music Scene, rattles with vibrations of Your Hit Parade, Hullaballoo and Laugh-In but bears a few promising new wrinkles. For one, the show does not commit itself to endless and eventually monotonous replays of the same top seven songs every week, as did Hit Parade. Instead, Music Scene tunes are picked from any place on any of the Billboard “Hot 100” or bestseller charts (soul, country, “easy listening”). On opening night the producers shrewdly mixed things up, booking Tom Jones, James Brown and Buck Owens—plus the Beatles. Between numbers, and sometimes during, an engaging young satirical company provided blackouts and sketches. A few too many of the premiere-night shots misfired, but considering the youthful audience the show is aimed at, the targets were bang on—female fans, senior proms, Richard Nixon and General Hershey.

ABC’s other new variety offering is, by comparison, antediluvian. The title, Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters Hour, says it all. The 76-year-old vaudevillian co-stars with four sisters who, though the oldest is not quite 30, are all 14-year veterans of The Lawrence Welk Show. The standard finale of their series will be an upbeat musical tribute to a city. Opening night it was Chicago (that toddlin’ town), which the girls cheerily hymned as “the convention center of the nation.”

With similar insensitivity, ABC publicized that its new situation comedy, The Brady Bunch, will deal with “the most difficult integration of them all, that of the sexes.” In the premiere of the series, which is perhaps the most cynically commercial offering of the season, a widow (Florence Henderson) with three daughters and a cat, wed a widower (Robert Reed) with three sons and a dog. The rival pets and siblings reduced the wedding to a sickening chaos that was about a thousand decibels less hysterically amusing than the show’s laugh track suggested.

To Rome with Love (CBS) is the same sort of savorless trifle, with John Forsythe back to the laugh-packed responsibilities of bachelor fatherhood. In this, his third series, he plays a widowed history professor from Iowa who relocates with his three daughters in sunny, funny Italy. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (ABC) exploits both the classic 1936 film comedy of the same name and the stupefying breakthrough in transcultural humor of The Beverly Hillbillies. Deeds is a bumpkin newspaper editor who unexpectedly inherits the financial empire of a robber-baron uncle and moves to Manhattan to redress family wrongs. In the first episode, TV Actor Monte Markham (The Second Hundred Years) wrestled with the Gary Cooper part and an intractable script.

One of the new dramatic series on ABC brings back that pleasant man, Robert Young (Father Knows Best), as Marcus Welby, M.D. Welby is an old-fashioned general practitioner, but Executive Producer David Victor plays him off against what he calls a “very ‘now’ young assistant” (James Brolin) who makes house calls on a 650-c.c. motorcycle. The first episode was about as good as U.S. soap opera ever gets: Can the “now” junior G.P., who mistakenly diagnoses a pretty young schoolteacher’s terminal brain tumor as a psychosomatic “sex hang-up,” make his peace with her before she dies?

The New People (ABC) is another attempt to reach the young by Mod Squad Executive Producer Aaron Spelling, 47. A planeload of 40 touring American students was somehow blown off course, crash-landed on an isolated mid-Pacific island and, in the process, lost its radio and any hope of ever returning to civilization. So the kids, stereotypes to a man (one militant black, one racist white Southerner, one rebellious daughter of a Senator) have to create their own world in a sort of college-age Lord of the Flies. In the opener, they played Hobbes with themselves and plausibility. The life of the series should be nasty, brutish and—considering New People’s kamikaze time slot opposite Laugh-In and Here’s Lucy—short.

Curiously, yet another ABC première last week, Movie of the Week, led off with a plane crash. In this one, seven blind people survived, only to be done in by the tricky, pseudopsychological script. That disaster may or may not have been a harbinger of ABC’s remaining 24 movies of the week, since they will come from many different producers. Generally, they will run cheaper (all 25 cost $16 million) and shorter (80 minutes without commercials) than conventional features. Films specially made for TV can develop into series, witness last season’s Then Came Bronson and Marcus Welby, M.D. TV fans who watch the TV flicks of 1969-70 will probably get a foretaste—and a forewarning—of 1970-71.