Television: The New Season

Nine out of ten physicians probably agree that a patient should resort to Amytal, Seconal, and phenobarbital only after he has tried TV. Last week, with the arrival of the last of the new season’s premieres, it was clear that the prescription is still effective.

Since ABC discovered that stupendous profits can be made through the production of stupendous mediocrity, the other two networks have conformed nicely, performing the difficult feat of lowering their own standards. From precooked oatmeal to precast bullets, everyone is importing packaged pap from Hollywood by the case. But above all, the 1961-62 television season may go down in history as the year that canned laughter made its greatest comeback. Every new sitchcom (adspeak for situation comedy) is a masterpiece of electronic control: three hees and a hah for a cracking knuckle or a lifted eyebrow, a two-decibel avalanche for a two-bit joke.

The Rounded Cliché. Although the competition is fierce, no sitchcom is quite so cute, cute, cute as Ichabod and Me (CBS), wherein a metropolitan newsman (Robert Sterling) buys a small New England newspaper from owner Ichabod (George Chandler) Adams. The town is peopled by rounded, well-realized, three-dimensional clichés with names like Widow Ruskin and Cousin Martin, played by actors steeped in basic quaintsmanship. From ABC’s Margie (1920s flapper) to CBS’s Father of the Bride, the other new sitchcoms come close to the icky standards of Ichabod. Actress Shirley Booth has been caught in an NBC series called Hazel, based on the Saturday Evening Post’s cartoon maid. She place-kicks footballs and tweaks the ears of her boss’s clients. The Joey Bishop Show (NBC) presents its deadpan comic star as a small-time flack who is not as slick or tricky as the world around him. But the whole show is a little too cold and clanny.

The contrasting warmth of Gertrude Berg almost saves Mrs. G. Goes to College (CBS), although the situation itself is both sad and saccharine: a widow in her 50s enrolls as a freshman at U.C.L.A. Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who also played opposite her in Broadway’s A Majority of One, helps a bit, but nothing can be done with a script that sets its sights along “the hippopotamus of a right triangle.” And Car 54, Where Are You? is a question that does not deserve an answer. An NBC show written by Nat Hiken (who wrote Sergeant Bilko), it lionizes two New York cops named Toody and Muldoon (Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne) and reaches its pinnacles with such dialogue as “Where’s Toody?” “Toody’s on doody.”

Horses & Crime. The oat still thrives. CBS’s Marshal Dillon (James Arness) now has one solid hour to thicken the air with Gunsmoke; and the imitable Paladin, clearly out to impress the FCC’s rootin’ tootin’ Newton Minow, was reading a Dostoevsky novel during an episode of this year’s Have Gun, Will Travel.

The crime shows want to impress Minow too. The FCC chairman thinks television is unfit for human consumption, does he? A cultural slag heap? They’ll show him. Result: the cultured, well-heeled flatfoot. Robert Taylor’s retooled Detectives (NBC) now wear button-down collars, glen plaid suits, and shoot professorially from the mouth. “A beatnik,” said one Taylor gumshoe last week, “is a vagrant with intellectual pretensions.” ABC’s The New Breed celebrates Lt. Price Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and the new, soft-spoken young cops of the Los Angeles Police Department, college men and nearly all scientists, who speak scornfully of the old-style “fat cops who steal apples.” Straightforwardly acted, it is an absorbing story of men rather than dum-de-dum-dum bunnies.

Target: The Corrupters (ABC) is another good crime show, dramatizing each week a different area of corruption (waterfront, highway construction). But the rest of the season’s prodigious list of new crime shows are mainly 30-caliber bull. NBC’s 87th Precinct began with a gimmick (the heroine of the initial episodes was the deaf-mute wife of a police detective) and will undoubtedly end on one—soon. Cain’s Hundred (also NBC) has introduced Nicholas Cain (Mark Richman), onetime attorney for the mob, now bent on revenge for the mob murder of his fiancée and out to get—one by one—the 100 biggest worms that ever came out of an Apalachin.

Doctors & Jokers. Two new medical shows have come on the air this season. In a medically accurate re-creation of

Hollywood’s Dr. Kildare, Raymond Massey falls far shy of Lionel Barrymore as the wise old teaching physician, Dr. Gillespie; and Intern Kildare, as played by Richard Chamberlain, suggests nothing so much as an oversized white rabbit with a stethoscope instead of a watch.

The other medical show, Ben Casey, however, written by James (Medic) Moser and starring Vincent Edwards, is one of the great events in the long, hallowed annals of videosurgery. Neurosurgeon Ben Casey is so bright that his giant brain is already grappling with the most advanced encephalopathological problems of 1975. Meanwhile, he is a first-class, unsutured, 1961-style son of a bitch. Handling several cases an ABC-hour, his kindest words for his fellow physicians are: “What the hell do you use for brains?” Rabid women bite him. But, for all his foaming at the mouth, Casey is a marvelous character in a show that accurately captures the feeling of sleepless intensity in a metropolitan hospital.

The season’s only new weekly TV comedian is Bob Newhart, who built his reputation on a handful of brilliant monologues. He has now committed himself to The Bob Newhart Show (NBC), which requires as much new material each week as he used to develop in months. Last week’s premiére showed the strain, starting with a superb phone monologue and autobiographical sketch (“people thought I was taller than I am, but this is about as big as an accountant will get”) and sliding slowly downhill thereafter.

Strength & Soap. News and public affairs, TV’s one strong suit last year, is even stronger this fall. U.S. television cameras have thoroughly covered the world’s major crises from Berlin’s Wall to the U.N. reaction to Dag Hammarskjold’s death. Adlai Stevenson has begun a highly effective series of Sunday afternoon talks on ABC. CBS Reports last week began its worthy three-part interview with Eisenhower (see THE NATION), and Commentator David Brinkley began sounding off on his own, opening his Journal with a mordant discussion that ranged from the U.S. outdoor billboard industry to British tabloid journalism.

Some of the more promising series and specials fell typically outside the usual categories. For Example. Alcoa Premiére began last week on ABC with an impressive dramatized study of group psychotherapy in the U.S. Navy (starring Arthur Kennedy). NBC’s Theater ’61, offering live productions of TV plays adapted from once popular movies, may sound like hybrid corn, but the first one, Robert Goldman’s TV version of The Spiral Staircase, reminded viewers how good live television drama can be.

With other scattered and notable exceptions—such as Sir Laurence Olivier’s appearance later this month in a two-hour version of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory—the season’s early form leaves the impression that there is only one reason for anyone to turn on his TV set this fall: because it’s there.