Television: The New Season

Let us now praise television. Its longbows, drawn since springtime, finally twanged last week and 17 arrows flew. Wunk. Tunk. Boink. Doyng. One after another, TV’s new series all hit on or near the mark.

The single word that best distinguishes this year’s series is honest. Unlike many plays of Broadway and films of Hollywood, they are free of pretension—unprepossessing, undisturbing and unoffending. They are accomplishments of theatrical engineering, designed to say and mean nothing while being diverting, with a net moral value of point zero zero. All were offered by NBC and ABC—CBS has temporarily held its fire.

The most interesting trend visible so far is an emphasis on sex. The TV men have also forsaken their experiments with ever longer shows. In fact, most of the new series are 1954-style, hardtop, 30-minute comic potboilers.

Plot and situation, however well-turned or bizarre, have much less effect on the lifespan of a TV series than the personalities of its performers. If the performers are liked by the watching families, they are wanted back in the living room next week—and that is what keeps the Nielsen ratings high and the sponsors contented. Most of the new shows are adequately deep in personable people.

ABC

Valentine’s Day, for example, is a house of cards about a young bachelor publisher who likes a white fuzzy drink called Cotton Gin and keeps a portable fireplug in his Jaguar XKE to help create parking spaces. Last week he was publishing a book called The Fraudulent Female, which claimed that women criminally exaggerate the burden of housework. To prove its thesis to a potentially dangerous female critic, he went off with her for a weekend on Staten Island, where he did all the chores for a family of five. Impossible as it may seem, the show was amusing, but only because Tony Franciosa, as the publisher, delivered a winning personality far in excess of the requirements of the script, and Jack Soo, who looks like Robert Mitchum, was irresistible as his Chinese manservant, who talks hip and fancies the ponies.

The Addams Family are successful incarnations of the necrogeists in Charles Addams’ cartoons. Their house is a great Victorian cobweb with a bear rug that growls when stepped on, a stuffed sailfish that has the legs of a child protruding from its mouth, and a mailbox with a hand in it that receives letters. Including guillotined dolls and thoroughbred spiders that are raised by the children, the props are obviously first-rate, but the people are even better. Beautiful Carolyn Jones plays the mother, Morticia, with a chilling verve that should make any dead-blooded man want to share a bier with her. Her husband Gomez (John Astin) and Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan) are quite sufficiently insane, but one could research the annals of television and not discover the likes of her butler Lurch, who is played by Ted Cassidy, 6 ft. 9 in., 250 Ibs., with a massive, embalmed face and a deft touch on the parlor spinet.

The Tycoon stars 70-year-old Walter Brennan as a board chairman. Both the show and the corporation obviously float on his style alone. Last week, on a bet, he went out to prove that he could start over again with $10 and captain a new industry in no time. He did, with a clanking assist from the script. But what he owed the writers was nothing beside what they owed him. He even scored with an old one-liner about banks: “Never trust a place where they pull the shades down at three o’clock in the afternoon.”

In Wendy and Me, George Burns is the owner of a Los Angeles apartment building where he acts as chorus and narrator of a running story about his tenants, centering on the nutty wife of an airline pilot. She speaks in a kind of implosive syntax. “I didn’t want you to think I was out when I was gone,” she reassured her husband last week. “I always want you to know where I am even when we’re together.” Sadly, the fictional Wendy (played by Connie Stevens) recalls the late Gracie Allen, who died in August. There is nothing funereal about the show, however. Burns’ interpolated remarks save it whenever it sags. Unexpectedly sticking his cigar into the action last week and looking straight into the camera, he said: “This show has everything.” Perhaps not. But it has him.

The Bing Crosby Show has a similar asset. Crosby plays Bing Collins, an electrical engineer with a wife (Beverly Garland) and two daughters. All he did last week was drift through a nostalgic routine that kidded middle age. Even the laughs were wearing baggy sweaters, but he drew them.

Mickey presents Mickey Rooney as an Omaha salesman who inherits a marina in Southern California, and with it a crooked Chinese manager who has a lifetime contract. The situation is un promising and the dialogue (“Only registered guests are permitted to drown in the pool”) needs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but inside Mickey Rooney there is a profound sense of the absurd; and last week in moments of wordless action — resisting seduction by Guest Star Dina Merrill or running through downtown streets wearing only a mink coat — he developed humor in the tradition of comic pathos.

Bewitched, on the other hand, succeeds because of its situation and not in spite of it. Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York are newly weds. She is a witch. Her mother (Agnes Moorehead) is a witch too. And it is a pleasure to watch a man try to cope with a mother-in-law who is a real one. When, with dilated pupils, the bridegroom approaches the hotel bridal chamber, he suddenly finds himself standing in the lobby.

No Time for Sergeants is TV’s most deserving new show because it would seem to be high time for Sergeants to jump into the television trough and suck up some of the gravy from the hillbilly trend it started as a Broadway play—illiterate mountaineers burbling with uncorruptible goodness. As Will Stockdale, Actor Sammy Jackson ought to make it. Guys pick fights with him and drive their fists against his stomach again and again while he just stands there smiling. Reveille is at 6 a.m., he learned when he started basic last week. “I ain’t going to get up that late for nobody,” he said.

Peyton Place glows in the night not once but twice a week. The camera impatiently scurries from house to house in the small New England town, functioning as a kind of sexual seismograph, recording the slightest tremor. Most of them are very slight, indeed. For example, last week’s biggest one involved a man who had made his secretary his mistress but disapproved of his son’s going out with the secretary’s daughter. Yet, since all the other new comic and dramatic series are developed through broad caricature, the odd thing about this marathonical bore is that it is about the most realistic of the new shows that have opened so far.

Jonny Quest is this season’s new animated series from Hanna-Barbera, producers of The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Yogi Bear. Dr. Benton Quest, jack of all sciences, and his son Jonny were last week combatting a horde of enemy agents dressed as lizards, who were destroying shipping with laser beams in the area of the Sargasso Sea. Zow. It is hard to imagine better television than that.

Only two of ABC’s new shows are 60-minuters. Both are consecrated to the presentation of heroic deeds. Twelve O’Clock High, derived from the novel and movie of the same name, is about men who flew B-17s in World War II. Robert Lansing is the central figure—a flying general named Savage, who can spit 220 nails a minute. “I’m going to make you lay square eggs,” he told one of his pilots last week. “I’m going to hand you a copilot who’s all thumbs, a bombardier who can’t hit his plate with his fork, a navigator who can’t find his own feet.” He did, too.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea owes something to Admiral Rickover and even more to Jules Verne. It is the story of an enormous nuclear submarine that patrols the ocean floor, combatting the sinister forces, human and natural, that threaten the American way. Last week earthquakes of unprecedented ferocity were about to produce tidal waves that would drown almost anyone in the U.S. who did not happen to be standing on Pikes Peak. To counteract these H-breakers, the sub had to blast them with H-bombs before they got rolling. For one hour, on land and at sea, machine guns chattered, torpedoes schlurped through the deep, and missiles sang in the air. Voyage is all it tries to be: fast-moving calisthenics for young eyeballs.

NBC

The Rogues is probably television’s most awaited new series, since it stars Charles Boyer, David Niven, Gig Young, Gladys Cooper and Robert Coote, a cast that would bestir Broadway. They are an international family of aristocratic robbing hoods, who steal from rich raff and usually give to the deserving. Unfortunately, they do not all appear all the time. Niven starred in the opener, supported by Coote and Guest Star Dina Merrill, who was having a big week in one-shot appearances. Even though she went swimming nude in the Mediterranean and nearly married a Greek shipping magnate, Dina looked preoccupied, as if she were wondering how she was going to seduce Mickey Rooney on Wednesday night. Niven, posing as an Australian financier in his effort to fleece the shipping magnate, seemed to be looking around desperately for Alfred Hitchcock, of whose style The Rogues is an awkward imitation. Traveling by everything from yacht to donkey cart against Riviera backgrounds, The Rogues was all ashuffle with impossible predicaments, lightning solutions and fantastic coincidences. Everywhere they went, in fact, its characters kept running into one another as if they were actors on an overcrowded television set.

Flipper stars a 300-lb. Florida porpoise, a kind of Rin Tin Tuna, who saves the day when the people in the story seem doomed. Last week a skin-diver with a rare blood type was chewed by a shark. A container of the rare blood soon arrived by helicopter, but was accidentally dropped into 50 fathoms of water. Flipper flipped to retrieve it. Hi-ho, Flipper! But did the audience flip too? Not flipping likely.

The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo features the world’s most unlikely casting. Tired of the nearsighted rut he was in, the animated Mr. Magoo has opted to play roles from the classics —Don Quixote, the Count of Monte Cristo, Captain Ahab, D’Artagnan, Ulysses, Merlin, Paul Revere. You name it; Magoo is it. And he is not kidding. He is not playing for farce at all. The tales are told straightforwardly, and predictably they will be excellent fare for children. Magoo started his series as William Tell. Looking less nearsighted than blind, he lifted his crossbow, sighted the apple on his son’s head, and let ‘er fly. The apple split into matching hemispheres. And what was that second arrow for, pray, Tell? Perhaps for the first person to laugh.

Another actor, this one real, who has broken away this season from his stereotyped past is Dennis Weaver. After limping through ten years of Gunsmoke as Mr. Dillon’s deputy Chester, Weaver is now walking alone and normally as Kentucky Jones. Trainer of race horses, he is also a widower with a nine-year-old Chinese boy to raise (this is the Year of the Tiger for Chinese TV actors). The little boy, called Dwight Eisenhower Wong, is an escapee from the Chinese mainland, and he has brought with him both ageless philosophy and ancient cuisine. Seeing Weaver in a hung-over condition last week, he warned him: “Lover of wine is cousin of goose.” Perhaps as an antidote, he thereafter gave him a steaming pot of powdered horse-manure tea.

The second installment of the season’s new TV series will arrive next week—one more from ABC, two from NBC, and twelve from CBS. NBC is holding two others for later premières, including Profiles in Courage.