Television: Second Week Premi

Television’s second week of premières was staged almost entirely by CBS. As incumbent ratings champion, having had eight of the top ten prime-time shows last season, CBS waited until the challengers had flashed nearly all their goods before spreading out its twelve new entries for 1964-65. In one or two instances, it could thus be said that the best was saved for last, but in general CBS’s new shows lack the warmth of those on the other networks. CBS has a cool and mechanical touch. Its choices in comedy seem cynical, where ABC’s and NBC’s at worst seem merely foolish. Even the people in the CBS canned-laughter machine seem to laugh with a Hessian edge.

But at least three CBS comedies have no need of the machine. Judging by its premiere, Many Happy Returns is the season’s best new show. As is generally the case with successful TV series, it is the principal actor who makes the difference. In this case, it is John McGiver, the balding fellow who waited on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and whose concise, precise portrayals have lightened other films from Love in the Afternoon to The Manchurian Candidate. Now he’s an employee of a department store whose career depends on his ability to persuade people to keep merchandise they are trying to return. Urbanely, he convinces a woman that she should keep a teakettle because of its unique talent for whistling Beethoven’s Fifth. In order to snow a snob, he poses as one Carter Phelps-Phipps of the Phelps-Phippses of Boston. “Strange, I don’t recall your name in the Social Register,” says the snob. “We have an unlisted page,” explains Phelps-Phipps.

My Living Doll is a one-joke show, but the joke is a knockout. Julie Newmar, once of The Marriage-Go-Round, here plays a robot created by an aerospace scientist. Her viking-size body is actually a compilation of electronic equipment sheathed in homogenous polyethylene plastic. A mistress in a million, she will do anything she is told. In the middle of her back is an OFF and ON button. The man who works it is Bob Cummings, as a psychiatrist who is looking after Julie for his creative friend. “My construction is similar to the one-piece die casting,” she explains in a husky voice as he takes her home. “But I was hand-molded.”

“Have a drink?”

“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t eat, I compute. At night I rest my transistors and”—looking down into her cleavage—”my solar batteries.”

The Munsters are U, as distinguished from non-U, monsters—a nice, funereal, bourgeois family like the Addamses of ABC. Fred Gwynne is Father; he consists of parts of seven people. Yvonne De Carlo is Mother. She tells her son: “Don’t forget to wash behind your points.” Grandfather last week drank a potion to turn himself into Mr. Hyde, and when he didn’t turn, he said his suspicions were confirmed: somebody had been cutting the stuff. At a masquerade ball, Father won first prize for his own face. “I’ve never been so insulted,” he said, “since the day I died.”

Defying the trend on the other networks toward the short and snappy, CBS opened three hourlong dramas. By default, Slattery’s People is the best, even if it is a kind of provincial Advise and Consent, taking its milieu—as so many TV shows vulturistically do—from an earlier showbiz success. Slattery, played by Richard Crenna, is a state legislator. The story last week did stir up an at least plausible atmosphere of cameral politics. Slattery turned the chamber into a courtroom, fingering an older senator who had deliberately quashed a bill that jeopardized his personal financial interests. The program is fearless. It was sponsored in part by Chase & Sanborn, and the crooked old senator’s name was Mr. Sanborn.

Mr. Broadway views the pits and perils of Manhattan as if through the prejudices of a spinster librarian in Humboldt, Kans. Last week’s story was all about a bright-eyed girl from the Midwest (Tuesday Weld) who arrived in New York and within a week was eating kickapoo pills given her by a thug in El Morocco. Ironically enough, the series was created by the man who wrote Born Yesterday, Broadway Playwright-Director Garson Kanin. His hero, played by Craig Stevens, is a press-agent who calls Kilgallen before he calls the police. The show is nervously edited and stuffed with cameo appearances by Leonard Lyons and Oleg Cassini—all the symptoms of a script that has been wadded rather than written.

The Reporter is a much-yellowed Front Page, with hoods out of West Side Story. In the première, these hoods —who walked the New York streets in sneakers and tight pants, snapping their fingers—stabbed a man who tried to interrupt them at rape. The man stumbled into a basement and called up a columnist (played by Harry Guardino) who had denounced people who stand around watching street crimes without taking action. Now that this fellow had taken action, he was cut and dying, and he wanted the columnist to know about it. For the hour that followed, the newspaperman and his editor (Gary Merrill) tried to determine where the victim was so they could help him. This is the only really revulsive show that has opened this season, pretending to a depth and insight that it totally lacks.

In its new World War I series, CBS is presenting a well-researched documentary that uses only stills and motion footage from archives. Its first segment moved swiftly, panoptically, and about as informatively as was possible in 30 minutes devoted to nothing less than all the causes and early events of the conflict. The pictures of Gallipoli and the Lusitania, young Göring and old Hindenburg were absorbing enough, but the best moments came in unexpected footnotes, such as Sigmund Freud’s declaring: “All my libido is given to Austria-Hungary.”

Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart, Caterina Valente, Art Buchwald and Tessie O’Shea are all regular participants in a comedy-variety series called The Entertainers, which is essentially live and up to the minute since it is taped just before it is broadcast. Its opening hour was excellent. Buchwald eagerly suggested that Barry Goldwater could prove his point about the unreliability of U.S. missiles if he were to sit in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific and let the Defense Department take a shot at him. Newhart did a fine routine in which he posed as a man sitting in his office with the automatic sprinkler system drenching him. “I find it’s just a wee bit sensitive,” said Newhart calmly to the sprinkler company. “It goes on whenever anyone comes into the room with a fever.” Burnett did a skit in which she was a hopelessly nearsighted girl on a blind date with a guy whose eyesight was no better than hers. Both removed their glasses, in pathetic vanity. As she mixed a drink and poured it on the sleeve of his suit, he quaffed from his empty glass and cheerfully mouthed: “Now that’s what I call a dry martini.”

CBS’s proven laboratory skills with test tube situation comedies failed with Gilligan’s Island (a modern shipwreck story), The Cara Williams Show (a man and wife both work for a company that prohibits that sort of thing), Gomer Pyle (a hillbilly Marine), and The Baileys of Balboa, which stars Paul Ford as the captain of a charter fishing boat. Not even his hooks are barbed.

Scalped Facts. Meanwhile, three shows were opening on the other networks. ABC, having spent itself the previous week, had only one more. Called Broadside, it is set on a South Pacific island and is basically a satire on the velvet life enjoyed by some officers in the U.S. Navy’s Supply Corps during World War II. It stars Edward Andrews, who played in Elmer Gantry and Advise and Consent and is one of Hollywood’s best caricature actors. His quarters contain everything from a Persian rug to an extensive and distinguished rack of wines. Perhaps as the ultimate luxury, a group of WAVEs has come to run his motor pool. One of them (ho, ho) is a male named Marion who became a WAVE through clerical error. Andrews himself was funny. But Andrews plus the male WAVE plus the female WAVEs resulted in a colossal SCAFU—situation comedy all fouled up.

NBC brought forth two series and is saving still another two for October and November. Daniel Boone capitalizes on the old Davy Crockett shows, since any sharp-eyed woodsman can be expected to discern that this here Boone is the same man—Fess Parker, who might be described as the lichen-eating Gregory Peck. His new show, broad and robust, is a marvelous specimen of the Drums Along the Mohawk school, with flaming arrows, torture stakes, and cauldrons of scalding water poured over parapets onto howling redskins. It scalps almost as many facts as Indians. It has Sequoias in Virginia, but anything is possible in the world of Daniel Boone, who last week fought 40 painted savages at once and caught a hurtling tomahawk in his hands. After each successive feat, a sound-track chorus sang out:

What a Boone, what a doer,

What a sure comer-througher was he.

Boiled Red. A somewhat less sure comer-througher is Napoleon Solo, hero of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. This la bored acronym stands for United Network Command for Law Enforcement, or good guys. Solo (played by Robert Vaughn) is set to battle weekly against the malevolent members of THRUSH, which stands for bads and is an international organization “with no allegiance to any country or ideal.” Last week THRUSH was trying to assassinate the Premier of a new African nation, who was visiting a nuclear chemical plant near Washington. Napoleon Solo and a female companion (Patricia Crowley) in a spangled evening dress tried to prevent the killing and were soon being boiled like lobsters in live steam from the reactor. If all this sounds like the late Ian Fleming, it is. Fleming, while only fleetingly a consultant, was in spirit the creator of the series. Fleming held back a little more than his name. Solo is authentic Bond with a private label, but he is not 007. He is 006⅞.