Kudos & Choler

TV's formula for the situation-comedy series is the electronic version of the old comic strip, with its broadly caricatured characters, simon-simple situations and zam-powie slapstick. Two new series made the point last week. Blondie (NBC, Fri. 8 p.m., E.S.T.) carried its own comic-strip pedigree. Mr. Adams and Eve (CBS, Fri. 9 p.m., E.S.T.) offered husband-and-wife Hollywood stars playing husband-and-wife Hollywood stars. Howard Duff as a vain boob, Ida Lupino as the archetypically wise better-half. Except for wife Lupino's acerbic way with a line, it never got off the comic page.

The real story of Clinton, Tenn. is not the acts of its headline-breeding minority, but the quieter efforts of its majority in behalf of law and tolerance (TIME, Sept. 10 et seq.). In Clinton and the Law, over CBS, Edward R. Murrow's See It Now displayed for a nationwide TV audience this week some of the bad and a lot of the good face of Clinton: a stentorian basketball game in a sleek new gym, the nascent philosophy of young Football Captain Jerry Shattuck ("All through life you come up against things you don't like but have to accept"), a simple oration on tolerance by the Rev. Paul Turner. "The people of Clinton thought they learned something from their ordeal," said Narrator Murrow, "and they have cooperated because they thought others might benefit from their experience."

Was it a play? Was it a flop? Was it a clinker? No, it was a super-disaster called Snowshoes and presented last week over CBS's Playhouse 90. There are these racetrack types down and out in Miami and they get a race horse and then somebody thinks of Bridey Murphy and a hypnotist makes the horse think he's Man o' War, or does he? and then . . . Well, that was the way it went. Trendex gave Snowshoes a high rating, which ought to make Playhouse 90, its sponsors and its network worry: Will many of those millions ever tune in again?

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