Quoth the Ratings: Ever More

The trademark of the television executive is a crick in the neck. It comes from looking back over his shoulder. For TV planners decide what they are going to do next season only by prayerfully studying the ratings of the past season: discovering what they did right but failed to sell, what they did wrong which nevertheless sold well, what rival networks did with success that they could do too. Then they decide to do more of same. A study of the 34 new shows and 58 holdovers scheduled for the new fall season shows that spies are up, and so is witchcraft. Westerns are making a modest comeback, and literally every second offering will be a situation comedy. A healthy hunk of it all will be in color: NBC will color cast 96% of its shows, CBS 50%, and ABC 30%.

There is nothing much really new under the sunburst of color, however. The only show that can be called new--for TV at least--is Lost in Space (CBS), the story of a family named Robinson marooned on an unknown planet. (It must have been sheer torture for the boys to keep from calling it The Space Family Robinson.) Guy Williams, in silver suit minus his Zorro cloak, heads the mislaid clan. The amazing thing is that TV has never launched such a series into space before.

The Spies. It did not take nearly so long to tumble to the idea of rebottling Bond. The most imaginative of the imitators seems likely to be Get Smart (NBC), a spoof of the already spoofish Man from U.N.C.L.E., featuring Comic Don Adams as Agent Maxwell Smart (get it?--"Get Smart!"). Blooper-Spy Smart hasn't much cool. When his captor says he does not believe there are six Coast Guard cutters on the way to the rescue, Smart asks: "Would you believe five?"

In addition to Agent Smart and the returning U.N.C.L.E., Amos Burke of Burke's Law will quit the police force and become Amos Burke, Secret Agent. I Spy (NBC) will follow a top-seeded tennis amateur and his trainer who are in reality professional spy guys. Honey West (ABC) is a girl, but with Anne Francis in the role she is a fully Bonded sort of private eyeful. James West (no kin to Honey) disguises himself as a moneyed gentleman with his own railroad car, while working secretly for President Ulysses S. Grant. West heads off post-Civil War international plots against the U.S. that history never heard about, evidently because West was so successful. The CBS show is called-yup--The Wild, Wild West.

For those who like their Bond stirred and not unsettlingly shaken, ABC is aiming somewhere between 007 and 77 Sunset Strip. The F.B.I. will serve up ex-77 Sunset Stripper Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as an agent so gosh-darn clean cut that J. Edgar Hoover has grunted his first TV seal of approval.

Old Tricks & Dogs. There was evidently enough abracadabra in last year's Bewitched formula to inspire three new ghosts to walk. In NBC's My Mother the Car, Ann Sothern has died but returns as the disembodied voice of a car Jerry Van Dyke buys. The Smothers Brothers (CBS), who used to be a funny-folk duo, will impersonate a junior executive and his deceased brother who returns as an angel, I Dream of Jeannie (NBC) tells the imaginative story of an aspirant astronaut and Jeannie, a genie (it's a big year for clever names). As played by Barbara Eden, Jeannie is apparently not dead, but she keeps returning just the same.

So do situation comedies. Car, Smothers and Jeannie are only three of the 18 new shows that will be tickling the ribs of laugh machines next year. The most promising of the situations seems to be occupied by Hogan's Heroes (CBS), a sort of World War II P.O.W. version of Bilko's bunch who use their prison camp as an Allied headquarters for spying and plotting escape routes for downed pilots. As usual, though, it looks like old tricks for most of the other new dogs.

Run for the Fugitive. TV plans some new homes, or at least campsites, on the range. Four Texas rangers from Laredo (NBC) will be ranging Texas anew. The Legend of Jesse James has finally cracked TV and will get the cleaned-up Robin Hood treatment from ABC. ABC also has a variant of Bonanza called The Big Valley; Barbara Stanwyck plays Lorne Greene, dispensing wise advice and stuff to her three sons and a daughter, plus her dead husband's bastard boy for extra spice. Robert Horton, late of Wagon Train, has now forgotten his name and goes searching around the West for it as A Man Called Shenandoah (ABC). He may bump into Lloyd Bridges, who has come out of the sea and is also wandering the West trying to get happy in Rod Serling's The Loner (CBS).

Shenandoah and The Loner are not the only ones who hastily contracted the wanderlust bug after noting how well The Fugitive was doing on the lam. The most blatant copy will be Run for Your Life (NBC), in which Ben Gazzara is told he has 18 months to live (roughly three TV seasons). So with the grim reaper on his trail, he sets off to live dangerously all over the world.

Refreshing Behind. To make way for all the warmed-over Bewitched, Bonded and otherwise bewildered spin-offs of spinoffs, 31 last-season shows had to go. And with one eye fixed on the ratings, network executives guillotined a number of old standbys. Mr. Ed has finally closed his trap. Jack Benny will have no regular show for the first time since he started on radio 33 years ago. Neither will Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Paar, Bing Crosby or Joey Bishop. Also missing will be the sophisticated Rogues, the historically interesting Profiles in Courage, and the always dramatically cogent Defenders. Among the whole haul of new shows, only one appears in concept to have any chance of duplicating the originality of that departed trio. The Trials of O'Brien (CBS) is about a lawyer, but, as portrayed by engaging Peter Falk, O'Brien may be TV's first loser-hero. He ducks out of the office to the race track or a crap game, where he's chronically behind, is also nine months in arrears on his rent, and is more or less consistently chased by his ex-wife for back alimony.

It is, of course, much easier to follow old formulas, and in that pattern TV has increasingly turned to successful movies (often themselves derivative) as the basis of new series. That way the audience is already partially presold. Thus next season's fare will include series derived from Mister Roberts, Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies, The Wackiest Ship in the Army (all NBC), The Long, Hot Summer, Tammy and Gidget (ABC). Less taxing yet is to just show the movies themselves. NBC already shows two in prime time, ABC one, and all three shows are firm rating successes. So next year CBS will join up.

There is only one problem. Local stations have gobbled up so many films to stuff their non-prime-time schedules all day and late-night long that there are only an estimated 900 U.S. movies left. As many as a third of them may be too gamy for the home screens, or are still being held for further exploitation in movie houses. And so TV, which did so much to finish off the golden age of Hollywood, has come full circle. NBC and CBS have both commissioned Hollywood studios to create original movies for TV consumption.

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