The Overstuffed Tube

It was a week such as television has never known. After months of preparation and pilots, all three networks were jamming a whole yearful of new shows into eight consecutive nights. All totaled there were 88 premieres, 34 of them brand-new. And lest the viewers remain lethargic, the ads flanking the newspaper TV schedules flogged away at the public. "The new year begins tonight! Turn on the excitement," proclaimed ABC. "Celebrate NBC week--a week so big it lasts eight days," announced NBC. "Hey, look us over," pleaded CBS, "so fasten your seat belts and watch."

Seat belts? Straightjackets, perhaps. Even a three-handed, six-eyed shut-in would have been hard-pressed to cope; Friday evening alone, for instance, nine new shows were thrown on the air. New York Times TV Critic Jack Gould felt compelled to footnote his column, explaining that he had been able to write his reviews only because he had seen filmed previews. But by week's end it was clear that the quicker it was over the better. For never have the TV gristmills ground so ponderously and turned out such thin gruel.

Hack Hotspurs. The big news, such as it was, lay in the massive shift to color. NBC plunged heaviest, jumping its color programs from 70% of prime time last season to 96%. CBS (50% color) and ABC (40%) were more cautious, but still 18 of the new shows glowed with splashy hues. Their targets are the 3,600,000 color sets already in use and the networks are buoyed up by the knowledge that the public is now buying new color sets at the rate of 1,400,000 a year. That color provides an added dividend was clear both to viewers, for whom even a bad western becomes more bearable with real sunsets, and to the networks, who have proved that color can boost a show's rating by an all-important point or two. The ads look better that way too.

But even by TV's own mass-entertainment standards, the content of the new shows was deplorable, hackneyed, timid and banal. The new season fielded one barely passable show for every seven that were artistically bankrupt and boring. If the season seemed to have a theme, it was, what's new, copycat? ABC, for instance, tried to cash in on NBC's No. 1 Bonanza with The Big Valley. For Cartwrights there were Barclays, for Lome Greene there was a silver-haired ranch matriarch, Barbara Stanwyck, who is trying to head off the railroad from expropriating the family spread. The scriptwriters are only hack hotspurs. "No men beat the iron," runs a line, mouthed ominously by a railroader. "Sooner or later they die, and all they leave behind is dust."

The Great Beyond. ABC, whose Peyton Place has already proliferated into versions I, II and III, tried again with The Long Hot Summer, which had the gall to credit "the stories of William Faulkner," and then fell even below the standards of the 1958 Hollywood adaption. CBS's Green Acres tried a sitch switch on its own Petticoat Junction and Beverly Hillbillies. Carbon paper also produced a blurred copy of the

No. 2 show Bewitched. The result was NBC's I Dream of Jeannie, in which a genie (Barbara Eden) is discovered by Astronaut Larry Hagman inside a wide-bottomed bottle. Fatuously, he assumes that everyone at Cocoa Beach will believe his story. Naturally, no one does, including most viewers.

Even Ed The Talking Horse inspired emulation. CBS's My Mother the Car tried combining the U.S. fascination with cars, sex and Mom. But something happened in casting: the car is a 1928 convertible; Mother (who returns to earth from celestial regions, using the car radio as a voice box) is an invisible Ann Sothern; and as for Hero Jerry Van Dyke, he has finally answered the question, what is it that Jerry hasn't got that Brother Dick has? The Smothers Brothers also tried to cope with the Great Beyond. Tom Smothers is drowned at sea, returns to visit his brother Dick as an inept angel. It was better than coming back as an antique automobile, but not much.

Moron Smart. The new season had been billed as the big Bond payoff, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. seemed to have found the right spoofing approach; even with reruns, U.N.C.L.E. managed during the summer to stay up in the top ten. But oh what sins producers commit when they begin to counterfeit. ABC's Jane Bond, Honey West (Anne Francis) has all the getaway gadgets --including tear-gas earrings and a garter that converts to a gas mask--but she has not a chance of escaping the banalities of her script. CBS's The Wild, Wild West and Ulysses S. Grant ("The nation is in a pot of trouble, boy") enlist Major James West as a post-Civil War Bondsman. He is outfitted with his own railroad car replete with pool table, cues that unsheath to become sabers, billiard balls that detonate as hand grenades. But such gimmickery is simply cumbersome. Except for President Grant, who needs him?

Which is not to say that the Bond lode is worked out. NBC's parody, Get Smart, proves to be a very viable Fleming entry, mainly because it dares to be healthily sick when the competition is all sickeningly healthy. Straight-faced nasal Comic Don Adams plays Idiot Agent Maxwell Smart, an 0 bungling desperately to become an 007. In the opening episode, he was pitted against Mr. Big, played by Dwarf Michael (Ship of Fools) Dunn. Smart received a phone call during a black-tie concert from a receiver in his shoe. Then he sat down in Dunn's child-sized chair and walked away with it stuck to the seat of his pants, puffed madly at Dunn's butt-sized cigarettes, and generally behaved in outrageous taste. But somehow by the show's close, against the dull grey background of his colleagues, Moron Maxwell Smart seemed brighter than anybody. And funnier.

Moxie & Malarky. NBC's I Spy also succeeds, in part because it turns its back on the Fleming flammery, makes a hip thriller out of two CIA types touring the world as a tennis bum (Robert Culp) and his Oxford-educated Negro trainer (Bill Cosby). For all its stereotyped gunplay, the production has a style to which TV audiences should hope to become accustomed: lavish locations (Hong Kong in color for the first eight episodes), virtually choreographed direction, a swinging score, and a cant-and-cliche-free script, for which Culp doubled as author.

Also possessed of that swing is Trials of O'Brien, starring Peter Falk as a Manhattan criminal lawyer. A comedy successor to The Defenders, it is suffused with a breath of fresh (for TV) wit and literacy, and Falk steeps the role in a New York City boy's moxie and malarky. After winning a case, he shrugs: "You can't lose them all." Not in court anyway, though Falk blows enough on the ponies and at craps to stay hopelessly in arrears on his rent and alimony payments. All of which should make him an empathic and irresistible anti-hero to all but a handful of complaining image makers from the American Bar Association. The latter have already issued a complaint.

Nifty Legs. With comedy this season all but moribund, it comes as a surprise to find it popping up in, of all places, a German P.W. camp in Hogan's Heroes (CBS). Natuerlich, the World War II Teutons are Dumkopfs, and the prisoners run rings around their captors, blackmailing them into submission with dark hints that if anything goes wrong at the camp, Hitler will send them all marching off to the Russian front. So they allow the captives to print money, smoke their cigars--to do everything in short but escape. It's slapstick Stalag 17, but just funny enough to keep viewers happily in the bag.

Celebrities proved largely loss leaders. Steve Lawrence tried using Lucille Ball, got his show stolen right out from under him as she sang, danced and displayed, at age 54, the best pair of legs in town. The Dean Martin Show tried flooding the screen with headliners such as Frank Sinatra, Eddie Fisher and Diahann Carroll, but for all the nudging, warbling, winking and leering, the party turned out to be the kind you would thank the stars for not attending. "Folks," said Martin at the close, "there's an old show-business tradition: the show must go off."

Could be, and the substitute Thursday night was no farther away than a flick of the dial, where Sinatra was competing with himself as Major Marco in The Manchurian Candidate. Beside CBS's Thursday Night Movies, there is also NBC's Tuesday Night at the Movies and Saturday Night at the Movies and ABC's Sunday Night Movie. Since the three networks, now locked in a furious three-way ratings tie, can't begin yanking shows for 13 weeks, and significant ratings will not emerge before late November, these may provide the only safe haven.

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