Not Worth a Second Look

Television's dark age seems to be continuing into the 1970s. The 1969-70 season began dimly last fall, and the "second-season" replacement shows that premiered last week did not exactly brighten the picture tube.

Except, perhaps, for admirers of Johnny Cash and country music, in that order. The Johnny Cash Show, a fill-in hit last summer, is back on ABC with more of the Nashville sound. Another fair-weather favorite, Hee Haw, has returned to CBS; a bucolic Laughin, the show has a certain nitwit charm--for about seven minutes.

The only other new program with a glimmer of interest is Pat Paulsen's Half a Comedy Hour (ABC). Smothers Alumnus Paulsen led off with an embarrassing sketch played in Minnesota with Hubert and Muriel Humphrey. The comic, who supposedly had a stalled car and no overcoat, took pratfalls in snow drifts while the former Vice President, who was all bundled up, made interminable chatter. Other opening-night visitors were Daffy Duck (in animation) and the unthinkable Debbie Reynolds. The one amusing bit in the whole 30 minutes was the closing segment in which Pat pleaded with the "Nielsen families" to keep tuning in. Tearfully, he suggested that if low ratings caused cancellation of the show, "over 75 people will be out of work . . . The money received from tonight's show," he said, "went to help my little boy's puppy recover . . ." When the sequence was over and the camera presumably off, Paulsen turned, dry-eyed, to the director. The question was crisply professional: "Is that it?"

The Tim Conway Show, which premieres on CBS this week, is also a witless formula sitcom, starring the ex-McHale's Navyman as pilot of a broken-down, one-plane airline. In the first episode, Conway gets locked out of the cockpit in midflight. Hilarious.

Nanny and the Professor (ABC) is yet another despicable pastiche of overused situation-comedy staples. Put together one beleaguered widower (Richard Long), three oppressively cute kids, one English governess with psychic powers named Phoebe Figalilly (Juliet Mills), a pack of frolicsome pets, and what do you get? Mary Poppycock.

The Engelbert Humperdinck Show (ABC) is an egregiously ordinary variety hour headlined by the British singer who got nowhere until he changed his name from Gerry Dorsey. He has a passable baritone and is now purportedly worth about $8,000,000. But why can't he hire some writers?

Unbearable as these shows are, none is half so painful as Paris 7000 (ABC), featuring George Hamilton as a trouble shooter at the U.S. embassy. George is all that remains of the most expensive (original budget: nearly $8,000,000) debacle in TV history, The Survivors. The series was glued together in the frantic eight weeks since ABC gave up on the original program. George professes to believe that in Paris 7000 there is "more of the real me," which is to say the patina beneath the suntan of a man who after eleven years in acting still has only two expressions--a saturnine scowl and a smirk.

ABC ads last week urged America to "take a new look" at the 1969-70 season. Why? Of the 30 series introduced this year, only one is at all distinctive: Room 222, ABC's comedy drama about a black schoolteacher. The Bill Cosby Show (NBC) has also had its weeks, as have My World and Welcome to It (NBC), the sitcom about a cartoonist resembling Thurber, and The Bold Ones (NBC), the doctor-lawyer-police trilogy. But if anyone should take a new look at what TV has wrought this past season, it is the networks.

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