Recycled Waste

If nothing else, the TV networks' "second season"--shows substituted midterm for those killed by bad ratings --could serve as a postgraduate seminar for ecologists. No other U.S. industry is as practiced or proficient in recycling its waste products.

The CBS replacement entries include a series of Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners reruns dating from 1969. NBC is introducing two substitutes it bought two years ago and then shelved. One of ABC's fill-in series is The Reel Game, a formula quiz show produced by and starring Jack Barry, who was associated with Tic Tac Dough and Twenty-One until the 1958 rigging scandals. A syndicated revival of Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life returned to the air in 107 cities last week.

The only vaguely venturesome show among the seven network replacements is CBS's All in the Family. But its promotion campaign underscores the whole downhill history of television in America. Triumphs the CBS ad: "You are about to see something entirely new in comedy. Real people." In fact, the characters are only gross caricatures who may be different from--but barely more real than--the inhabitants of any other American half-hour situation comedy.

Family is based on the BBC's classic satirical series on lower-middle-class racism, Till Death Do Us Part. The copy, however, has none of the original's vulgar gusto, savagery or plausibility. By way of a breakthrough for CBS, there is an on-air burp. A black is called a spook, a Jew is called a Yid. Nuns and preachers, pinkos and John Wayne get equal slurring time. The show proves that bigotry can be as boring and predictable as the upthink fluff of The Brady Bunch.

CBS's other new production gives Andy Griffith a second bash at a comeback during the 1970-71 season. The (socalled) New Andy Griffith Show is really just a return to the old original Andy Griffith Show. This, too, is recycled waste. In the first series, starting in 1960, Griffith was a lovable sheriff who rode his patrol car to the No. 1 spot in the Nielsens before the tedium overtook him in 1968. Last fall Griffith was made less bucolic in Headmaster, which involved a private school where the kids were into pot and such. The show was apparently too "relevant" (in the network use of the term) for Griffith fans; the pedagogue plopped as low as 67th (out of 79) in the ratings. Hence CBS's decision to re-rusticate Andy in midwinter. Now he is a lovable small-town mayor. New Griffith tends to glaze over with Hollywood slickness whatever true grit the earlier shows had, but the premiere sent the actor back up to No. 12 in the Nielsens.

Pale Fondas. One of the shows that NBC pulled off the shelf is Strange Report, a British-made detective drama. (The other, From a Bird's Eye View, debuts in March.) Strange Report's only drawback seems to be that it is discomfitingly sophisticated compared with the jaw-busting genre of American police stories. In the opening episodes, the acting was first-rate (Anthony Quayle plays Criminologist Adam Strange), and there were flashes of intelligence and piquancy not to be found in a domestic melodrama.

None of the four new ABC series is nearly as engrossing. The Smith Family is a half-hour "comedy-drama" starring Henry Fonda as a compassionate detective sergeant who mans the barricades against crime and the generation gap. The rest of the Smiths and their interplay pale by comparison with Fonda's real-life family, but his series is distinguishable from the competition in three respects: Fonda's own performance, his insistence that the laugh track be removed, and the fact that he is not a widower (Janet Blair plays his wife).

Alias Smith and Jones is a western about two desperadoes (Ben Murphy and Pete Duel) in search of vocational guidance. It would be shamelessly derivative of ABC's old Maverick if it did not owe even more to the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Murphy, in the role of Jones, has the same blue eyes, curly locks and, to the best of his meager craft, the mannerisms of Paul Newman, who played Cassidy in the movie. What is missing is the panache.

The Pearl Bailey Show might just as well be titled the Pearl Harbor Show. Pandering to its time slot immediately following Lawrence Welk, the variety hour is creaky in sets, costumes, camerawork and guests (Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, Bing Crosby). It should appeal only to Bailey fans and viewers who want to close their eyes and recapture the tingle of radio--a practice to be seriously considered in preference to watching most of the first and second TV seasons.

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