The New Season: I

Like Jimmy Stewart said, "TV is where the action is."

--Glenn Ford

There is a massive breakdown in law-and-order that should be curbed. I wanted to contribute something that said, "Preserve the system."

--Jack Webb

If this show fails, it'll be one of the great failures.

--Anthony Quinn

Among them, Ford, Webb and Quinn summed up the new prime-time TV season that premiered on the three networks last week. Some of the brightest and longest-holdout stars, now caught in the twilight of Hollywood and of their own careers, swallowed their images and signed on for TV series.

Quinn's fear of failure and the problem with the season have a common source: the same old production executives, like Jack Webb, and the old writers are still in command and timorously repeating and protecting themselves. The formats and scripts, as ever, are beneath the talents of the first-rank performers now appearing on television.

As Webb pointed out, law-and-order is this season's watch--or don't watch --word. More than half of last week's new shows concerned private or public eyes, or the crusade against crime. Even Larry White, an NBC programming vice president, confesses that the proportion represents "an overdose." But there are a few potentially diverting series and a few harbingers of reform.*

This story examines the season's new drama series. Next week TIME will review the comedy shows, hoping that some of them will have grown funnier by then.

THE PERSUADERS (ABC). "I'm Brett to my friends, but you may call me darling." Lady Brett Ashley speaking? No, Lord Brett Sinclair (Roger Moore, TV's engaging former Saint), who is the Oxbridge playboy half of The Persuaders. His co-persuader is Danny Wilde, a new-rich high roller from The Bronx (Tony Curtis), and the two of them womanize and swashbuckle around the Cote d'Azur "in the name of justice." For all their jet-set airs, their plebeian repartee and stupefying plots make Roger and Tony emerge more like Batman and Robin in ascots. Catch the show fast lest the Nielsen ratings get there first.

CADE'S COUNTY (CBS). Glenn Ford, an earlier choice for the Tony Curtis part in The Persuaders, fortuitously turned it down, he says, "because that would have meant traveling a year." Instead, Ford is making his TV debut in Cade's County as a sheriff in the contemporary Southwest. In the premiere, the plotting was raw, but the dialogue and new TV Star Ford proved uncommonly authoritative.

CANNON (CBS). This is another slice of Dashiell Ham, with William Conrad featured as a high-priced private investigator. The first episode, involving armed robbery of a rodeo box office, was unconvincing and, in the end, embarrassingly sentimental. Conrad himself, who resembles a cross between Orson Welles and Walter Cronkite, is a screen-crowding presence with a pomegranate voice enriched by eleven years as radio's Matt Dillon.

THE D.A. (NBC) and O'HARA, UNITED STATES TREASURY (CBS). Fingerprints are unnecessary to detect the sledgehammer hand of Executive Producer Jack Webb behind these two. The dogged prosecutor in The D.A. is Robert Conrad (no kin to William). David Janssen (The Fugitive) is the T-man in O'Hara, relentlessly rooting out traffickers in contraband armaments, moonshine and, in the crudely crafted premiere, what he calls "happy sugar" (heroin).

NBC MYSTERY MOVIE. This is a catch-all title for three 90-minute miniseries that will play in alternate weeks. Last week's curtain raiser of the trilogy, Columbo, with Peter Falk in the title role, sounded like a chronicle of some kind of Kosher Nostra; but Falk was in fact a disheveled, runty, squint-eyed detective lieutenant who ferreted out a murderer like a Roto-Rooter. This week the series rotates into a McCloud segment, picking up an element of one of last season's few new engaging series, with Dennis Weaver as a lasso-swinging New Mexico sheriff on loan to the New York City police. Next week comes the third and most awaited part of the trilogy, a Mr. and Mrs. North-type entertainment called McMillan & Wife. Wife is Susan Saint James, late of The Name of the Game. McMillan, who happens to be the police commissioner of San Francisco, is Rock Hudson.

BEARCATS! (CBS). Rod Taylor and Peter Cole are freelance adventurers circuiting through the tireless waste of the Southwestern desert in one of the first Stutz Bearcats seen in them thar parts. Their first quarry was a surplus World War I tank deployed by a band of bank-busting desperadoes. Taylor steers through it all with a lack of conviction that, considering the script and whole production, is entirely justifiable.

THE MAN AND THE CITY (ABC). The City is probably Albuquerque, and the man (Anthony Quinn) is a slum-bred Mexican Irish American who became a mayor. The concept was promising until Executive Producer David Victor (Marcus Welby, M.D.) blew it, downplaying the politics and turning the series into what the trade calls "heart drama." Now Quinn seems to spend most of his time as a social worker battling for causes like, in the premiere, the rights of a deaf couple to keep their adopted child. Who needs a TV mayor with the sex appeal of Richard Daley, the political clout of John Lindsay and a heart as big as all Universal City?

OWEN MARSHALL, COUNSELOR AT LAW (ABC). Producer David Victor also spun off this series, which is basically just Marcus Welby, J.D. Marshall, played by distinguished Actor Arthur Hill, is a Samaritan barrister and, like Welby, has a young hotspur assistant (Lee Majors) to do the dirty work. What he seeks in his shows, says Victor, "is drama that has a way of striking hard at the emotions with a retentive hangover." What he means is a hangover on soapsuds.

LONGSTREET (ABC). This is another clutch at the heart, with James Franciscus (Mr. Novak) in the title role as a blind insurance investigator. The dialogue wallows in his affliction, but Longstreet asks no quarter. In the premiere, he becomes an expert in the ancient, supposedly Cantonese-style karate called "Jett kune do," and pummels the roughest goon on the waterfront all over Pier Six, thus wiping out a $1,000,000-a-month hijacking racket. In the end, warming up for future episodes, Longstreet takes to the pistol range. His score: two heart shots, two gut shots and, quips an associate, "two innocent bystanders."

The handicapped detective is not exactly new. Last week the most established of them all, NBC's Ironside, the wheelchaired chief inspector played by Raymond Burr, teamed in a two-hour movie to introduce and presumably build the ratings for SARGE (also NBC). Sarge is a longtime homicide detective who turned priest in his 40s--and does anyone remember O.K. Chesterton's Father Brown? The series, says its formidable star, George Kennedy, "is more cop oriented than priest oriented." In every crunch during the teaser episode with Ironside. Kennedy shucked his cassock and got into a sports shirt.

The collaboration of Ironside and Sarge points up two other runaway trends of the new season. One is the cross-pollination of network stars. ABC is pushing the gimmick to the limits, arranging for a call on Nanny and the Professor by Sportscaster Howard Cosell. The other big push is toward made-for-TV movies. They will run three or four nights a week this year, and before the season is out, some 125 will be shown. Some trade observers see this so-called "long form," any drama program running 90 minutes or more, as the salvation of the medium. Of course, as they used to say on television, "it's not how long you make it, but how you make it long."

* The season's most dramatic departure is the Federal Communications Commission's "primetime access" rule, which in effect requires the networks to turn back one nightly half hour to their local stations (TIME, March 29). But the impact of that rule will not be known for several weeks, or, ultimately, until next season when its provisions will be fully enforced.

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