The New Season: II

By Richard Burgheim

The situation comedy has long been the most outlandish and outmoded of the television genres. No man is Gilligan's Island. Whatever network programming vice presidents think, there is a difference between a fantasy classic like Peter Pan and a Screen Gems gimmick show like The Flying Nun.

Despite this record, there was some hope that the impetus of last year's comparatively fresh All in the Family, and the influx of top-drawer stars might lift the current season above the midden of the past. In fact, the networks' ten new comedy series--though their caricatures are slightly less grotesque--have sunk into the old predictability and sentimentality.

THE NEW DICK VAN DYKE SHOW (CBS).

This go-round, Van Dyke is cast as the host of a TV talk show in Phoenix, Ariz.; Hope Lange, after two seasons of sublimation in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, plays Mary Tyler Moore. In the witless premiere, Van Dyke was stuck with one joke, and one as grizzled as his new sideburns: the recidivism of reformed smokers. But the second episode--concerning the humiliation of a local-station headliner screen-testing for a network slot--portended a return to form by TV's consummate situation comedian and by the series' witty "creative consultant," Carl Reiner.

THE PARTNERS (NBC). Don Adams, the nutball hero of Get Smart!, a golden oldie of the sitcom form, returns as author and star of a derivative series with the same lunatic intensity and sporadically hilarious style. This time, Adams and a new partner, droll black Actor Rupert Crosse (The Reivers), are bungling plainclothesmen. Inevitably, they do not play as freshly or score as often as old Agents 99 and 86, but would you believe 89 and 76?

SHIRLEY'S WORLD (ABC). In this import from England, Shirley MacLaine portrays an impulsive photojournalist from the States, based in London. The premiere established her credentials in the face of a male-chauvinist editor; in the second segment, she got unprofessionally overinvolved in the tax problems of a home-distiller in Scotland. Both scripts were absurdly implausible and unworthy of the performer's literacy and charm. But Executive Producer Sheldon Leonard, who in better days produced I Spy and the old Dick Van Dyke Show, insists that Shirley will be the first TV comedienne to have an obviously healthy sex life. There is no sign of exactly what Leonard has in mind, but on Women's Lib terms, Shirley's consciousness is already raised several levels above that of CBS's Doris Day, who this season has just been promoted from secretary to token female reporter on her San Francisco magazine.

NICHOLS (NBC). A $40,000-a-week salary and a $1,000,000 TV-movie guarantee lured James Garner (Maverick) back to the comedy-western business. Cast as a sheriff in need of vocational guidance, he emotes with accustomed facetiousness, his eyes flecked with fear and with understandable lust for the bosomy barmaid (Margot Kidder) who is the town's tease. The second episode took a clumsy swipe at U.S. jingoism and even Viet Nam (a 1914 cavalry officer notes: "Sometimes to save a town, you have to destroy it"). But there is a loco charm and potential intelligence ticking in Nichols that distinguish it from most of the competition.

THE JIMMY STEWART SHOW (NBC). At 63, the still-winning old star finds himself in a not very winning extended-family situation. Stewart plays an idiosyncratic anthropology professor who wears a hairpiece and a ten-gallon hat, says grace with a gag punch line, and plays the accordion. His younger son and his grandson, as it happens, are both eight year olds ("Now you know what's meant by an absent-minded professor," Stewart comments). The level of script and wit is such that Stewart even delivers contrived asides and winks to the audience, appealing for sympathy and, at the show's conclusion, another chance next week. He should seek succor instead from the producer-director-writer, Hal Kanter, whose previous contribution was Julia.

GETTING TOGETHER (ABC). Screen Gems and Bernard Slade, creators of The Partridge Family, are tightening their choke-hold on the teeny-bop audience. Pop Idol Bobby Sherman (Bubble Gum and Braces) is the sure draw as the composer in an unsung songwriting team. He is also guardian of his twelve-year-old sister (Susan Neher), who serves as housekeeper for him and his sappy live-in lyricist (Wes Stern), to the agitation of local social workers. The series' premise is a rather icky wicket, and Simon and Garfunkel the boys are not. But, as in The Partridge Family, the cast is disarming and the whole production surprisingly artful.

FUNNY FACE (CBS). Sandy Duncan stars in this show, which owes nothing to the 1956 Audrey Hepburn movie musical and everything to TV's That Girl and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Sandy plays an aspiring teacher working her way through college doing TV commercials. The package is too cute for comfort.

THE GOOD LIFE (NBC) and THE CHICAGO TEDDY BEARS (CBS) are the most annoying nitwits of the new situation travesties. In Good Life, a stockbroker and his wife (Larry Hagman and Donna Mills) check out of the bourgeoisie for the presumed comforts of becoming scrape-prone butler and cook to an anachronistic family of plutocrats (David Wayne and Hermione Baddeley). The plot smacks of those 1930s films that had fun with the Depression. Teddy Bears attempts to cash in on the nostalgia binge for the by-now-boring '20s, playing the gangland speakeasy scene for slapstick laughs. An apter title for this show would be The Unwatchables.

THE FUNNY SIDE (NBC). This mating of Laugh-In and sitcom is at least topical. Each week, the stock company of five couples (one young, one old, one cosmopolitan, one black, one hardhat) lights into a subject. Last week it was sex, and most of the gags were past their prime. The premiere the previous week took on health and, without drawing much blood, did at least pink such vulnerable targets as Americans' hypochondria, overcrowded waiting rooms, and the inadequacies of health insurance ("At today's prices, the only one who can afford to be sick is Howard Hughes"). The program's interlocutor, Gene Kelly, did not dance, and his material did not sing. Most of the sting in the first two weeks came from sassy Teresa Graves (formerly of Laugh-In) and the blue-collar couple, Warren Berlinger and Pat Finley. The elderly Burt Mustin and Queenie Smith were wry and especially welcome, considering that old people have heretofore been virtually anathema to television.

Within a month or two, A.C. Nielsen, the Grim Rater, will probably have cast down at least a few of these new comedies. But the networks have already groomed such summer-tested replacements as Sonny and Cher and British Comic Marty Feldman. Also waiting in the wings at CBS is splenetic and iconoclastic Don Rickles, who in the pilot for his next TV incarnation is cast as an advertising executive presumably with executioner power over TV shows. Given the quality of the new-season series to date, Rickles will not want for real-life material on which to exercise his spleen.

--Richard Burgheim

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.