Plus Ca Change

Week after week, the networks delayed their annual ritual of announcing the new fall schedules. Was some major policy shift in the offing? Were the congressional hearings on TV violence being taken to heart? Apparently not. When the final schedules were revealed last week, the delays seemed merely a result of the usual intramural poker game. All three networks are holding new hands, but the viewer is getting the same old deal.

Some longtime favorites are being dropped in the program shuffle. CBS's twelve-year-old My Three Sons and four-year-old Glen Campbell Show are going, and ABC is twitching its nose and making the eight-year-old Bewitched disappear from prime time. Some newer favorites are spawning the inevitable offspring. CBS is cashing in on All in the Family's success by giving Mrs. Bunker's Cousin Maude her own show. The ethnic emphasis begun by Family is showing up in several new entries. The Catholics and Jews are getting CBS's Bridget Loves Bernie, a variation on Abie's Irish Rose, which soft-petaled mixed marriages on Broadway in the '20s. In a more tentative gesture, ABC has Kung Fu, an adventure show set in the old West with a Chinese hero, to be aired every fourth Saturday.

Reverse Alchemy. Violence is holding its own. Five crime and Western shows are being canceled by the networks, but another six are being added. TV's medical corps, on the other hand, is definitely growing. NBC plans The Little People, about a Hawaiian pediatrician and his pediatrician daughter, and ABC has Temperature's Rising, about the chief surgeon in a big city hospital. Both shows will combine the medical genre with the situation-comedy formula. The only new programming of a serious nature is an hour on NBC that will alternate between NBC Reports and Alistair Cooke's BBC-Time-Life Films series, America.

The networks are also persisting in the reverse alchemy that so often has turned movie gold into weekly dross. An hour-and-a-half round robin of mystery shows on NBC will include Richard Widmark in a series called Madigan, adapted from the 1968 detective film in which he starred. On CBS, MASH, the grisly 1970 comedy about a troupe of Army surgeons in Korea, is becoming a half-hour situation comedy starring Alan Alda.

Also on CBS, Anna and the King of Siam, which has seen every other incarnation, will turn up as a series called Anna and the King. The schoolteacher will be played by Samantha Eggar; the King by the actor who took the role in Broadway and film musicals and seems to hold a patent on it: Yul Brynner.

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