The New Recruits: Old Faces & Tricks

Familiar faces in new situations, familiar situations with new faces and a few far-out fancies worked around the standard detection plot. So it goes with this season's new recruits in TV's crime-fighting force.

Lome Greene, for example, formerly the gruff boss of the Ponderosa ranch on Bonanza, is reincarnated as Griff (ABC), an ex-police captain who opens an antique-filled office as a Los Angeles private eye. The impossible-mission gambit is given a new workout by shows like Chase (NBC), which stars Mitchell Ryan as the head of a police unit assigned to cases other departments cannot handle.

Tough cops still come in two styles --young and hip, and old and grizzled.The former category is represented by Tony Musante as Toma (ABC), a narc whose specialty is disguises. The latter style was best exemplified by last week's The Blue Knight (NBC), a four-hour special strung out over four consecutive evenings. Based on the novel by the Los Angeles policeman and bestselling author, Joseph Wambaugh, it gave William Holden a solid TV dramatic debut as a patrolman who has been on the same beat for 20 years and decides to bail out.

In keeping with the Thanksgiving season, the networks have begun killing their ratings turkeys. The New Perry Mason Show (CBS), with the bland Monte Markham in the old Raymond Burr role, has been sentenced to oblivion. At least two other shows face a doubtful future: Tenafly (NBC), with James McEachin as a black middle-class suburbanite who shuttles from kids and crab grass to detective assignments; and Faraday and Company (NBC), wherein Dan Dailey engagingly plays a private eye just home after 28 years in a Latin American jail on a trumped-up charge.

Among the survivors, three stand out--partly on merit as well as ratings --as the season's hits:

Kojak (CBS) enables Movie and TV Heavy Telly Savalas to play a hard-bitten nice guy for a change--namely, a New York City police lieutenant. Savalas--three-piece suits, thick stogie, shaved head and all--makes the most of it, giving the kind of magnetic, idiosyncratic performance that can carry a show. He is aided by scripts and direction that reveal a sharp feeling for the city's tough lingo, roach-infested tenements and lurid neon street scenes. Last week Kojak solved the murder of a topless go-go dancer. The key clue that allowed him to trace the dead girl: the scars from silicone treatments on her breasts.

Hawkins (CBS) is James Stewart in the guise of an ol' country lawyer who likes to let on that "moral dilemmas give me gas." Along with his sidekick and cousin, nicely played by Strother Martin, he squared off in earlier episodes against big-city decadence (the season opener featured a gay apartment house, an alcoholic actress and an attempted rape of a Lolita-like minor). But in next month's installment the pair will really get to shuck the corn. They will return to Jim my's home town in West Virginia to defend a man accused of committing a blood-feud murder with a muzzle-loading rifle.

The Police Story (NBC) is an "anthology" series of unrelated episodes, which--like The Blue Knight--is inspired by Policeman-Author Joseph Wambaugh, who acts as a consultant. All the dramas are set in that vast parking lot that is Los Angeles and unified by a single thesis: cops are human, heirs to the foibles of mankind and capable of being tender as well as brutal. Last month a detective recruited a junkie bank thief (Marjoe Gortner) as an informer, then became his pal, giving him shoes and lending him money. Typically for the series, however, the script took the easy way out of the complications that were so plausibly created. The junkie conveniently died of an overdose.

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