Viewpoints: The New Season, Part I

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Here it is, folks! The week you have been waiting for, the week the networks premiere their brand-new, grand new ... ah ... product mix. Admittedly that phrase falls a trifle lamely on the ear, lacking as it does the excited tone of the on-air promos they have been pumping at us all summer. It does, however, have the virtue of accuracy. To begin with, the "new season" consists mainly of old stuff. Among television's 70 regularly scheduled prime-time programs, no fewer than 45 are carryovers from last year (and, in several instances, the year before the year before that, and are they really going to show Marcus Welby cash his first Social Security check?).

More significant -though scarcely startling after decades of dashed hopes -almost all the new programs are the smallest possible variants on well-established genres -ethnic sitcoms, cop and doctor shows, revivals of such time-tested media favorites as Ellery Queen and The Invisible Man.

If there is a trend no bigger than a program director's soul to be discerned here it is two half-hour comedies that deal with fortyish women trying to start new lives. Fay (NBC, Thursday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.) is played by Lee Grant, and she is a divorcee. Phyllis (CBS, Monday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.) is a newly widowed Cloris Leachman. Both, coincidentally, are trying to work things out in overused San Francisco.

False Hysterics. The problem is that there is nothing intrinsically funny about widowhood, grass or otherwise, and it is a mistake to try to create big boffs, broad running jokes out of these conditions. Silly, honest, human errors occur when someone is trying to make a new life, and it should be possible to make gentle rueful human comedy out of the attempt to muddle through. But Phyllis is paced and played as if it were a zany farce. Fay is hobbled by an ex-husband whose profession is surely borscht-belt comedy. It is impossible to understand why she ever married this yakster. He is a creature of the anything-for-a-laugh desperation that turns both shows into exercises in false hysterics. Still, they are efforts to find the humor in situations that increasingly large numbers of Americans are actually experiencing. Any show that makes even a botched attempt to model itself on life instead of last year's Nielsen winners probably deserves a second look.

Once is more than enough, however, for the likes of Big Eddie (CBS, Friday, 8 p.m. E.D.T.), The Montefuscos (NBC, Thursday, 8 p.m. E.D.T.) and Doc (CBS, Saturday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.). People like these must have existed once so that the movies and television had something on which to base their models. For decades now, however, these characters have only existed as TV cliches. The predictability is not just unfunny, it is infuriating. Big Eddie (Sheldon Leonard) is the semitough owner of a sports arena cut off the loud-checked Damon Runyon cloth. As a nod to more recent fashion, he has been given a hip black man as an assistant. But as the subliterary tradition to which he belongs insists, he is married to a wise-dumb ex-chorine, and they are warmhearted and lovable despite their grammatical struggles.

The Montefuscos are a prolific Italian family who yell and hug a lot and have a Wasp son-in-law to make the butt of their hearty humor. They are warmhearted and lovable despite their mercurial temperaments. Doc (Barnard Hughes) is a crusty, idealistic doctor ministering to a poor neighborhood. Doubtless it will soon be revealed that he goes on house calls, making him a fantasy figure as remote as The Six Million Dollar Man. He is just plain warmhearted and lovable. The first episode, in which a priest tricks him into attending Mass by beating him at poker, is the best proof yet of the contention that excesses of sugar can make you crazy.

Such signs of sanity as exist in this week's sampling of the new shows derive from a likely and an unlikely place. The likely source is Mel Brooks. When Things Were Rotten (ABC, Wednesday, 8 p.m. E.D.T.) hacks away at the Robin Hood myth with a broadsword. If it is not up to Young Frankenstein, or even his earlier TV venture Get Smart, it still proves that second-rate Brooks can come close to being first-rate television. For instance, the fellow with the thankless task of reading unpleasant royal proclamations enlivens his role by doing a very passable imitation of Olivier's Richard III. And when the peasantry, muttering revolt, are told to hold their tongues, it is unreasonably amusing to see 50 extras stick them out and literally grab them.

Verbal Flights. The unlikely source of optimism is a little-publicized ethnic comedy called Joe and Sons (CBS, Tuesday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.). Here, too, the principals are Italians, and the first episode, like that of Doc, involves getting a doubter to return to church. The earnest efforts of the title character (played by Richard Castellano, who gives us an unprecedented figure, a phlegmatic Italian) and his buddy (Jerry Stiller) to save an errant soul are at once hilarious and touching. They engage in wild verbal flights to prove that you can believe in someone invisible ("You've never seen Howard Hughes, have you?"), and that the evidence of God's spirit is everywhere. "God writes all the songs!" Stiller cries triumphantly at one point. "You mean to say God wrote Zippity-Do-Dah?" a puzzled, momentarily shaken Castellano asks. Pace and construction are as good as the gags on this show. More important, anyone -regardless of race, creed or income -can readily sympathize with the characters. When seriously dealing with an adolescent, who has not found his rhetoric rising, his eager arguments backing him into absurd corners? In short, Joe and Sons features human beings, comically exaggerated, to be sure, but solid and recognizable.

Less Idealistic. So far, there is no new dramatic series that can say as much. Medical Story, (NBC, Thursday, 10 p.m. E.D.T.) is an attempt to ape the success of the allegedly adult cop anthology Police Story. It is shot and edited in fake cinema-verite style. Mild profanity is allowed, gynecological problems are openly discussed and some doctors are shown to be something less than idealistic. But there is still more of Dr. Kildare than genuine originality or moral courage to the program; characterizations are strictly comic book and whenever anyone criticizes an M.D. it is hastily pointed out that the vast majority of doctors are splendid chaps.

Starsky and Hutch (ABC, Wednesday, 10 p.m. E.D.T.) are a jivey detective team, cheeky to authority, kindly to the oppressed. Played by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, they dress raffishly, drive too fast and generally behave like a mini-Mod Squad. Nothing new there. Ellery Queen (NBC, Thursday, 9 p.m. E.D.T.), starring Jim Hutton, is a garage-sale period piece. The presence of Guy Lombardo, some ancient autos and the oldest of detective story conventions (all suspects are assembled in one room to await the results of the detective's ratiocinations) are supposed to evoke nostalgia. They do not -and the format's stasis is numbing.

Still, wheezy is not queasy. Queasy is The Family Holvak (NBC, Sunday, 8 p.m. E.D.T.). They live in the bottom land below Waltons' Mountain and east of The Little House on the Prairie, in the never-never 1930s where hard economic times bring out the best in folks. This conceit is, of course, without historical basis and the cloying piety with which it is constantly reiterated on these shows -aimed primarily at children -is repulsive. In one respect, the show has the advantage over its competitors: Dad (Glenn Ford) is an ordained minister, so he has a professional excuse for endlessly mouthing two-bit moralisms that the other father figures lack. The decision to equip the sound track with a rustic ballad commenting on the action is, however, a howling wrongo. (Sample rhyme: "My mom, who never had a fur,/ Must have known how rich we were.") The song does tip the program toward unconscious self-parody, but not nearly far enough. The only hope here is to put Mel Brooks on as a consultant.

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