The New Shows

On the basis of last week's entries, the 1955 TV shows are out to set a record low for lovable cuteness. Some samples:

Norby (Wed. 7 p.m., NBC) stars David Wayne as vice president of a Pearl River, N.Y. bank and Joan Lorring as his giggling wife. Like all TV investigations of small-town U.S.A., it is suffused in the rosy, nostalgic glow more common to the Gay Nineties than the 20th century. Filmed in color by sponsor Eastman Kodak Co., Norby finds its humor in an uncritical succession of minor disasters for Hero Wayne: he gets his arm caught in the lining of his sleeve; he shakes hands with a statue instead of a friend; he promptly breaks a desk he has been warned to take good care of. The show is one more TV monument to the accepted fatheadedness of the American husband.

Professional Father (Sat. 10 p.m., CBS) has Actor Steve Dunne pretending to be a child psychologist in what are described as "all kinds of hilarious adventures." Helping him to make a chump of himself are his wife, Barbara Billingsley, and the inevitable two children (Ted Marc and Beverly Washburn). As a psychologist, Dunne advises other fathers how to deal with their children but, naturally, it takes his all-wise wife to set him right on how to handle his own.

The Bob Cummings Show (Sun. 10:30 p.m., NBC) has a real twist: Bob is a bachelor. But since he lives with his widowed sister and her callow son, viewers are not deprived of any of the dubious delights of family comedy. Bob is also a Hollywood photographer, which permits him to be surrounded by shoals of swooning models as well as a yearning secretary. The plot of the opening show, sponsored by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., was composed of equal parts of slapstick and nonsense, and not even as able a light comedian as Cummings could do much with it.

Way of the World (weekdays, 10:30 a.m., NBC) is a TV soap opera with a difference: it promises to tell its dramatized stories in six to 15 episodes each, instead of going on endlessly. The current sudsy romance (sponsored by the Borden Co.) deals with Claudia Morgan and Philip Reed, who are supposed to be one of Broadway's better-known husband-and-wife acting teams. Claudia is growing deaf but won't tell her husband, who worries because she is acting peculiarly.

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