The New Shows

The new television season has formally weighed in, and so far, in the main, it seems like a ton of feathers trying to crowd together on a butcher's scale. But among this week's and last week's starters, there also are some solid spots.

Thriller (NBC) is an hour-long bloodmobile with Boris Karloff as host. Last week's unpromising premiere involved a Manhattan corporate executive framed as a murderer by a kleptomaniacal kook.

The Aquanauts (CBS), a new series, turned out to be sea-horse opera of the first water about a pair of professional divers. The first episode got them into a struggle to outdo another diver in collecting manganese deposits off Hawaii. It could have been so much submarine corn if the show had not been crisply written and cleanly shot, and well swum by Actors Keith Larsen and Jeremy Slate. Aquanauts' chase scenes take on an odd, ballet quality 35 fathoms down, and the special language of the skindivers is at least less rusty than the dialogue that comes out of the average Warner Bros.' stage coach. On last week's show, snagging a smoothly globular blonde, played by Darrah Marshall, one aquanaut observed: "I knew I'd have to decompress her before I took her to the surface."

Checkmate (CBS) shows promise of becoming one of TV's better private-eye series, is slickly and expertly tooled (moving tree shadows, sudden screams), and uses its one-hour format to advantage by tossing in three detectives instead of the more usual single eye. Calling themselves Checkmate, Inc., the three took on their first customer last week, a female rancher (Anne Baxter) who turned out to be a murderer.

The Shirley Temple Show (NBC) began its career this week in The Land of Oz, an imprecise locale which actually seemed to be more the land of Ozzie and Harriet. Comedian Jonathan Winters, however, gave a memorable performance as Lord General Nikidik, fulfilling a confessed Winters' dream from boyhood days when he wanted to become a general (to no one at all, young Johnny would shout repeatedly, "The rest of you are privates"). Agnes Moorehead, a suitably grating witch, all but punctured the screen with her cockney accent, and Sterling Holloway, as Jack Pumpkinhead, cried seeds instead of tears. Hostess Temple herself, whose new series will include such additional material as Winnie-the-Pooh and Kim, played--within her limitations --both Princess Ozma and the boy Tip. She turned up for the new season deglamorized, lacking the airy coiffure and shining lipstick which she used to help sell last season's Shirley Temple Story Book.

National Velvet (NBC), a series based loosely on the 1945 film that established the career of twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, is set by television in the U.S. rather than England. The first episode was given over to the successful efforts of Velvet Brown (Lori Martin) to rescue a horse from the Ken-L-Ration can, had a certain oaty charm.

The Tab Hunter Show (NBC), opening this week, demonstrates once again that Tab's acting range pretty much consists of a capacity to inhale and exhale through his seemingly polyethylene eye balls. As Paul Morgan, a Malibu Beach cartoonist, he is felled by one sandy starlet after another, but the word on the beach is that the whole thing is phony abalone.

Pete and Gladys (CBS) sets up Actor Harry Morgan, the next-door neighbor from the defunct December Bride, in a show of his own. Pete and Gladys (Cara Williams) kid around a lot and have little spats and all that, but they are really mad about each other. "It's a new house," observed one character, in this week's first installment, "but still the same old jokes."

Expedition! (ABC), with Explorer-Author-TV Producer John D. (Danger Is My Business) Craig as host, follows the 1959-60 trail of Tracker John Gunther as the show wanders the earth looking for Abominable Snowmen, African bushmen and socially disinclined jungle Indians in Brazil. The Frozen Continent, this week's opening program, extends TV's stay-at-home commuter service to Antarctica, nicely balances biological and geophysical information with its documentation of winter life near the South Pole.

The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (NBC), reflecting TV's recent back-to-Poe trend toward suspenseful dilemmas that need to be solved rather than shot, opens its first regular season this week (after four shows last spring) with Rex Harrison and Tammy Grimes in a superb, spoofily whimsical adaptation by Drama Critic Walter Kerr of Richard Marsh's The Datchet Diamonds. Exchanging his Gladstone bag by error with another that contains some -L-36,000 worth of stolen gems, Rex manages to preserve his fortune, restore the diamonds, fall in love with Tammy and simultaneously avoid being done in by the woggiest group of thugs west of Conrad's Victory.

Raven (NBC) stars Skip Homeier as something called Dan Raven, a sort of semiprivate eye who shares his billing with such guest performers as Singers Bobby Darin and Paul Anka while he works his beat on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip. Boyish-looking and hyper-hip, he is apparently convinced that murder can be fun. The show may have to go some to avoid the epitaph: "Quoth the ratings, nevermore."

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