Judgment on the New Season

TELEVISION

Television, which has long since replaced the crackling fire as the cozy thing to sit by of an evening, was once quite a blaze. Machine guns ratta-ta-tatted, switchblades sang, and grand mothers grunted as fists hit their mandibles. In the last couple of seasons, however, the pyrodynamics have agreeably relaxed. All that sputtered now wheezes cordially. None of this season's new series is objectionable. And a hand ful are quite good.

The best new program on the air is East Side, West Side (CBS), which stars George C. Scott as a Manhattan social worker. Well written and excellently acted, the show is neither maudlin nor melodramatic, having disciplined dialogue and high plausibility. The first segment was about a prostitute who was also a devoted mother, a theme that could have been treated with cheap sensationalism, but was presented instead as a sensitive and unsentimental examination of moral ambivalences.

Playhouse '64. The so-oalled dramatic anthologies are generally well turned. NBC's Kraft Suspense Theater premiered last week with a really exciting war mystery. The Great Adventure, a CBS program produced by John Houseman, presents a different dramatized event from American history each week. The first was a well-written teleplay, with Jackie Cooper and Charles MacArthur, about the development of a Confederate submarine. And NBC's Espionage tells spy stories that, by early returns, show promise.

The Richard Boone Show (NBC) has considerable potential because it has freed the accomplished Boone to be anything he likes--lawyer, promoter, bus driver, drunk--in successive, unrelated shows. On NBC, Bob Hope's Chrysler Theater (Hope is the host, not a performer) began with a play by Rod Serling. It was about a modern-day Chippewa who goes back to his town to avenge his father's death. It frequently sounded good. "You have no tribe," said an old redskin. "You are a scar that walks like a man." But the story had a formula slickness.

Oats & Outs. Television has two new westerns this year and one of them is first-rate. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (ABC) is based on Robert Lewis Taylor's novel about a boy's life in a wagon train on the California trail. It is directed with a spare honesty and superbly acted by Dan O'Herlihy as Jaimie's father. The trail story has its light side, but a necessary, ruthless brutality is always present: women are attacked, children die, a man is knocked cold, then strapped to a horse and sent to a party of hostile Indians. It's his life or everyone's. Temple Houston (NBC), whose hero is an 1880 lawyer who rides the circuit looking for work, seems to be as phony as McPheeters is genuine, a program on which a flying bullet sings past a man's heels and spins his spurs.

For the first time since the scandals, a network ventured a return to the big money quiz, with contestants competing for $100,000 on an ABC show called 100 Grand. The master of cere monies behaved like an inquisitor, suggesting that nothing could possibly go wrong, honesty-wise. Something did go wrong. Nobody was watching. The show has already folded.

There will be other foldees. Science fiction has never shot much of a ray into television, and this year's try--The Outer Limits (ABC)--is unlikely to start a new trend. Last week Donald Pleasence appeared as a professor who had a neurosurgical operation that harnessed the electricity in his brain, producing a ray-gun effect every time he looked at someone he didn't like. Plop, they fell dead of electrocution. During the show the screen danced and jumped with various antics of the cathode tube, intended to suggest "the mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits." At the end, an announcer said: "We now return control of your television set to you." That was a mistake. They'll never get control of it again.

Optional Midden. ABC's Arrest and Trial has laid an egg with two yolks. Something unique in television, it is a 90-minute double show in which Flatfoot Ben Gazzara has roughly 45 minutes to arrest someone, then Lawyer Chuck Connors spends the remainder of the time preparing and presenting the defense case. The whole is encased in a thin shell of phony dialogue and dramaturgy. Says the defense counsel to the judge: "I ask the court's indulgence while I present the schizoid face of forensic analysis." The judge might have to sit still, but viewers have their option.

Burke's Law (ABC) may last until Christmas. It features a Los Angeles police captain (Gene Barry) with an independent income who rides around in a Rolls-Royce driven by an Oriental chauffeur. One show features a parrot that squawks: "Rails up 2.6, utilities down 1.4." The cop has less distinguished lines to read. "That," he says, "is the way the body bounces."

Viewers who resist change can find something familiar in ABC's Breaking Point, the season's new addition to the psycho ward. Following the tried Kil-casey formula, there's a young, straight-talking psychiatrist and an old, knowing psychiatrist. There is also a slosh of psychiatric midden. How long will TV go on mistaking mental upset for high drama?

Startime. All kinds of other stars, big, little and loud, have started their own revues. None was awaited so fondly as Judy Garland, but The Judy Garland Show (CBS) is an awesome disappointment. Her voice is a scraping vestige of itself, and her producers have made her seem an interloper on her own set. More happily, The Danny Kaye Show (also CBS) has been a thorough delight and need only be maintained. There is no thematic thread--just Danny Kaye, pronouncing Los Angeles in approximate Castilian ("Loth Antheleth") or changing My Fair Lady lyrics into baseball songs like Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Fan?

Singer Jimmy Dean (The Jimmy Dean Show on ABC) yuks and yatters and carries on with homey talk and Bible songs while the beady eyes within his Hereford face rove the studio, missing nothing. Dean, whose recording of Big, Bad John once sent all teenagers, is really the darling of their mothers, who want to call him in off the street and give him a slice of warm pie with melting vanilla ice cream on it. Incredible as it may seem to ABC's metropolitan viewers, he may be around for a long time. It's a big country.

Jerry Lewis may not be. ABC has given him two full hours (The Jerry Lewis Show) to appear on the network --live and largely unrehearsed--each Saturday night. The show is loaded with intramural cracks, tedium, desperate-looking guests reaching for laughs, mechanical dolls that wave their arms and drop their pants, additional tedium, and the apparent illusion that several million people want to watch 120 minutes of the scriptless life of a semi-educated egocentric boor.

The Undependables. Oddly enough, the least novel area of the season contains the new situation comedies, long TV's most dependable moneymakers. Apparently, the networks just take it for granted that any six fools and a can of laughter will win high ratings. Paul Henning, who created The Beverly Hillbillies, is obviously attempting to corner corn. He has produced another CBS comedy called Petticoat Junction, a kind of Hickadoon through which runs an old steam train called the Hooterville cannonball. The railroad company is threatening to put the train out of service. Why bother? The Nielsen Limited is barreling up the track the other way.

Patty Duke, the superior child actress of The Miracle Worker, plays two roles as "identical cousins," one a square, the other a wild hare, in The Patty Duke Show (ABC). Her program works no miracles, but Patty, now 15, is a winning girl and pleasant to watch. Other shows are made palatable by three even riper pomegranates. Inger Stevens, for example, could stand still and smile for 30 minutes and win a higher rating than Joe Valachi pitching for the Dodgers. Unfortunately, she is imprisoned in the script of The Farmer's Daughter (ABC), a comedy series loosely based on the old Loretta Young movie. Diahn Williams is one of Harry's Girls (NBC), a comedy about a dance act that tours Europe. Most preadolescents have traveled enough to wince at the show's gauche international flavorings, and the humor is historic ("The count? Tell him to keep counting."), but Daddy will settle for Diahn, a tall, red-haired ex-baton twirler at the University of Miami.

My Favorite Martian (CBS) has a stopper of a girl too. She is Kathy Kersh, Miss Rheingold of 1962, and even a Martian can appreciate her mellow malt and hops. The show itself is really an animated cartoon that uses live people, chiefly Ray Walston as a professor of anthropology from one of the numerous universities on Mars, lately arrived by saucer. He disappears at whim like Topper, and he sprouts antenna horns that boing amusingly. Younger cats should lap him up.

Old Fares, New Standards. On NBC, Imogene Coca has become a gypsy Hazel, a domestic worker who has a new job each week. She and the show are called Grindl, one of those committee-tooled cute names that tickle 'em pink in Peekskill, but the old Coca cola still has the fizz that somewhat refreshes. Glynis Johns is that rarity, a beautiful woman who can also be funny. And she even manages to animate Glynis (CBS), about a woman who writes mystery stories and gets involved with miscellaneous killers while doing her research. Phil Silvers is back (The New Phil Silvers Show, CBS), this time as the shop foreman in an industrial plant. Plotting against management, he is really Bilko in coveralls; but Bilko obviously needs more time to adjust to civilian life. The old Bilko would never have been caught dead "breeding a city mouse and a country mouse to produce a suburban mouse." And Bill Dana has installed his character Jose Jimenez as a bellhop in a hotel. Working with Fellow Bellhop Gary Crosby

(The Bill Dana Show, NBC), Dana pronounces his jays as if they were aitches and people jowl. In one episode, Hollywood Hypnotist Pat Collins (TIME, Aug. 2) puts both bellhops to sleep and convinces them that they are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They dance through the lobby. Jilarious.

The most sensible standards of TV criticism rate television as comfortable popular culture, capable of rare accidents of quality, but never expected to be anything more than relaxing distraction. By those standards, the new season is more relaxing than distracting.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.