The Quick & the Dead

One night last week, network research departments stayed up beyond midnight analyzing the new Nielsen ratings (see box). CBS quietly nodded approval, since CBS was designated overall champion of the air five nights a week, utter master of daytime TV, and possessor of eight out of the top ten individual shows. ABC was pleased, because its position had improved since last year. It has twelve programs in the top 40, for example, whereas it only had six a year ago. NBC oinked woundedly that these early national Nielsens are premature. Viewers are still picking their winter ruts.

Plastic Shocks. It is true enough that TV shows collect people as a magnet collects iron filings; audiences slowly accumulate. Only seven new series are listed in the top 40, but more are certain to climb up there later on. Danny Kaye failed to make it, but at 16.7 he is close and will probably rise. Burke's Law, Mr. Novak, The Phil Silvers Show and The Breaking Point nearly made the top 40 too. Three bombs: The Judy Garland Show, The Jerry Lewis Show and, most surprisingly, East Side, West Side, the critically applauded television debut of Actor George C. Scott. Two new shows were dropped. Redigo, the new NBC half-hour version of last year's Empire, was cut down. So was NBC's Harry's Girls.

If some people were leaping to doom, however, others were leaping for joy, and no one had as much cause to be ecstatic as Writer-Producer Paul Henning, 52, whose Beverly Hillbillies is apparently going to remain the most popular show in the nation for a second year, and whose Petticoat Junction is the highest-rated of all new shows. Henning, once of Missouri, is a sophisticated, urbane Hollywood type who sits at his typewriter ten hours a day gulping bouillon laced with yeast cubes or Metrecal as he turns out shock after shock of plastic corn.

People's Choice. The residents of Petticoat Junction are valley billies who seem to be lifted from a photographic negative of the Hillbillies show, with the same mock back-country manner and tone. The star (Bea Benaderet) is a widow who runs a rural hotel with her three foam-rubber daughters and her Uncle Joe (Edgar Buchanan), who has a pet wooden Indian 6 ft. tall that the gals keep hiding on him.

When Henning was a little fellow in Independence, Mo., he went to a Boy Scout camp in the Ozarks, where he soaked up the lore of the mountaineers and developed an ambition to write about them. But first he wrote for Burns and Allen, Rudy Vallee, and Fibber McGee and Molly. Then last year, he explains, "I felt that the climate was right for pure fun shows after a surfeit of hospital sagas, courtroom dramas and brawling westerns. If it's what the people want, God love 'em."

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