The Unloved Ones

However else it is in the rest of the entertainment business, in television the show must go off. The average life expectancy of a TV series is less than two seasons, and this month 38 shows, a full 40% of the prime-time programs, will be sent packing.

Senior on the superannuated list is Ozzie and Harriet, which has persisted for 13 years. Perry Mason will sign off after nine years, Donna Reed after eight, and Hazel and The Flintstones after six. The top-rated Dick Van Dyke Show is the only one retiring--after five years--of its own volition. Explains Van Dyke: "We wanted to quit while we were still proud of the show."

Other casualties include the last of the doctors, Kildare and Casey; both The Addams Family and its imitator, The Munsters; and three combat comedies, Mr. Roberts, McHale's Navy and The Wackiest Ship in the Army. Four westerns are going thataway: Branded, Shenandoah, The Legend of Jesse James and The Loner. Peyton Place will run two installments a week instead of three, and its Southern version, Long Hot Summer, will be cut off altogether.

Hullabaloo and Jimmy Dean will be silenced as well. So will Sammy Davis, which recovered from its calamitous early weeks in every respect but ratings (it stood 96th of 104 at last calculation). Similarly, most of ABC's heavily shilled "second season" has had it: Blue Light, The Baron, Henry Phyfe. Some of the situation comedies, such as Gilligan's Island and Corner Pyle, are apparently too bad to die, but a few of the most mindless, among them Mona McCluskey and The Smothers Brothers, ran out of gags--just as My Mother the Car has mercifully run out of gas.

All this house cleaning should not delude viewers with the notion that better shows are necessarily in store for next season. "The trend and the entire mass appetite," explains CBS Programming Chief Mike Dann, "is toward larger-than-life drama. Anything true, about real people and real problems, is out." Thus, the 1966-67 batch of shows will include more situation come dies, more science-fiction shows, more spy and spy-spoof serials--all, in short, about untrue, unreal people.

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