Here Come the Merry Widows

On paper, the 1968-69 season, which opens this week, looks indistinguishable from 1967-68. Onscreen, viewers will find a few new wrinkles. Bonanza, Petticoat Junction, The Big Valley, The Andy Griffith Show and My Three Sons encouraged a trend by all featuring at least one character who was a widow or a widower. This year the trend becomes a stampede. In addition, the big, new angle is interracial -- there is a vast increase in roles played by Ne groes. Whether all this signifies a vast improvement in entertainment is, of course, problematical.

May berry R.F.D. (CBS) is a revised version of The Andy Griffith Show. The new star, Ken Berry, carries on in the tradition: he is a widower in love with a bakery employee (Arlene Golonka). Here's Lucy (CBS) is just a new title for the old Lucy Show, except that Lucy's two real-life kids will be around; naturally she is a widow. So is Doris Day (CBS), who is making her TV debut in The Doris Day Show. She portrays a singer who leaves career and city after the death of her husband and goes to her father's ranch to raise her children. Another situation comedy, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (NBC), is based on the 1947 movie by that name; the widowed heroine (Hope Lange) lives in a haunted cottage.

Two programs go in for a little extra insurance. Julia (NBC) is a Negro widow. Warns Star Diahann Carroll: "Julia is not going to tell it like it is. It's a comedy, and Watts ain't funny." Another Negro widow, played by Gail Fisher, will be a regular on the old private-eye series Mannix (CBS). A pair of new ABC adventure programs feature balanced tickets as well. The Mod Squad boasts three troublemaking dropouts who turn fuzz: one hip white chick (Peggy Lipton), one rebellious rich white boy (Michael Cole), and one ghetto black (Clarence Williams III). And The Outcasts are an odd couple of bounty hunters in the post-Civil War West. Don Murray plays a former slaveholder; Otis Young is a former slave. For viewers with more conventional tastes, CBS offers a long-unawaited TV revival of Blondie. What is most startling about this series is that the heroine (Patricia Harty) is neither widow nor Negro.

Boy Twiggy. If there is anything genuinely new in the new batch of sitchcoms, ABC can claim some dubious credit. Having proved with last year's hit, The Flying Nun, that audiences will sit still for anything that is sufficiently inane, the network now exploits its advantage with television's first series about a transvestite, The Ugliest Girl in Town. The story deals with a young Hollywood talent agent (Peter Kastner) who is mad for an English starlet. He works his way to London as a bewigged model and becomes the hottest mannequin since Twiggy. Kastner admits that at first he feared the show "might be offensive and in bad taste." After screening the pilot, he became convinced that it is merely "silly."

It is too early to write off 1968-69 as the silly season. Phyllis Diller, who bombed in an ABC sitchcom two years ago, will try a variety hour for NBC titled The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. The format includes a twist: in one segment each week, she will interview a celebrity. But the real get-the-guest free-for-all should be ABC's Don Rickles Show. Rickles, the insult comic, will knock off a guest or two per weekly half-hour. ABC will also try TV's first weekly book musical, That's Life. For continuity, the one-hour show will have a regular star, Robert Morse, and a continuing theme, modern marriage.

Wider Spectrum. Michael Dann, CBS's senior V.P. for programming, concedes that "the true excitement must come from specials." This year NBC will offer Roberto Rossellini's impressions of Sicily, an original drama starring Paul Scofield, and shows headlined by Brigitte Bardot and Elvis Presley. CBS promises a study of the Galapagos Islands narrated by Britain's Prince Philip, a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and another colloquy with Waterfront Philosopher Eric Hoffer. ABC will screen about 45 hours of the sum mer Olympics from Mexico, as well as a Truman Capote report on capital punishment and two more Capote teleplays. In news, CBS and NBC will pioneer prime-time shows with a magazine format. CBS's 60 Minutes, to be seen on alternate Tuesdays, will widen the TV news spectrum to include the arts. Among the "guest columnists": Norman Mailer, Bishop Fulton Sheen and British Critic Kenneth Tynan. NBC's First Tuesday, a monthly two-hour program starting in January, will stress aggressive investigative reporting. The goal, says NBC News Vice President Richard Wald, is "insight, not just the slam-bang of things."

National Educational Television will range from Bullfighter El Cordobes to Conductor Zubin Mehta, and from the psychological burdens of the ghetto to drinking problems in the suburbs. This could be the season when Public TV becomes the viewable alternative.

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