The New Season

In answer to numerous if inaudible requests to dramatize daily life on a weekly newsmagazine, NBC last week unveiled its new series, The Name of the Game (Fridays, 8:30-10 p.m., E.D.T.). The show is all about People, a hard-hitting mag staffed with the hard est-hitting newshawks since Steve Wil son and Lorelei Kilbourne cleaned up Big Town.

Tony Franciosa is People's handsome, daring ace reporter. His editor (Gene Barry) occupies an office that is only slightly more opulent than, say, Hugh Hefner's pad. Expense-account cash is as abundant and accessible as scratch paper. The researchers are not only resolutely clever but demure, sensuous and beautiful.

So far, that is a fair representation of conditions on any newsmagazine that could possibly come to mind. It is the story line that seems just a trifle exaggerated. In the first installment, Franciosa starts off on a routine assignment, tries to bribe one sexy girl, romances another, shoots two would-be assassins and, with the aid of the FBI, breaks up an international espionage ring. Then it's time for lunch. . . .

On occasion, the show will feature Robert Stack, who plays the handsome, hard-hitting editor on People's sister publication, Crime. The audience gets the punishment.

Among other TV premieres last week:

> The Outsider (NBC, Wednesday, 10-11 p.m.). Darren McGavin, who played Mike Hammer in the television series, is now a mercifully un-Hammerlike private eye named David Ross. In the first program, Ross got his work done without resorting to brutality and heman seductions; he impersonated a millionaire gambler in an effort to trap a crooked cardplayer. Ross exposed the cheater and departed, having provided the viewer with a provocative glimpse of a cutthroat poker game. That's all, and that's enough.

> The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (NBC, Saturday, 8:30-9 p.m.). Like the 1947 movie, this series dwells on an ethereal love-hate relationship. The ghost, Captain Gregg, is a crusty old salt (when he materializes), who scares people away from his beach house. Along comes Mrs. Muir, her two children and a Hazel-like housekeeper. After a couple of showdowns, Mrs. Muir decides that Captain Gregg is more bluff than gruff, and he concludes that a spiritual affair is better than nothing at all. The Muirs stay. Even for viewers who don't turn on to ghosts, especially in sitchcoms, the show is still a considerable improvement over flying nuns and disappearing Jeannies.

> Julia (NBC, Tuesday, 8:30-9 p.m.). Diahann Carroll, in her own series, is a black registered nurse who is trying to make it in whitey's world. Widowed Julia has a five-year-old son Cory, played by a winning little fellow named Marc Copage. They are pretty well off, judging from the nifty apartment they occupy. Still, Julia needs a job. She is turned away by America's only personnel director who is not desperate to hire Negroes. Fortunately, she finds a protector in cantankerous Dr. Chegley (Lloyd Nolan), who doesn't care what color she is as long as she knows her business. Some of Julia's problems are black, but her aspirations and life-style are white. That factor, despite NBC's laudable decision to bring Negroes more prominently into television, makes Julia hardly more than a small-screen Guess Who's Coming to TV?

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