Burn Down Peyton Place?

Whenever a fresh idea comes on the air, TV programmers can be counted on to run it into the ground. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. spawned The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. Shindig stirred Hullabaloo. The Beverly Hillbillies called forth Petticoat Junction and then Green Acres. Now it's the turn of Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers.

Midseason replacement schedules include three Smothers Brothers or Rowan and Martin derivatives--and a fourth, an all-Negro Laugh-In, may yet be added by NBC. ABC will carry a still untitled show by Laugh-In Producers George Schlatter and Ed Friendly, introducing a group of unknown comics. What's It All About, World?, starring Dean Jones and produced by Saul Ilson and Ernest Chambers, originators of The Smothers Brothers, will also go on ABC. CBS will pick up another corporate effort by Smo-Bros Productions, The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour, featuring frequent visitations by Pat Paulsen. Among the other midyear substitutes following older formulas: an NBC mystery comedy, My Friend Tony, by Producer Sheldon Leonard (I Spy), and an ABC game show, Generation Gap, put together by David Susskind's Talent Associates Ltd.

Open Holes. The new programs will fit into scheduling holes opened up by the imminent demise of several series, most of which are less than a year old and never caught on. NBC is dropping The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. CBS is losing Daktari and Blondie. ABC is dumping The Don Rickles Show, The Ugliest Girl in Town, Journey to the Unknown, The Felony Squad and Operation: Entertainment. The network is also jettisoning The Dick Cavett Show (TIME, March 22), one of TV's most literate daytime programs, which rarely ranked higher than 35th among the 35 daytime shows included in the ratings. But the biggest casualty is likely to be Peyton Place, originally seen on ABC twice a week and at one point increased to three times a week. The five-year-old show has tumbled to the bottom third of the Nielsen rankings of prime-time programs. Next month, it will be cut back to one episode weekly, and by next fall, unless the ratings improve dramatically, it will go off the air for good. The problem is how to find a happy--or even any--ending for all the tangled people and plots of Peyton Place. Executive Producer Paul Monash admits that it will be impossible to "tie up all the story threads. The solution has been proposed to have the Miles family [Negroes, newly arrived] burn down the town."

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