Year of the Unspecial

THE new TV season will not be new --TV seasons never are--but it will be different. The western, for example, is expiring like a perforated cowpoke, shot down to a mere five by critics of TV violence. Situation comedies--"sitch-coms," in the jargon of the trade--are up to 25, three more than last year. Adventure shows, in which journalists, lawyers or spies match wits and gimmicks, will shrink to 16, v. 18 last year.

But mostly, the '69-'70 season will be the full-blown season of the special --the one-shot show featuring a single entertainer or theme. TV's first spectacular, a 90-minute Betty Hutton songfest on NBC in 1954, was actually out of the ordinary. Nowadays, specials are so predictably unspecial that NBC alone has announced more than 100 for next season. Among the most ambitious is a production of David Copperfield starring Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Emlyn Williams and Dame Edith Evans. The most regal spectacular from CBS will be Royal Family, a peek at Queen Elizabeth and her kin. Jacques Cousteau's undersea documentaries will continue to shine on ABC.

Over the years, regularly scheduled programs have been getting longer. This season there will be 31 half-hour shows, 36 full-hour programs, three 90-minute extravaganzas and seven two-hour blockbusters. Even 30-minute comedies are being bunched in groups of three, for easy pre-emption by 90-minute specials. The long programs are so schedule-disrupting that they cannot help causing a fundamental change in the old 26-week parade of series episodes, since fewer programs will ride out a season uninterrupted.

This year will see a revival of an old programming concept. It is the anthology, a collection of unrelated programs grouped together under an overall name (remember Playhouse 901). Once, anthologies ruled the air, but over the years the series took over the schedule, leaving only an occasional anthology show.

This year ABC's Love, American Style calls itself an anthology of sketches, with no continuing characters and no continuing story line; all they have in common is romance. Several so-called series will also bear the anthology's earmarks. NBC's The Bold Ones will have three separate casts doing 60-minute dramas dealing with doctors and lawyers. ABC's Movie of the Week will be an anthology of unrelated 90-minute dramas.

Bit of Innovation. When it comes to programming, ABC traditionally has been the most innovative. The network was largely responsible for the flowering of mass-cast detective stories, freaky comedy characters, and programs tailored to appeal primarily to the under-30 set. This fall, ABC is introducing the idea of 45-minute shows aimed at the young. Based on Billboard magazine's hot-record charts, radio's Hit Parade will be turned into a new pop-music show, The Music Scene. Then, before viewers switch their dials, The New People will strand a planeload of youngsters on an abandoned Pacific island for another 45 minutes every week.

Aside from such timing gimmickry, the most promising innovation this season will come from NBC: My World and Welcome to It, a sitchcom about a cartoonist (William Windom) who daydreams. NBC promises that the show will include animated cartoons in James Thurber style.

For its part, CBS just rolls along, hoping to capture ratings with a resident brigade of television stars. Taking the Smotherses' CBS place this fall will be Singer Leslie Uggams in a musical variety series. NBC and ABC also have big names to offer. On NBC, Bill Cosby will play a schoolteacher and Debbie Reynolds a sportswriter's wife. ABC will go with a musical variety series called Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters Hour, strange as it seems, the sneak-preview of that show received high ratings last spring.

Among the sillier-sounding premieres will be NBC's . . . Then Came Bronson, with a peripatetic adventurer in love with his motorcycle; and ABC's The Brady Bunch, in which a widower with three sons marries a widow with three daughters. If that sounds like overpopulated plagiarism of My Three Sons, Fred MacMurray, the world's champion sitchcom widower, is getting married this season now that the boys are grown.

Still, the new schedule offers some hope. No longer must the viewer face a season rolling without highlight or change. Little by little, because the specials now show up nearly every night, the schedule is being broken up and poked full of holes. For the audience this means at least more choice--and a chance for some substantive fare.

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