The Return of the Smothers

The Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. staged a modish little executive brain-storming seminar in exurban New York last week. The subject was the future of television programming; the guest thinkers included Anthropologist Margaret Mead, Esquire Editor Harold Hayes, Ford Foundation "Social Development" Officer Roger Wilkins--and Tommy Smothers.

Former CBS Star Smothers was kind of apologetic for his presence. "I didn't realize I was important until they made me shut up," he explained. But Tommy also sounded mighty wistful for larger audiences than the Westinghouse assemblage of 30. Immediately after his speech, in which he discussed youth's contempt for present-day TV, he drove back to Manhattan to pursue more personal programming talks with ABC. By the end of the week, attorneys for the network and Smothers Inc. had virtually assured the return of the broth ers to a weekly network series after a year's banishment.

The contract will call for a minimum of eight one-hour shows beginning in July. If they succeed, the boys could be moved into the ABC year-round lineup in January 1971. For onetime top-ten TV headliners to gamble on a summer-replacement audition requires "tremendous guts," marvels one ABC executive. Tommy himself admits that some of his show-biz colleagues might consider the deal "demeaning," and that off-season substitute series are "generally so much sheep-dip."

But Tommy's talk these days is unprecedentedly mellow. "When a network can't even raise its eyebrows in a newscast," he says, "you have to adjust. You don't get anywhere being angry. You have to work from within." His social commentary will be "softer," he promises. He will work "through indirection."

ABC, for its part, says that "we have no interest in emasculating the Smothers." In fact, Tommy has promised to submit his scripts to the network's censors two weeks prior to broadcast date and his final tapes nine days before. He figures on laying off the Viet Nam issue and leaning into ecology. He would like to venture into animation and electronic experiments with film. What it all adds up to, he says, is that "Dick and I have to get back on the air."

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