The Redeemers

By Robert T. Jones

Can the worst disasters of the television season be redeemed? January is when the programmers try, by inserting midseason replacements for the shakiest shows. By last week, all eight of the substitute entries were on the air. Among them: a dentist whose family adopts a chimpanzee (Me and the Chimp), a put-upon executive (The Don Rickles Show), a parapsychologist's bouts with the supernatural (The Sixth Sense), and movies, movies, movies. If any trend was apparent, it was simple desperation. But a blessed few shows revealed something more.

Sanford & Son (NBC) is a promising situation comedy produced by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, the team that created All in the Family. Like Family, which was based on a long-running BBC hit called Till Death Do Us Part, the new show is also an adaptation of an English model. This time Yorkin and Lear have taken the BBC's Steptoe & Son, about the tribulations of a cockney junk dealer and his son, and Americanized it by setting it in a low-income black milieu. In the process they have come up with an inspired piece of casting: Redd Foxx, a black comic famed for his blue nightclub material.

As a Los Angeles junk dealer, Foxx plays a whining parent who dominates his son with phony heart attacks and other transparent but successful ruses. In last week's opening episode, there was an occasional echo of Archie Bunker's WASPy bigotry. "There ain't nothing uglier than a 90-year-old white woman," Foxx said at one point. When his son said he wanted to make a fortune "just like Aristotle Onassis," Foxx eyed his black skin and observed: "Only one difference between you and Onassis: he started out a Greek."

But the real theme of Sanford & Son is the generation gap. Son Lamont Sanford (Demond Wilson) struggles with his complacent parent in comic exchanges that, for all their surface harshness, are affectionately respectful. And Redd Foxx shows that the old man's bite comes from an essential warmth and humanity. Indeed, Foxx, who has written his own material for years, supplied some of his own acerbic lines. At one point when he had to refer to a black family who put on airs, he suggested using the authentic vernacular phrase "jive niggers." A less obvious Foxx contribution: the show's title. His real name is John Sanford.

Zoom (PBS) is a children's show produced by kids who want to stay on their own side of the generation gap, thank you. Virtually all the material is by children and is selected by the seven-member cast (ages nine through 13). The kids sing, dance, play games, talk in "Ubbi-Dubbi"--a catchy code language reminiscent of past generations' pig Latin--show home movies and give laconic instructions in all manner of skills. The first show featured a filmed demonstration of how to build a raft from tree limbs, leaves and an old tarpaulin. A 41-minute karate exhibition aimed at defeating bicycle thieves was on the second. The third will include a thoroughly befuddling lesson in the game of "cat's cradle," with a perplexed young instructress tangling her string and admitting, "I got it wrong."

In the Boston studios where Zoom is produced for public television, grownups coach, suggest, choreograph and keep a professional rein on things, thus avoiding the anarchy and flatness that sometimes bedevil NBC's hourlong, live Take a Giant Step. But the kids have the last say. Producer Christopher Sarson originally wanted a problem-solving segment patterned after the "Dear Abby" column, but the Zoom cast vetoed the idea: they felt they lacked the experience to solve problems for their peers. At the end of last week's show, they urged young viewers ("Zoomers") to write in for song lyrics and game instructions, and to provide material for future shows by sending in their own stories, limericks, home movies or whatever. At week's end, Zoom had received 5,359 responses in the mail.

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (CBS) slipped into the schedule last month and has already staked out a strong position in the ratings competition. Doubtless benefiting from the youthful audience it built up during a trial run last summer, it has attracted a 40% share of the audience for its Monday night time slot, which translates into approximately 30 million viewers. This makes it already one of the dozen top shows on evening television--commercially, at least.

Otherwise, Sonny & Cher is uninspired. Its stars are Sonny, a rock-'n'-roll graduate with the manner of an eager spaniel, and his wife, Cher, a gangling lady who sashays through comic skits with a kind of kooky chic. As a singing team, the couple trails a history of hit records of the mid-'60s, but as variety stars, neither has the comic gift to unthaw their frigid material. The saving feature of the show is Cher's singing. Give her a song and she electrifies a dim-watted production. Her rock-pop voice sounds like a cross between a mating call and a sonic boom. If only the producers did not insist that she also try to act and be funny.

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