Cops and Comedy

TV programmers are like astrologers: every spring they nervously plan for the future by trying to predict what the viewing public will be buying in the fall. Since they all follow the same arcane guidelines, the Nielsen ratings, their predictions are usually much alike. As the networks completed their fall lineup last week, the pattern was clear: cops and comedy--and precious little in between.

Changes. NBC, which finished up the current season* slightly behind CBS, announced the biggest changes, with the introduction of nine new shows. Its old Tuesday night lineup, which included a movie and rotating news and documentary specials, will be thrown out entirely, and three crime-oriented hours will take its place. Four half-hour situation comedies will go into the schedule to replace such shows as Laugh-In, which is now only a tired reminder of the hit of the '60s, and Circle of Fear, which tried to be ghostly but was never more than ghastly. In The Magician Bill Bixby, in the title role, plays a top-hatted Robin Hood who aids the distressed when he is not pulling rabbits out of hats. Comedian Dom DeLuise will play a clerk in the lost and found department of a New York bus line. Like such hits as All in the Family and Sanford and Son, the new show, Lotsa Luck, has been adapted from an English series. The Girl with Something Extra is billed as a romantic comedy series about a young bride who has one funny problem --she can read people's minds. The woman with something extra will be Sally Field, who a few seasons ago was a flying nun in an ABC comedy. It is easier, it seems, to kick the habit than dump inane scriptwriters.

As befits its success, CBS will do little tinkering with its formula. In a surprising but vastly appreciated decision, it will drop the atrocious Bridget Loves Bernie. Though the show began the season with high ratings--the result of following No. 1, All in the Family--it dropped steadily and was beginning to hurt the popular Mary Tyler Moore Show, which followed it. Viewers tend to stay with one network through the evening, and Bridget's continued presence, the programmers figured, was endangering CBS's ratings for all of Saturday night, which the network now dominates. In keeping with the overall trend, CBS will introduce two new half-hour comedies and four crime shows. The thrillers will include Shaft, with Richard Roundtree repeating his movie role as a flamboyant black private eye, and Cojack, starring Telly Savalas as "a tough but compassionate" cop. Savalas won acclaim this year in a similar role in CBS's The Marcus-Nelson Murders. Another thriller will bring Perry Mason back in a new series. Another Perry has to be found, however, since the old one, Raymond Burr, is busy fighting crime from his wheelchair on NBC's Ironside.

After waiting for the other two networks to reveal their lineups, ABC announced a carbon-copy schedule. Six shows were dropped, including the ever-boring Julie Andrews Hour, a visual Sominex that seemed to put most viewers to sleep. (Julie will, however, come back for six hours of specials.) A couple of with-it comedies were added: Mr. and Ms., a story about two married lawyers with a Women's Lib touch, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a sanitized TV version of the racy 1969 movie. Thursday night will be given over entirely to fast action, with Kung Fu and The Streets of San Francisco, two current series, and TOMA, which will star Tony Musante as a cop who "relies on his wits and imaginative disguises" to bring the varlets to justice. Every fourth week ABC will even give the viewer science fiction cops and robbers. In Cyborg, Lee Majors will play a test pilot whose body is rebuilt after a crash to make him a superman--and a super crimefighter. Since NBC put its long-running Western Bonanza out to pasture last year, Lome Greene has taken off his spurs. Next season he will don a business suit to play the star of Griff for ABC. In keeping with next fall's guns and chuckles accent, Griff will be a former cop turned private detective. Who knows? With a little luck, he may even track down a good show or two in what sounds like the most unpromising season in years.

* What used to be called "summer reruns" now begin as early as February.

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