Viewpoints

By Judy Fayard

qedROLL OUT. CBS. Friday, 8:30-9 p.m. E.S.T. Another wartime comedy, this time about a team of black convoy drivers in World War II France. The actors are delightful, especially Stu Gilliam as the street-smart sharpie "Sweet" Williams, cherub-faced Hilly Hicks as his Good Book-quoting buddy, and Val Bisoglio as the group's irascible Italian captain spleening his personal vendetta against il Duce. The dominant black vernacular, if slightly too contemporary to be authentic, brings some new life to tired old combat comedy situations, and here and there some jewels sparkle: during an exchange of insults, one soldier is told, "You got enough ugly to open a branch face." In what must be an inevitable comparison with the scalpel wit and truly black comedy of M*A*S*H*, however, the sad fact is that Roll Out seems as old-fashioned as its war.

THE MAGICIAN. NBC. Tuesday, 9-10 p.m. E.S.T. In theory, this show must have seemed to network programmers to have a lot going for it--a handsome leading man familiar to the viewers (Bill Bixby, of the old The Courtship of Eddie's Father series), who would have a whole new bag of flamboyant tricks with which to play the cops-and-robbers game. In practice, however, The Magician's sleight of hand is only a shade more unbelievable than its slight-of-wit plots. In one recent episode, Bixby rescued a kidnaped blonde nightclub singer whose will to live he had once (sob!) magically restored after she had been scarred in a fire--aided, of course, by the deductive wizardry of his "paraplegic genius" sidekick. Another episode began with Bixby in love with a sweet young thing who turned out to be masquerading under a fake identity with the help of the Government because she once fingered a mobster. Actor Bixby is surely worthy of better things than a soulful love scene with lines like, "Two people . . . [pause] . . . become as one [pause] . . . forever," mumbled with mystical intensity as he symbolically fiddles with an entwined set of bracelets on her sweet young wrist. Despite a whole magician's supply shop of prestidigitator's paraphernalia, The Magician conjures up nothing so much as an urge to presto change to another channel.

POLICE STORY. NBC. Tuesday, 10-11 p.m. E.S.T. Created by Author and Los Angeles Police Detective Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh (The New Centurions), Police Story has an anthology format that allows it a variety of character and subject matter denied to most law-and-order series. So far it has also enabled viewers to see a handful of acting talents who do not often grace the tube --Vic Morrow, Verna Bloom, Claude Akins. Each segment, in fact, is sort of a mini-movie--some disappointing, some top-quality television drama. The emphasis is on the human being behind the badge, and with Wambaugh as consultant the show has provided a noticeably more realistic look at police work than any other cop show on the air. In one recent episode, a cop made foolhardy--and trigger-happy--by learning that he had terminal cancer, shot a gun-wielding suspect. Familiar enough, but on Police Story the cop was hauled before the "meat grinder"--a police review board--to defend his action, something that happens to a real policeman involved in a shooting but hardly ever to his TV counterpart. ("Do you have any idea," the haunted cop rages at his punishing review-board inquisitor, "any idea what it feels like when you've shot a man?") Police Story is not always as good as it might be, but it is way ahead of the competition.

Judy Fayard

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