The New Season

The days grow shorter in September as nature restores all those long, dark prime-time hours. Television, responding, springs into the fall season but, unlike nature, it repeats itself tirelessly. On the theory, for instance, that there is still nothing as sure as shooting, the networks have again decreed that law (men and -breakers) will be the first order of the evening. Nine of the 25 new shows that begin next week will deal with police, private eyes and lawyers.

To prevent viewers from confusing their heroes, cop crops of the past few years featured gimmickry--wheelchairs, helicopters and lollipops. This year's trend is to the ethnic and geographical distribution of justice.

ABC's Kodiak, for instance (not to be too confused with Kojak), is an Alaska state trooper (Clint Walker), outfitted for trapping his man properly: snowmobile, snowshoes and icy determination. ABC's Nakia (Robert Banyon Forster) is a hot-tempered Navajo deputy sheriff in New Mexico, evidently intended to be confused with both the cult-film heroics of Billy Jack and the mystical-religious cant of Kung Fu.

Next door, in another Southwestern town, NBC's Petrocelli (Barry Newman) is a Harvard-trained lawyer whose big-city tactics are guaranteed to grate on his new neighbors. And working out of his Depression-era home farm in Idaho, CBS's The Manhunter (Ken Howard) will tear across the country in his 1929 Cadillac, hauling in would-be Bonnies, Clydes and Dillingers.

Lady Cops. Meanwhile, Southern California, historic turf of the private eye, will have two new operatives. On ABC, ex-Cop Harry O (played by former Fugitive David Janssen) will work out of a shack on the beach. In NBC'S The Rockford Files, James Garner will become pretty much of a contemporary embodiment of his old sharp-talking Maverick self.

Three lady cops will also join TV's criminal chase. The heroine of ABC'S Get Christie Love! (Teresa Graves) gets her man by sassily flouting the orders of her boss--and flaunting the best legs on the force. NBC's Police Woman (Angie Dickinson), a spin-off from Police Story, is only a sergeant. But Amy Prentiss (Jessica Walter), a rib out of NBC's venerable Ironside, is a chief of detectives in command of 260 (male) officers.

For those who find all this criminal activity unsettling after dinner, the networks will offer nostalgic dramas tagging after the top-rated The Waltons' family-bond wagon. ABC's The New Land, based on the movie, will star Scott Thomas and Bonnie Bedelia as Scandinavian emigrants settling in Minnesota, circa 1858. NBC's Little House on the Prairie, based on the Little House novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder, will begin with "restless but resourceful" Michael Landon (Bonanza), his perfect wife (Karen Grassle) and their three adorable daughters also settling in Minnesota in 1878.

For less pastoral and more Peyton Place, CBS's pilot of Sons and Daughters features two 1950s high school seniors, a messy divorce (her parents), sudden death (his father) and a traumatized sibling (his younger brother), not to mention puppy love (theirs) and homework. Obviously, things should get worse on the series.

Family ties can also be a situation comedy, of course. ABC's Paper Moon will be a carbon copy of the film, starring Christopher Connelly, a dead ringer for Ryan O'Neal. There will also be two variations on the Sanford and Son theme: ABC's That's My Mama, about a black woman and her son who run a barber shop, and NBC's Chico and the Man, with Jack Albertson as a crotchety white garage owner in the L.A. barrio and Hungarian-Puerto Rican Comedian Freddie Prinze as the Chicane kid who moves in as a self-appointed business partner.

Big-League Star. Two places to which a viewer might turn for quality comedy are a couple of CBS shows from Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises. Mary's friend Rhoda (Valerie Harper) will be moving from the Mary Tyler Moore Show to New York, where she will meet a young widower (David Groh) with one child and along in October, get married.

And in Friends and Lovers, the versatile, engaging Paul Sand, a Tony winner in Broadway's Story Theater, will play a bachelor bass player with the Boston Symphony.

Familyless dramatic shows are few:

NBC's Lucas Tanner (David Hartman) is a former big-league baseball star turned concerned schoolteacher. In ABC's The Night Stalker, Darren McGavin plays Newspaper Man Carl Kolchak (not to be confused with either Kojak or Kodiak), whose beat is the bizarre--witches, werewolves, et al.

When the FCC unexpectedly did not return to the networks some of the prime time awarded to local stations in 1971, six more shows were shelved. But all six are waiting in the wings for possible January starts, as replacements for those shows that are about to find this the winter of their discontinuation.

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