The Boom Tube's Prime Time

Archie Bunker seeks sexual fulfillment with a waitress. Rhoda and Joe bust up. Charlie Haggars undergoes television's first testicle transplant. Maude's Arthur goes bankrupt. Ted Baxter has a heart attack in mid-newscast. Lionel Jefferson marries Jennie. Florida loses her husband. McMillan loses his wife, his sidekick and his housekeeper. And . . .

These are a few of the momentous developments that will engross the Great American Electronic Family with the start of the new television season this Sunday. In addition to the familiar programs, the networks will introduce 21 new shows in prime time. Never have producers of TV fare worked harder to catch the viewer's fancy; never have the financial stakes been so high for the industry.

From Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas, where the fortress headquarters of the three national television networks are clustered within five blocks, to Los Angeles, the studio assembly line of TV entertainment, the past few weeks have been the most grueling in the industry's history. The competition between CBS, NBC and ABC is more intense than ever. ABC, until recently the perennial underdog, is suddenly the top network since CBS's brilliant programmer, Fred Silverman, moved to it and found Laverne, Shirley and the Fonz ready for picking from Happy Days.

All three networks are riding high on record incomes: $6.6 billion in advertising revenue, up a full 25% over 1975. Moreover, TV rates can only rise farther. Prime-time commercial time is sold out through mid-1977 at prices up to 50% higher than last year's rates. "This season," boasts an NBC executive, "we could sell a test pattern." It is the prime of the Boom Tube.

The success or failure of the new schedules will immediately affect the financial well-being of the networks. The bigger the audience for any show, the fatter the advertising revenues that flow into the network: a winner can charge up to $140,000 a minute for commercials, enough to pay the entire cost of a 30-minute show; a loser may get only $90,000. The difference of one Nielsen rating point for a season, reflected in advertising rates, can mean the loss or gain of $15 million in one year.

Such risks make the networks conservative. Though they can --and do--turn obscure actors like Henry Winkler into certified stars in four or five weeks, they are as reluctant to gamble on the untried as Nick the Greek would be to bet on a frog-jumping contest.

Thus the familiar faces--and many cast-in-concrete formats --keep coming back. Dick Van Dyke, Carol Burnett, Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn, among others, all have weekly variety shows again this season. Hawaii Five-O enters its ninth year; Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family their seventh.

In the biggest departure from old formats and formulas, the networks are turning to expensively produced dramatic serials and adaptations of bestselling novels; the emphasis is on high drama and convoluted story lines that lather on from week to week. This strongly resembles what soap opera has been doing for decades. Some of the soaps' Homeric techniques have already sudsed off on the evening shows, partly through the smash spoof opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman!

The runaway hit Rich Man, Poor Man was last year's most influential show. It used heartthrob, class envy, suicide, seduction, desolation and disease with all the abandon of Days of Our Lives. Along with ABC's four-hour Eleanor and Franklin, it jolted the networks into restructuring the traditional grid of episodic family and doctor dramas. RM. PM, a $6 million mini-series based on Irwin Shaw's novel, picks up the plot this season as a full-fledged ABC serial called RM, PM Book II.

Other new dramatic serials, notably CBS's Executive Suite, which uses a corporate shelter for exploring the lives of dozens of people and their families employed by one company, also borrow the daytime shows' mode of interweaving multiple plots. Notes Bud Grant, CBS programming chief: "The serial is the most powerful form invented for television. Once you hook an audience, it stays hooked."

The biggest investor in long-form dynasty drama is NBC, with its Thursday evening Best Sellers series. Its opener, starring Henry Fonda, will be a nine-hour serialization of Taylor Caldwell's The Captains and the Kings, the saga of a Kennedy-esque Irish immigrant clan's rise to power. Other entries are based on Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle and Thornton Wilder's The Eighth Day.

Some of these shows will surely provide fresh entertainment, but most of the season's prime time will be devoted to crashingly familiar formulas. The lineup, by category, follows:

COP SHOWS will occupy 28 half-hours a week, a reduction from last year's cop content. A promising entry on CBS is Delvecchio, a big-city (write in Los Angeles) police detective with a law degree. NBC is countering with Serpico, based on the best-selling book and hit movie about a real-life New York cop. ABC has a conventional cop show, Most Wanted, starring the able but unexciting Robert Stack. A bigger gamble is ABC's opulently produced Charlie's Angels, in which three sexy women investigators--Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Jaclyn Smith--are given high-risk assignments, Mission: Impossible style, by a superdetective whom they never see.

THE WESTERN, which went thataway years ago, returns on NBC with Quest, the story of two brothers' search for a long-lost sister who has been raised by an Indian tribe. It is all suspiciously similar to John Ford's film The Searchers.

THE SITCOM has two new entries from Norman Lear and one from Mary Tyler Moore's mill. As might be expected, the most sophisticated, All's Fair, is a Lear production for CBS. The story about a conservative Washington columnist in his late 40s, played by Richard Crenna, and his affair with a young, radical chic photographer, gives saucer-eyed Bernadette Peters a long-overdue opportunity to close in on an identifiable personality. But All's Fair is not for all viewers. In the damning words of one West Coast handicapper: "It's a thinking man's show."

Lear's other new sitcom, The Nancy Walker Show, has the inspired notion of casting the crafty comedienne as a high-powered Hollywood agent married to a Navy officer who decides to retire from the sea. (Lear's low regard for TV brass is reflected in the character of a network executive whose eight-year-old son makes all his programming decisions.) A likely hit.

MTM's The Tony Randall Show on ABC brings back The Odd Couple farceur in the role of a widowed judge in Philadelphia. The tired story line--the two motherless kids advising Dad on his sex life, an abrasive English housekeeper (played by the admirable Rachel Roberts)--is a tenuous handle for Randall.

THE BIONICS are multiplying like Texas Instruments' common stock. In addition to the Six Million Dollar Man and its automated rib-out, Bionic Woman, ABC has Holmes and Yoyo, featuring a robot programmed to do cops' work for kids' amusement. NBC recycles The Invisible Man as Gemini Man.

VARIETY COMEDY, that standard entry, will include the engaging Bill Cosby, with a comedy hour on ABC in prime kiddy time. He faces tough competition from the perennial Wonderful World of Disney (NBC) in the 7 p.m. Sunday slot, known in the trade as "death alley." The Captain and Tennille, a.k.a. Pop Musicians Daryl Dragon and Wife Toni Tennille, are a) lackluster, and b) up against Rhoda and Phyllis from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays, and may have to go bionic to survive. The same thing goes for Van Dyke and company on NBC, which is set for 10 p.m. on Thursdays.

SPECIALS, those traditional one-shot blockbusters, will feature Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, Charlie Brown, Neil Diamond, Johnny Cash, Bing Crosby and many others. This kind of show is virtually the property of NBC this year. The network has scheduled 190 hours of nonseries specials programming, plus 45 hours of a weekly spectacular it calls The Big Event. TBE is an amalgam of movies, novels-into-books and such nonhappenings as a 4 1/2-hour special--during its worst rated year ever--in honor of NBC's own 50th anniversary. Highlights: the first network TV showing of Gone With the Wind in two parts (commercials were sold for $235,000 per minute) and a salute to cinema called LIFE Goes to the Movies. Despite its grandiose title and all-star goodies, TBE may have trouble developing a loyal audience. "With a title like that," says Frank Price, who heads Universal's TV division, "you need to have the Christians facing the lions. Nothing else will do."

FILMS are, of course, a diminishing species, and even fewer of them can be blue-penciled for TV. So, though all three networks carry on with movie nights (NBC has four, in addition to the superflicks on The Big Event), many of the films are made for TV. Among them: Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, based on the best-selling book about John F. Kennedy (NBC); and inevitably, Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby with Ruth Gordon (ABC).

ADVENTURE as a category looks upward. Two shows celebrate the wild blue yonder. Spencer's Pilots (CBS) records the adventures of two young pilots who work for an independent aviation company; against ABC's Donny and Marie and NBC's Sanford and Son, they may never get it off the ground. Baa Baa Black Sheep (NBC) expands the feats of scrappy Pappy Boyington, the celebrated World War II Marine Corps fighter pilot, in Dirty Dozen fashion.

As certain as the cathode ray guns of autumn, professional and amateur TV critics in the next few weeks will raise their familiar September Song of despair, the Wasteland Revisited dirge. The point that they invariably miss is that the programs visited upon the public tell as much about the national psyche as the deodorant commercials. Viewers may not get what they deserve, but to a remarkable degree they get what they want. Television is not folklore or an art form but an advertising medium. "Our product," says one network official, "is heads in front of television sets." If the current lineup fails in the ratings, replacements --already chosen--will start appearing next month.

Quite clearly, if people want cultural uplift, it is not from TV --at least, not in very large doses. The critics might be encouraged by the fact that shows of above-medium competence, such as Eleanor and Franklin and Helter Skelter, have been successful, and that the networks have now invested huge sums in the serialization of novels, culturally a hefty cut above the sitcom. If Thornton Wilder can survive serialization and engross the viewer, who can say that the networks cannot some day succeed with, say, War and Peace or Look Homeward, Angel?

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