The 1979-80 Season: 1

By Frank Rich

Retreads, spin-offs and rip-offs dominate prime time

If American mass culture is a true index of the national spirit, then the 1980s may be more boring than the 1970s. Or so one might conclude after surveying the network television schedules that will usher in the next decade. The new series of the 1979-80 season are a mostly flavorless assortment of retreads, spin-offs and ripoffs; there are no innovative programs and few fresh faces in sight. Though the past few years were not much better, they did at least offer such novel phenomena as Soap, Lifeline, Suzanne Somers and Robin Williams. The 1979-80 network lineup is so tame that it even lacks that saving spice of commercial television --triumphantly bad taste.

One of the season's most bizarre, and inexplicable, developments is the resurgence of cop and detective shows. They account for a third of the new series. California police, already glorified by NBC'S CHiPs, will now be featured in both ABC's 240-Robert (from the creator of CHiPs) and CBS's Paris (starring James Earl Jones). Joe Don Baker plays the New York City chief of detectives in NBC's Eischied (a spin-off of the TV miniseries To Kill a Cop); Claude Akins is a smalltown Southern sheriff in the same network's The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (a spin-off of B.J. and the Bear). ABC's Hart to Hart stars a jet-set husband-wife sleuthing team (Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers). In CBS's Big Shamus, Little Shamus, father and son (Brian Dennehy and Doug McKeon) become the first TV detectives to police Atlantic City's new casinos. For audiences who take crime lightly, ABC has a sitcom called Detective School. NBC is unveiling a James Bond clone (Robert Conrad) in A Man Called Shane.

When cops dominate the tube, doctors and lawyers usually follow close behind. Both ABC and CBS have new medical hours: The Lazarus Syndrome (starring Louis Gossett Jr.) and Trapper John, M.D. (a M* A* S* H spin-off starring Pernell Roberts and set 28 years after the Korean War). ABC's sitcom The Associates, from the creators of Taxi, takes place in a Wall Street law firm. Other new sitcoms are built around fatherless families, in imitation of CBS's long-running Norman Lear sitcom One Day at a Time. Shirley Jones, years ago a single mom in The Partridge Family, will do it again on NBC's hour-long Shirley. Eileen Brennan gets her own set of kiddies in ABC's A New Kind of Family.

If there is any cause for optimism about the new season, it derives only from the fact that the ratings race should kill many of the new series early on. Already there is one potential casualty: last week ABC yanked Nobody's Perfect, another new detective comedy, from the fall schedule for extensive repairs. That trouble spot notwithstanding, former CBS Programming Chief Mike Dann predicts that ABC will once again sweep the Nielsens, winning 28 of prime time's 44 weekly half-hours, with CBS taking twelve and NBC four. Should this prognosis prove accurate --and it probably will--the losing networks will be reshuffling their programs with mad abandon by Thanksgiving, if not before.

Poor last-place NBC is pinning its big hopes on such stale items as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (from the same folks who launched the crash-landed Battlestar Galactica) and From Here to Eternity (a spin-off of a miniseries). As Johnny Carson put it in an opening monologue this summer, "The NBC peacock looked at the fall schedule--and he's not so proud."

When that schedule bites the dust, maybe NBC's beleaguered Fred Silverman will at last rise from defeat and give network programming the jolt it so desperately needs.

Among the new season's first crop of premieres:

Benson (Sept. 13, ABC, 8:30 p.m.

E.D.T.) Scheduled behind Laverne & Shirley, this Soap spin-off is one of the season's few sure hits. Unfortunately, Writer Susan Harris has not capitalized on her secure ratings position by creating a daring and witty show. Benson is another sitcom dedicated to the tedious proposition that servants and children are smarter than employers or parents. In this case the employer is a moronic Governor (James Noble) who hires black Butler Benson (Robert Guillaume) to run his household and, by inference, his unidentified Eastern state. Except for Benson and the Governor's unspeakably precocious subteen daughter (Missy Gold), the series is entirely inhabited by knaves and fools; Harris even drags in a barking Germanic housekeeper (Inga Swenson) who would be more appropriate to Hogan 's Heroes. The restrained Guillaume is a refreshing antidote to the caricatured blacks one normally finds in TV comedy, but this series needs political bite and sharper writing to prevent its captive audience from nodding out.

Out of the Blue (Sept. 9, ABC, 7 p.m.

E.D.T.) People who go to the improvisational comedy clubs in New York City and Los Angeles know that Jimmy Brogan is probably the best comic to hit that circuit since Robin Williams. ABC wisely signed him up, only to cast him in this tired Mork & Mindy retread about an angel who moves to earth. Unlike the manic Williams, who makes a guest appearance in Blue's first episode, Brogan is a quiet, reflective comedian. In his stand-up act he functions as a bemused straight man, playing off the audience, and does not deliver a set routine. ABC would have been smart to put him hi something like the old Jack Benny Show, where he would have a cast of idiosyncratic characters to bounce off of.

Instead the network has plunked Brogan down in a household of bland orphans and demanded that he clown around like Mork to keep the show flying. That is not Brogan's talent, but then this sitcom is so badly written even Williams would not be able to save it. Opposite CBS's 60 Minutes, Blue should be put out of its misery very soon. ABC owes this series' misused star another shot.

Working Stiffs (Sept. 15, CBS, 8 p.m.

E.D.T.) Laverne herself (Penny Marshall, that is) directed the first episode of this male Laverne & Shirley ripoff. It stars Jim Belushi (John's brother) and Michael Keaton as janitors who go to work for their uncle in a Chicago office building. Both actors appeared in quick flops last season (Who's Watching the Kids?, The Mary Tyler Moore Hour), but Working Stiffs could be their fastest cancellation yet. There are only so many jokes to be made about moving furniture, and none of them is funny.

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