A Timid, Truncated New Season

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Recycled hillbillies, screwy cowboys and a stuffy homosexual

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

--Fred Allen Because of a summer strike by writers, the new TV season will not gush with fresh programs, only trickle into December. A few weeks later, a "second season" will dribble in. Networks calls this arrangement a "living" schedule. "Undead" is more like it.

The commercial networks are as fearful of the future as striking writers and, last year, actors. They are also just as eager to ensure their share of profits from new technologies: ABC, NBC and CBS have been discreetly investing millions to explore cable and cassette possibilities. At the same time, network executives keep insisting that broadcast TV remains their once and future province. The industry seems to be running out of ideas and energy and faith--especially in its audience.

There is practically nothing bold or venturesome coming to the screen this week, which is the non-season opening.

The networks seem befuddled by the conservative trend in the country. They are reluctant to give up sex and sass in favor of traditional values, for fear of losing the hip, young, urban audience that advertisers desire most. They do not seem able to recapture the innocent affection, the pride in being American, that attracted viewers to the optimistic family shows of the 1950s. Yet they seem to think that they can recapture viewer loyalty just by returning to the forms of the past.

The sorriest example is at CBS, which became the Bumpkin Network in the 1960s, then dropped a raft of popular shows in the early 1970s in deference to the urban preferences of advertisers. Of late CBS has been hearkening to the heartland again, with Dallas and Dukes of Hazzard and, next Tuesday, a two-hour Return of the Beverly Hillbillies. The film is, alas, the resurrection but not the life. CBS appears to assume that Hillbillies appealed chiefly to yokels, dullards and children, when in fact it was a secret favorite of some college professors and was indebted to the populist film comedies of Frank Capra. It was the story of got-rich-quick innocents coping with the darker side of the American Dream--the fear that even with money and social access they could never belong. Eleven years later, the Clampetts are settled, even smug, with no remaining sense of wonder about the world. CBS has concocted a wacko two-hour plot about using moonshine to replace gasoline. But there are no warmhearted wackos to populate it, except Imogene Coca, too late to save the show as the late Granny's eccentric old Maw.

ABC surprised itself in 1976 with the popularity of the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man, and astonished itself a year ater with Roots. This Wednesday through Friday, the network tries to braid the formats and themes of those shows in a 19th century drama of Irish rebellion and emigration, The Manions of America. The Irish of the 1840s are presented (with some historical accuracy) as equivalent to the slaves in Roots--penniless, helpless, but more open and loving than their oppressors, more family oriented and especially more sexual. The English are schematically divided. The wicked are defined as those who try to suppress the Irish; their victims nonetheless eventually rise to wealth through suffering (a theme of Rich Man, Poor Man). Virtue among the good English is measured by willingness to subordinate their lives to the Irish cause. Despite mechanical plotting, the first two hours evoke a world that can still outrage us. In America, however, there is no unknown corner of history to illumine. Ireland thus becomes less a symbol than a storymaker's device. Events rush together, plot overwhelms character, acting turns to shouting, and the saga sags.

In Best of the West, ABC is making another error by invoking yet again the "gang comedy" spirit of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels, producers of Moore's show, Taxi and The Associates, should know by now that the basic format--a bland central character surrounded by screwballs --works only when the star has a patient and loyal following, as Moore did. Even with the best of casting, the TV audience hardly needs another gang comedy, certainly not a spoof western. Satire, like sacrilege, derives its impact from audience belief in the significance of what is being mocked. Most Americans, to judge from box-office results, are indifferent to westerns. Those who care are more likely to be nostalgic for John Wayne than irreverent toward folklore.

At PBS the most venturesome new show is Enterprise, 13 often entertaining half-hours about American business, starting Friday. But the series falls short in ways familiar to viewers of commercial network documentaries: an aimlessly neutral, "objective" tone; a visual style that is decorative rather than narrative; and frequent excursions into colorful but unimportant byways--the packaging of a bestseller, auctioning of thoroughbred horses, marketing of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan.

One show redeems the opening week, though hardly the season. NBC has a genuinely original and well-made TV movie on Monday in Sidney Shorr, the love story of a little girl and the homosexual man who raises her. For once it is not market research, nor the lessons of the past, but human truth that has gone into the shaping of a character and his world. Sidney is a disappointed, middle-aged illustrator who passionately opposes abortion and infidelity and the whole sexual revolution.

He is stuffy, self-righteous, a bit of a prude.

He wants a family, though he feels unable to sire one in the normal way. Viewers who might be unnerved by the show's premise should be assured by the casting of Tony Randall, a familiar figure whose nonmacho image was already comfortably established as half of The Odd Couple. Sidney believes that a family is not necessarily what church or state ordains but what people make for themselves.

That is not such a radical notion; it just might play in Peoria. Yet the story of Sidney is instead a sad footnote to this un-courageous season. A spin-off series called Love, Sidney is opening Oct. 28, after tumultuous protest against its very existence led by the Moral Majority. For the series, NBC, though denying that it bowed to pressure, has neutered the character's sexuality. The audience has lost an opportunity for understanding and instead will get a show about as daring and original as Bachelor Father. --By William A. Henry III

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