On Television

...The Mothers-in-Law immediately strikes you as very amusing and sophisticated...

...Custer has been doing poorly in the early Nielsens, but abc could beef up the ratings and perform a public service at the same time by advertising the last show of the series??which can't be too many moons away??as a "special...

...Since this is probably the most inspired and best show of the new season, I also wanted to ask if he was working on a spin-off, perhaps something about a rabbinical student who could walk on water...

...Let this be Kitman's Law: Pure drivel tends to drive off the screen ordinary drivel...

...Don't throw away the canned laughter, though...

...I have a hunch that the networks really are trying to kill television once and for all...

...There has to be a master plan, a new approach to programming, which we critics just don't understand...

...I started at the top," he reminisces in one episode, "and I'm working my way down...

...The drive to turn our television sets into neighborhood movies??called "diversified programming"??is an alarming trend...

...And he speaks like one of those Oglala Sioux who has been to Oxford under a cultural exchange program...

...His English is pure poetry: Yellow Hair is a tree In the wind...

...They are a people fighting for their homeland," he explains only a few minutes before he slaughters the Indian nationalists...

...It is inconceivable that three competing networks, working independently in complete secrecy, could produce by accident 26 new series so similar in quality...

...This year in their regular programming they have gone in heavily for pure drivel...

...In the past the networks have produced drivel...

...My first reaction to this awful discovery was to ask the networks to show me all 26 again to refresh my memory...

...His motives actually are more complex: He is an ambitious career officer and kills Indians because it is the fastest way to get ahead in the military establishment of the 1870s, just as killing Vietcong is a stepping stone in Vietnam today...

...Of all the flying nuns I've seen," read one of my lost notes, "she is probably the most likeable...

...I guess you could call the genre "red humor," for it ultimately turns the Indians into good guys and the U.S...

...I have watched four episodes of Custer so far, I'm ashamed to say, and now find myself looking forward to Wednesday nights the way I used to get hung up on The Lone Ranger...

...But it's just as well that I lost the note...

...Although I still turn a button three times whenever I see a nun, I'm not a religious man...

...The bad guys??wayne Maunder as the boy ex-general, and Slim Pickens, who was Major King Kong in (he movie Dr...

...telling us how much he wants to live in peace and brotherhood with the Apaches...

...Custer gives the impression of being a relatively simple-minded soldier who only wants to kill Indians...

...However, if you think of the Eve Arden-Kaye Ballard show??it's about a couple of nice kids in love who have these two impossible mothers??as a soap opera, which it really is...

...Army...

...est), without instruments...

...Not all of it, just the classic art forms??the westerns, situation comedies and crime shows...

...Historians have been laughing at westerns for years, but I recommend this one for laymen as well...

...I also toss at night thinking about the anti-Vietnam propaganda the doves out in Hollywood are slipping into our westerns...

...Still, neither Maunder nor Pickens is as funny as Michael Dante, who plays the good guy, Chief Crazy Horse...

...Thus far, Custer has managed to escape from every trap set by Crazy Horse...

...I wouldn't want to be in the same room with Ackerman: He's going to get hit by lightning some day...

...some nights I can't even sleep thinking about them...

...Mainly you have to ignore the conventional program categories...

...He will bend...

...I knowed he had to kill them men: They was gunning for him...

...But she reminds me most of Saint Exupery, missing in flight since 1944...

...Then break...

...Seeing him in action reminded me of Robert Sherwood's remark about Mix in the old Life: "They say he rides like a part of the horse, but they don't say which part...

...When the new shows die...

...With his long, straight black hair, Dante doesn't look like an Indian, which makes him something of a sight gag...

...Well, that's been a hard thing to do since the Red Chinese got the hydrogen bomb...

...Erickson looks and rides like Barry Goldwater, but he sounds like President Johnson...

...The average viewer immediately has a chip on his shoulder: All right, he thinks, make me laugh...

...One warning: It's habit-forming...

...It's easy to see why things haven't been breaking right for Lieutenant Colonel Custer...

...But fortunately I found I hadn't been able to forget those programs...

...I'm light," she explained in the first episode of The Flying Nun to all the doubting Saint Thomases, "and when the wind is right??i fly...

...Other nights I worry about what television is doing to poor Walter Brennan, who, as Jack Gould correctly pointed out in the New York Times, plays Walter Brennan in The Guns of Will Sonnett (Friday, 99:30 p.m...

...These first few weeks the writers have been sketching in the character of the man who at 24, during the Civil War, was the youngest general in the U.S...

...One reason nbc's The Mothers-in-Law (Sunday, 8-9:30 p.m...

...There will be other days, Yellow Hair," the Indian cries to the heavens in the fourth episode...

...Mostly, though, what keeps me up at night is trying to understand what the networks had in mind when they spent millions to create this particular set of 26 shows...

...The beloved star of The Real McCoys kills three men in the first episode of his new abc western...

...To some of the critics, she seems to be the child of a marriage between Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music...

...I worry, for example, about that poor nun over at abc who flies...

...When he calls for his dogs, the company clerk brings a pair of matched afghans (canned laughter...

...I want to see how it ends...

...Part of my devotion to this abc show, I admit, is morbid curiosity...

...We meet him now as a lieutenant colonel during the postwar period...

...He is smarter than Custer??the boy soldier, we learn in one episode, ranked 34th in his class of 34 at West Point...

...As they said when the crowds turned up at the funeral of Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn in Hollywood, "You give the people what they want, and they'll come out...

...Everybody who has ever flown recognizes this as a version of the lift-plus-thrust, load-plus-drag principle...

...I don't mean to imply that this isn't a successful season in the sense that the French critic Boileau used the word...

...The networks, by the way, are already doing this: They call their new movies "specials...

...But I'm worried about Walter Brennan anyway...

...One of the funniest situation comedies I've seen in years is Custer (Wednesday, 7:30-8:30 p.m...

...He is insubordinate...

...There was a note on my pad to interview Harry Ackerman, the executive producer who, I believe, came up with the idea for The Flying Nun, and ask him if he believed in transmogrification??which might explain what I feel is the uncanny resemblance to the French aviator and author...

...To further enhance your enjoyment of the new soap operas, every time you hear canned laughter substitute in your mind the sound of an organ...

...There probably won't be more dialogue like Chief Crazy Horse's on television until the networks try a fictionalized historical treatment of the life of Mao Tse-tung...

...Revenge is like a sore," he explains to his grandson after the gun battle, "that don't never heal...

...Simply insert it in the westerns...

...the story of a rich cartoonist who is trying to get richer...

...Yet I was very moved by the performance of Sally Fields (Gidget in the series of the same name, before she turned to religion) as Sister Bertrille, the first teeny-bopper at the Convent San Tanco in San Juan, Puerto Rico...

...Army into bad guys...

...For example, there is Leif Erickson, the Arizona cattle baron in nbc's High Chaparral (Sunday, 10-11 p.m...

...There is a big difference, as those of us who watch and love television know...

...There is an ominous note in the network publicity departments' restrained praise for this season...

...After reading a sonnet submitted to him by Louis XIV, M. Boileau is said (by Irving Babbitt in Masters of Modern French Criticism) to have remarked: "Sire, nothing is impossible for your Majesty...

...In every episode, he disobeys an order...

...I've been making my kids watch each installment with me to show (hem what eventually happens to people who don't follow orders...

...But I have finally figured out a way everybody can enjoy the current programs, and thus thwart the networks' evil scheme...

...And we believe him...

...You set out to write some bad verses, and you have succeeded...

...the networks will rush to substitute highbrow programming, movies like Mutiny on the Bounty...

...He is funny from the moment he rides into Fort Hays, Kansas, in the first episode, his long golden curls flowing, and proceeds to beat up the toughest man in the fort without a curl unwinding (canned laughter...

...Maunder studied acting with Stella Adler and rides like Tom Mix...

...It's so quiet you can almost hear an option drop...

...Strangelove and now plays the boy's scout??are comic figures...

...is such a disappointment is that it is identified as a "situation comedy...

...How he gets away with it is the plot...

...The same is true, incidentally, of cbs1 He and She (Wednesday, 9:30-10 p.m...

...I can't bear the thought of a young novice flying alone out there every Thursday night from 8-8:30 p.m...

...Miss Fields is a real swinger who plays gin rummy, dances the frug, is strong on civil rights (she has served time in jail, one of the sisters remarks, for her part in a free-speech protest) and knows aerodynamics...