Permissive Programming
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television PERMISSIVE PROGRAMING BY MARVIN KITMAN used to worry about that poor nun over at ABC who flew. The mere thought of a young novice flying alone every Thursday night without...
...Indeed, I have yet to figure out the meaning of this mixture of sugar and schmutz...
...The show is my favorite new one so far, but ethnic humor on TV is dangerous, since the cancellation of Bridget Loves Bernie...
...But the protest is only a moderate one, and he regains his potency before the first installment is over, accepting the invasions of privacy as a necessary evil...
...As a show, Diana owes a lot to the invention of Mary Tyler Moore...
...It's a situation comedy about life at Lorelei Fashions, where manufacturer Nathan Davidson (Norman Fell) must cope with a klutz of a brother-in-law partner (Louie Nye), temperamental employes, cut-throat competitors, and starry-eyed Dier-dre...
...Within 10 minutes of the first episode (September 10) Diana was taking her dress off...
...Even though it was the only stunt this wonder woman hadn't done in The Avengers, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the older members of her Avengers following passed out as that zipper went down and the dress fell to her knees...
...Last season's big marriage, Bridget and Bernie, was annulled because of incompatability...
...In the second episode (September 17), Diana flings herself on to a couch with a kind of sexual abandon never before seen on television...
...Clearly, television is trying to replace the New York Times Sunday Magazine as a major reference source for women's underwear fans...
...The New Diana Riggs Show next season will probably be a copy of Emma Peel, the woman who could do it all wear pants, karate chop, fence, run, box, crack a joke and a heart...
...Without her clothes on she's even skinnier than Mary Tyler Moore, the nation's leading TV sex symbol A fact that leads me to think many men have fantasies about antenna poles or other stick-like symbols...
...The premiere (September 14) tried to make me believe that Davidson, a real ninny of a fellow, a kind of now Ozzie Nelson, didn't know his bride had extraordinary powers...
...At the end of their first date in the lobby of her building, however, Sally explains, "This has been the nicest night of my life, and the answer is: no chance...
...a romantic comedy about a newly married couple, the first we've had since Bridget loved Bernie...
...The brain, he explains, is an errogenous zone...
...Since the show centers around a business on Manhattan's Seventh Avenue, naturally it was filmed in Burbank, California...
...A second warning: Anybody whose doctor has restricted the intake of sweets should exercise caution in watching this series...
...When she tells him he is (or is not) in the mood for sex, he complains, "I'm an open book with all the dirty parts underlined...
...They couldn't do it in New York's Garment Center, the Fashion Capital of the World, we are told, because it doesn't look like a garment center...
...An even better example of the new permissiveness is Diana, starring Diana Rigg (NBC, Mondays...
...For the benefit of you black-and-white set owners, she was wearing an orange slip...
...Her mother (Nanette Fabray) was making a telephone call...
...Unlike Diana Riggs, practically nobody had been looking forward to seeing Deirdre Lenihan without her clothes on...
...Like Mary, Diana is not a virgin...
...All Sister Sally retains of her supernatural powers is the ability to read men's minds, the "extra" being extrasensory perception...
...An important member of the cast is Charley, the supersalesman, brilliantly played by Bernie Koppel (who was also the man in Diana's bed...
...Like I said, the show is going to be a big hit with the silent majority...
...Even with my bumbling brain, I know this show can't miss being successful...
...Much of the aggravation is caused by that schle-perman of a brother-in-law who buys 3,000 yards of gingham instead of velvet, which Nathan has to unload on his archrival Singer...
...And Sister Bertilie A High Episcopalian, I believe was the most likable of all the flying nuns I have ever seen...
...Actually, I was disappointed by Diana's appearance...
...The mere thought of a young novice flying alone every Thursday night without instruments was unbearable...
...Sally probably already knows the Nielsen ratings her show will receive through the whole season...
...It may not win any Emmys, but it is a leading candidate for the American Sugar Refinery Association's medal for the show that brings the most sweetness into the American home...
...Why the great lady of British television should demean herself by returning as a Mary is a mystery to me, for one Mary is more than enough...
...Well, in one episode last year Mary came in at 8 a.m...
...She is way ahead of her times in her cool, calm and collected way of handling sex, leading some to think that Mary ought to take a hot bath and unfreeze...
...Previously, her major claim to fame was that she tried out for the female lead in Bridget Loves Bernie...
...all dressed up...
...8:30 p.m...
...Diana Riggs has her own apartment, a gang of friends who revolve around her, an interesting job (fashion illustrator at a New York department store), and she is a divorcee...
...From the waist up, she plays a modest girl from Omaha who is trying to make it as an apprentice dress designer in a New York garment center shop...
...Yet using ESP against the mind of John Davidson, who plays the husband, is overkilllike dropping the atom bomb in the war against poverty...
...How do we know that...
...Now she will forever be known as the first graduate of Brooklyn Friends, a Quaker high school, to be seen in a brassiere on a TV show...
...If the series fails, the production company reportedly is planning to go into the dress businessso it won't be a total loss...
...She asked, "Oh, did I get you out of bed with all the noise, my dear...
...We soon learn that many of his friends have keys the closest thing to a premise I've been able to find in the series so far...
...There are those who say Gloria Steinem modeled herself after Emma, but I don't want to get involved in the argument about who came first...
...If only the zoftig stars of the past like Doris Day were launching new shows this season...
...Fortunately, many of them are over the head of the average adult TV viewer...
...This fellow who, the Women's Liberation people will be pleased to learn, also stripped down to his shorts had the key to Diana's brother's apartment...
...Besides, I have a roommate...
...CBS's vision of the ratings it should have gotten and what it actually got did not go together...
...The highlight of the opening scene in the premiere (September 21) of Needles and Pins (NBC, Fridays, 9 p.m...
...That this dummy didn't immediately realize Sally has something extra is a profound insult to the intelligence of American men and a cause for protest...
...When I touch you," he whispers during a lull in the plot, "the earth moves...
...The lavish shop the producers built in Burbank for Needles and Pins makes the set for Hello, Dolly look like a trompe l'oeil...
...Don't let that well-scrubbed wide-eyed look fool you...
...The double-entendre jokes in the first three episodes flew as fast as on the Johnny Carson show...
...Diana's Emma, the model of a liberated woman, looked like Gloria Steinem...
...But in all other important ways Diana is a disaster...
...But after a couple of years in the nun-sked business, Sally Field vanished from sight...
...This is not simply a case of realism for realism's sake...
...The first episode was so realistic that I got heartburn from watching the hectic pace...
...They are so wholesome, in fact, that one has the feeling they could pass a military inspection without having bathed in a month...
...He can't keep his hands off Deirdre, even when he learns she isn't a model but an innocent girl from out West trying to get her first job...
...So I'm glad to see that she has now landed safely in a new series called The Girl with Something Extra (NBC, Fridays, 8:30 p.m...
...While it's basically just another version of the girl-with-the-lamp story (/ Dream of Jeannie), a rejection of the series by the American people at this point in time would be a rejection of all that is good and wholesome in our society...
...It was the most electric moment in the history of the medium...
...is Deirdre Lenihan in her brassiere...
...And the dummy Davidson, to his credit, does protest by becoming impotent on their wedding night...
...A warning: This is an incredibly dirty program, considering that it is also designed to be watched by children...
...Diana Rigg gave up the role as the widow Emma Peel on The Avengers (1966-68) for a higher calling, namely, to go into Shakespeare repertory...
...She doesn't bat a false eyelash at finding a man in her bed the first night in the big city...
...Seeing Diana Rigg undressing in the privacy of every home must be what Vladimir Zworkin had in mind when he invented television in 1923...
...Sally and Johnhe's the one with the slightly longer hair Are as American as frozen apple pie or Nixon's 1972 mandate...
...In reply came the famed Mary Tyler Moore smile...
...If Diana fails this year...
...Deirdre, a virtual unknown, is not from Omaha as she explained in NBC's promos all summer long, but from Greenwich Village...
...It's an invasion of privacy on a massive scale, almost like a President wiretapping his brother...
...By the time Charlie says, "Let me help you out of that dress and into something more comfortable, my office," you know that, oy vey, this is going to be some realistic show...
...in fact, all this new freedom is possible because Mary is not a virgin...
...They just exude cleanliness...
...Admittedly, there is something sneaky, almost un-American, about a girl who can read a man's mind...
...Diana lacks the typical American reserve about sex...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 20
