The Cruelest Season
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THECRUELEST SEASON BY MARVIN KITMAN Although it already seems like ancient history, only a few weeks have passed since the three networks presented their fall lineups with trumpets...
...The ratings for California Fever have been as low as those for Beacon Hill (12.4 above sea-level at last count...
...The star is James Earl Jones...
...was promising, I thought...
...The show stars Marc McClure, Lorenzo Lamas (son of Fernando) and Jimmy McNichol as Vince Butler...
...Even a TV critic's life would be more fascinating...
...Why, you wonder, have 1 been watching it faithfully...
...He plays Buck like Lee Majors played Colonel Steve Austin, but without Majors' heavy classical style...
...And," their leader has explained, "we also disco...
...Of course, that was before the TV era, when we've seen everything...
...Well, one never knows when one will die and come back as a teenager...
...replaced Paper Chase...
...But bad as the first season has been, the situation is bound to get worse in the second season, coming soon...
...The show, in fact, is even worse than American Girls?which, inside sources tell me, even the CBS executives disliked...
...Yet if beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder, it's certainly not in my eye...
...What irony...
...Shirley, could have come up with something more intelligent than California Fever...
...As most TV viewers don't know, this is a Hebrew toast meaning good health and long life...
...Once more, I discovered, I was witnessing the "Curse of Star Trek": For canceling its last good science-fiction series ahead of its time, NBC is doomed to get 500 years of wretched sci-fi, all of it made by the Universal Television Dung Recycling Plant (Batttestar Gal-actica, Invisible Man, Gemini Man...
...My hairdresser, Mr...
...The new shows should be so good...
...I discussed a number of the great disasters in my previous column ("In Memoriam," NL, October 8...
...This is the sort of imaginative thinking that led NBC to give one of its better new shows-the story of a Southern cop in New York City-a name that nobody can pronounce (Eischeid...
...This year CBS is into garbage, and the perverse public isn't buying...
...He is a good cop and a good husband...
...A Man Called Kitman" has a nice ring to it...
...You'd better lie down and take a cold compress to your forehead, should this show eventually return to the air, as CBS suggests it will...
...When he is beamed down to earth as Burt, Mary gets some real surprises...
...On Television THECRUELEST SEASON BY MARVIN KITMAN Although it already seems like ancient history, only a few weeks have passed since the three networks presented their fall lineups with trumpets blaring...
...He is giving nepotism a bad name...
...Instead of Frankie and Annette we now have Vince and Ross, two teenagers searching for fun, adventure and girls with hair as nice as theirs...
...Burt's clone explains he hasn't had sex in 2,000 years...
...This led me to suspect months in advance that it was probably the funniest thing on the show, and I was right...
...I'd like to know how he works his special effect on the network biggies...
...It makes you think that if Paul Robeson were alive today, he too would be playing a detective...
...I would have been an astronaut, instead of a writer, if not for an affliction that prevents me from even going to Washington Heights without getting dizzy...
...What Chairman of the Board William S. Pa-ley could use on his staff, perhaps as a senior vice president in charge of all new programming, is a seeing-eye dog...
...The lead on the series belongs to Gil Gerard, who didn't carve out much of a name for himself in that sci-fi bomb of two years ago, Logan's Run...
...This has prompted a bunch of emergency meetings at Black Rock, where Chairman Paley has demanded to know what is going wrong with California Fever and such other quality shows as Big Sham us...
...I vaguely recall that there was also a kind of humor about the character...
...asked David Groh, a 25th-century U.S...
...That's the gimmick, the wrinkle...
...They are short, with cute little upturned noses, Hollywood-starlet blinking eyes and large bald craniums...
...They can read and write all the earth languages...
...I never realized just how good those flicks were until I suffered an hour of California Fever...
...Last season Paley defended his canceling Paper Chase by claiming that while he personally loved quality, couldn't live without it, the public wanted something else and it was his duty to meet the need blah blah blah...
...In only three years he has risen from a relative obscurity (his sister Kristy became famous as Buddy in Family) to a complete non-entity...
...The excitement of the premise is too much...
...Ostensibly about what is happening in American teen-life today, the program is actually another TV rip-off of the early '60s AIP beach movies: Beach Parly, Muscle Beach Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, and Bikini Beach...
...After five minutes of intense viewing, however, I started getting sick...
...It would be a terrible waste to make the same mistakes again, hanging out at the library studying, reading books and all that stuff...
...He didn't believe it, either...
...In the year 1987, Buck has a freak mishap in his spaceship, and he returns to earth 500 years later...
...Maybe in a pig's eye...
...Remember how Burt said last season that he had seen a UFO and nobody believed him...
...And now they're messing up Buck Rogers...
...For CBS' idea of what looks good has turned out to be the worst garbage ever...
...The hero is about to down the booze when the voice box around the little fellow's neck says, "L'Chayim...
...It's unfair to criticize the plots, though, because the show is ultimately about hanging out at the beach, getting your hair lightened by the sun, driving four wheel vehicles around the sand dunes, and eating at the natural food shoppe-the good life as envisioned by Hollyweird...
...By contrast, the premise of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (NBC, Thursday, 8 p.m...
...On the opening night (September 25), for instance, they tried to outwit the FCC with "the most humongous three-watt underground radio station in the West...
...most have since been yanked off the air...
...For all we know, Buck may turn out to be the chief rabbi of the lost tribe in a later episode...
...School is out for the scriptwriters...
...Mary Tyler Moore enterprises, which thought up this auspicious TV debut for one of the nation's leading actors, deserves the year's Clammy, for the studio having the creative imagination of a clam...
...California Fever (CBS, Tuesday, 8 p.m...
...They messed up Wonder Woman, Spider-man, The Incredible Hulk...
...Fifteen minutes was enough time to take a good look...
...Little Shamus, Struck By Lightning, and Working Stiffs...
...His kidnappers are out of this world...
...Don't ask me what "humongous" means...
...Back then, Buck's adventures were really exciting...
...After all, doesn't winter follow fall...
...Herewith a few thoughts on some of the other equally fascinating entries that are still kicking around...
...On the positive side, sticking someone like Jones in so mundane a role proves that TV is not racist...
...At one point Buck is served a drink by this robot named Twiki...
...What took so long...
...Glen Larson, the producer of Buck Rogers, produced Battlestar...
...Since Hebrew has been around at least since the time of the Exodus, he says, one can reasonably assume that it will be around for another 500 years, God willing...
...He does those disco gestures and you could pass out laughing...
...If only Buck Rogers could have been as amusing as Batman, the last comic book hero to make the transition to TV successfully...
...What made it even stupider is that NBC ran the joke incessantly on the summer promos...
...But it appears that there are not many closet adolescents like myself...
...As we know from the summer promos, Paris is not one of your superfly, svelte, dude cops...
...Unlike the Buck Rogers cast, these outer space characters are wildly funny-looking...
...My friend Kim Richman has pointed out that the joke is not implausible...
...Nevertheless, it was a cheap gag, another example of some Jewish writer getting back at the country in a diabolical way...
...This is a mind-boggling piece of casting...
...No wonder TV is boring everybody out of their minds...
...You would think, from the title, that the show is about can-can dancers or a city of lights or the plaster business or Greek mythology...
...Professor Kingsfield used to warn his students in contract law: "You come in here with a skull full of mush, and leave . . ." If CBS hadn't dropped out of law school, it would now have a success d'estime, instead of a failure d'drek...
...This season, the spaceship took him off to outer space where his double was cloned...
...I can hear Burt laughing...
...Great white actors have always been stuck in dumb roles as well...
...And you thought there were no UFO's...
...McNichol is one of those showbiz legends...
...CBS, for example, claimed its shows were "looking good...
...The producers of the modern version have tried to impart some humor, too, but when TV tries hard to be tongue-in-cheek these days, it invariably turns into foot-in-mouth...
...Rex Smith gave the most insipid, limpid impersonation of a rock star named Rex Smith ever seen on TV...
...Why, a bank teller's life in New York City would be more involving and fresh as a series subject...
...temporarily on hiatus...
...These wacky kids at Sunset Beach in California have had a variety of adventures so far...
...That the change was not for the better is a heavy understatement...
...Air Force member, in the first episode made especially for TV (September 27...
...I modeled myself after him in the early '40s, when I saw him in those old Saturday morning "chapters...
...Now, I happen to like Buck Rogers -as a person...
...The next week the two teens befriended a senile woman and helped her keep out of an old-age home...
...Get it...
...He never compromises, is a little heavier and a little more pious than the other 2,314 cops who have had TV series, and above all, he is smart...
...A good example came in the two-hour long series opener-Initially a made-for-TV movie passed off last summer as a commercial film...
...They are also a very vigorous race...
...So you're Buck Rogers...
...If you want funny sci-fi, look for it on that old show, Soap (ABC, Thursday, 9:30 p.m...
...But no, it's about a black cop named Woodrow ("Woody") Paris...
...The special effects-often worth the price of admission in TV sci-fi-are not so special, having been used before in a failed attempt to ignite Battlestar Galactica...
...Not only is he a captain of detectives on a metropolitan police force but he also moonlights as a professor of criminology at a local university...
...The surf's not up...
...This is no accident...
...Another powerful CBS drama is Paris (Saturday, 10 p.m...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 21
