On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television WASTELAND PREVIEWS by marvin kitman I^have been staggering around like one of the living dead ever since subjecting myself to the preview tape cassettes of the new TV shows. Besides...
...It must be hilarious in LA and other places in the fast lane of life...
...Strike Force (ABC, Fridays, 10:00 p.m...
...A 1,600 year-old sorcerer, played by Barnard Hughes, is looking for an apprentice...
...I would like to leave you with a positive thought about this season, and about television in general...
...A high school kid possesses strange powers and doesn't know it in the first episode...
...Mr...
...is the Untouchables again, with Elliot Ness heading a special unit of cops who solve insoluble cases in an hour...
...An additional contribution of Hill Street Blues is the increase of tooth brushing on screen...
...Even without John Travolta, I like Kaplan...
...I'm telling you, there was unprecedented apathy in the land this summer...
...And Robert Stack is back in Strike Force on ABC...
...The James A rness Sho won NBC is currently McClain's Law...
...He should have looked harder...
...I don't know whether Danny Superstarr will fly...
...Welcome back, Gabe...
...They'll keep doing it until they get it right, I suppose...
...Now everybody is scrubbing their molars like Captain Furillo (Daniel Travanti) and his lady friend, the public defender (Veronica Hammel...
...Fortunately, the experts were too apathetic themselves to weigh what it all meant, or it might have been all over for the industry...
...recounts the life of a local TV newswoman...
...With NBC s unsurpassed flair for destroying comedy talent, I wouldn't be surprised if Randall gets shuffled right out of the story...
...Lewis & Clark (NBC, Thursdays, 8:30p.m...
...The thing is, Ozzie and Harriet was better...
...is no different than yesterday's...
...For its preoccupation with axe murders, this show wins Aaron Spelling the Attila the Hun Prize...
...Police shows have returned in force...
...The green isfor theenvyof the producers who didn't think of Blues first...
...There are a few threads, though, that in desperation might be woven into a silver lining...
...can't go on with this...
...In the space of 15 minutes in one of its segments I also saw two fork lifts chase a man who runs screaming through a warehouse before he is squashed...
...Lee Majors in The Fall Guy, without Lindsay Wagner...
...One decap is more grisliness than I can tolerate, but why use just one when six will do fine...
...is a really dumb show about two San Diego private detectives who keep going to Mexico and never get lost...
...Mayhem that would have been merely suggested last year is being rendered explicitly...
...Rock Hudson without Susan St...
...But this personal stuff doesn't hurt the dramas...
...The highlight of the opening episode is a skateboard ride down the streets of San Francisco...
...CBS' Vintage Years-which I thought was the story of the Gallo Sisters or Orson Welles-is now called Falcon Crest...
...The pressure gave NBC strokes (not Diff'rent Strokes) all summer, as it tried to juggle the elements of the film into a sitcom scheduled to premiere October 28 at 9:30 p.m...
...Most of them could bearrested for impersonating Hill Street Blues as Hill Street Reds or Hill Street Greens...
...In Greatest American Hero, the high school teacher can fly, albeit poorly...
...His comb in 77 Sunset Strip would be more scintillating than these retreads...
...should be called Have a Heart or Oh My A ching Back...
...Hey, why not an Ed "Kookie" Byrnes festival...
...Every cop has personal problems, of course, yet seems to be a good family man...
...And there is no Gail Fisher...
...Arson is very big this year, too— most of the shows have somebody with their clothes on fire...
...is the best of the Hill Street Blues clones...
...Though Mike Connors is no Efrem Zimbalist Jr...
...In any case, everything soon came to a sudden halt...
...The season would be delayed, the networks announced unhappily, and nobody seemed to mind...
...The Fall Guy (ABC, Wednesdays, 9:00p.m...
...The jerky pattern will be repeated at various times during the fall...
...Critical acclaim has affected the producers, if not most viewers, who are still not turning to that award winner...
...Who knows what depravity TV will turn to next...
...The show is an Ozzie and Harriet-styk comedy about family life in Ohio...
...MikeConnors has moved four times in the last six years, and we learn in Today's FBI that his wife has the moving blues...
...Whatever they call it, it's still nothing more than a Greatest American Hero sandwich-your basic Superman mixed with baloney...
...There'sworse, however...
...I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at Sidney Shorr, the moving two-hour movie special starring Tony Randall from which Love, Sidney has been drawn...
...I'll have to check his flight plans...
...It's what we call the hiccup start, or the rolling thunder opening...
...The story is completely blah and derivative, but Kevin Dobson without Telly Savalas is brilliant...
...Never have I seen so much recycling of concepts and players either...
...Another weird feature of this season: They keep changing the names of shows...
...Then we had the baseball strike, further delaying the TV season...
...Besides being the worst season in boob-tube history, for several reasons it is also the strangest...
...The networks really can't get their new series rolling until after the World Series, and that will be over Christmas week, 1 gather, such being the confusion resulting from the new playoffs...
...He finds a high school cretin...
...Simon & Simon (CBS, Tuesdays, 8:00 p.m...
...When the strike ended, nobody seemed to care (heck, they didn't even know it was on...
...A sitcom about a widowed police chief, his (below-) average kids and a super housekeeper played by the wonderful roly-poly, Nell Carter...
...Jessica Novak (CBS, Thursdays, 10:00 p.m...
...The prediction is for a very cloudy, overcast, dismal season...
...He's the new James Caan...
...This fantasy-comedy makes My Mother the Car seem inspired...
...Lome Green in ABC's Code Red, without his Alpo dog...
...Yes-the fall of Carthage...
...Unfortunately, his acting hasn't improved, his running has slowed to 25 miles per hour, and a stunt man reads his lines for him...
...They had 13 episodes in the can before the strike...
...They are still tracking down Italian businessmen...
...They also getting more mindlessly violent, a la Mannix...
...On ABC the first series of the season, King's Crossing, doesn't start until October 17...
...went from Starr Knight to Knight Starr to Starr Prince to The Po wer of Matthew Starrto The Power ofDavidStarr...
...Lacking is the real magic— good comic writing...
...The Power of Daniel Starr (NBC, Sundays, 7:00p.m...
...The Moral Majority hated the special even before it was aired on October 5. They objected to the central character-a homosexual illustrator who likes kids...
...Robert Stack in Strike Force lives in a house that looks like it must be cleaned by the huge dog, Sam, Stack's constant companion since his wife has left him-probably because of the damned dog...
...is written by Erma Bombeck-for the money, I hope...
...Love, Sidney (NBC, Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m...
...They just stepped out for a minute, and now there are nine new ones debuting this fall...
...The premiere of Strike Force boasts six decapitations with a battle axe that is ground to a nice edge before each "decap," as the cops call it-thus making it sound like instant coffee...
...Poor Nell...
...In the old days nobody in a police show was ever show n in the bathroom...
...one is enough), he is more mature and thoughtful than he used to be in the Mannix...
...and a head held down in a flushing toilet...
...In fact, the pilot was so good you could dance to it...
...Today's FBI, without Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and with Mike Connors...
...Today's FBI (ARC, Sundays, 8:00 p.m...
...As that great intellect, Lee Majors, says in the first episode of The Fall Guy, "Things always get blackest right before they turn dark...
...Officially, television launched its new year on Rosh Hashanah, thceveningof September 28.1 don't know what the moguls had in mind, but it won't help...
...The NBC series on Sundays at 7:00 p.m...
...Open All Night (ABC, Fridays, 8:30 p . m .) is the first sitcom about an all-night superette run by somebody named Gordon Feester, accompanied by an assortment of weirdos who hang out or in...
...Shannon (CBS, Wednesdays, 10:00 p.m...
...This wild west spoof is a Blazing Saddles with damp kindling, despite raves from critics on the LA press junket...
...TV actors today are taking flying lessons instead of acting lessons...
...Oh brother...
...Cheer up, it's only TV...
...He plays a man from Long Island who fulfills his dream of going to Texas, where he opens up a country and western nightclub called The Nassau County Tavern...
...James...
...Maggie (ARC, Fridays, 9:00 p.m...
...The Rock Hudson Show, also on NBC, is now The Devlin Connection...
...Isn't there anything I'm looking forward to this fall...
...He plays a Hollywood stunt man who moonlights as a bounty hunter...
...a gun fired next to the ear of someone who has already had a heart attack in order to scare him...
...Aaron must be really sore at society for canceling Charlie's Angels...
...A It hough l he police shows arc getting more meaningful, a la Hill Street Blues...
...Best of the West (ABC, Thursdays, 8:00 p.m .) was the only show to open on time or early (September 10...
...Merlin (CBS, Wednesdays, 8:00 p.m...
...The new metaphor for the sex act, apparently, is swilling water and spitting it out...
...Gimme a Break (NBC, Thursdays, 9:00 p.m...
...If not for the need to avoid a collision with the Super Bowl, the World Championship probably wouldn't have been decided until spring training...
...These private eyes need pairs of glasses and music by Garfunkle...
...First, there was the strike, and nobody seemed sure whether it was the gaffers or the best boys who had walked out...
...The same network' % Lewis & Clark, starring Gabe Kaplan and premiering October 28, was originally called The Lewis's [sic] of Luckenbach then Gabe andGuich...
...Today's FBI premieres October 15, The Fall Guy October 28...
...In one of the preview tapes, I saw a kid on a bicycle hit by a speeding car and sent flying...
...Last I heard it had become The Power ojDaniel Starr...
...Code Red (ABC, Sundays, 7:00 p.m...
...An alleged mad person is wiping out a whole jury for finding someone guilty...
...Today's FBI has a man hanged from the yardarm of a pier, not to mention faces slapped and stomachs punched...
...It sounds as if there were 90 new show s this season instead of 23...
...is Lome Greene's biggest disaster since Battle Star Ex-Laxia, and Irwin Allen's biggest disaster yet...
...Apparently they didn't take Lee Majors' parts away and put him in cold storage because of the escalating costs of maintaining bionic men...
...Details at 11...
...A whole generation may grow up thinking that brushing teeth makes babies, just as an earlier generation once believed that it was the surf pounding the beach, clouds passing over the moon, or logs crackling on the hearth, all of which used to happen after the kiss...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 19
