The Unkept Promises of Spring
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE UNKEPT PROMISES OF SPRING BY MARVIN KITMAN It happens every year. In spring, all the upcoming series announced on the West Coast for the fall round of premieres sound great, at...
...Is this an occult thing...
...The he-man of TV commercials (Jordache) and bus-stop shelters (Eminence underwear posters), Scalia is making his serious acting debut as Hudson's long lost son, another private eye—and my desk is a more convincing actor...
...How is it possible that in a free enterprise system, where there are no cultural commissars telling you what to do, two networks could have independently delivered these twins...
...If this copying were not so pathetic, I would laugh...
...Perhaps the maids are peddling what they find in waste baskets...
...Bennett had to invent another UFO out to get Star...
...I just flashed on the name 'Frank!'" she explains in the premiere...
...and a fellow passing by on the street outside your window is suddenly hit by the same bolt from the blue...
...When I outlined this to Larry Hagman of Dallas, he observed, "It never would have happened if we all worked in lead lined rooms...
...o detects a similarity between Tales of the Gold Monkey and Bring 'Em Back Alive (CBS, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m.-9.00 p.m...
...Whatever the scientific reasons for the industry's failure to deliver on the promises of spring, I'm always amazed at how these creative people in California aren't ashamed to spawn such dreary, unimaginative, done-to-death old junk, let alone put their names to it...
...This year the spoilage is so bad that a surprising number of the new shows aren't even real television...
...Here we have the story of a husband with a wife who is a witch, and believe me, this stinker casts a pall, not a spell...
...Plus two-fisted men with two fists, danger and ferocious beasts...
...Instead of being gold however, the metal is really a heat-resistant alloy, and of course the Axis wants it...
...fer shur," as they say in LA...
...First, it mimicks the old Hollywood B-minus adventure movies of the '30s and '40s, the ones that featured death-defying feats of heroism...
...Later, he was miraculously turned into a golden statue 100 feet high...
...Everyone is assured these masterpieces have survived a rigorous weeding out process that would have shriveled anything less than first rate...
...The word from LA is clear: This oneis fabulous, that one is a hysterical nonstop comedy...
...The hour-long "fanciful mystery," as CBS dubs the genre, does indeed sport a cat a la Bell, Book and Candle: Witches, apparently, need "second communicators" and cats are often used...
...He can hear people talk without a phone, stop a school bus at 50 miles per hour, melt steel with a look—definitely what we used to call a gifted child...
...Tales also features a special breed of mansized ferocious Doberman monkeys who guard the old idol...
...The MacGuf fin here is a hugegold-en monkey...
...His goal is to be like everybody else at Crestridge High...
...Why couldn't the communicator have been a snake, I wonder, or an agent—or am I being redundant...
...His best friend is a one-eyed dog named Jack, who has the best dialogue...
...I give t he show only t hree bananas: Some of the scenes in the jungle are as fearsome as a trip to the Central Park Zoo...
...Jack Scalia plays the Susan St...
...Two thumbs up give her enormous powers, too...
...As a dramatic team, they are Rock and the Rocketle...
...Nor will the producer complain if anyone is reminded of E. T. I once thought extraterrestrials looked like the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live: Though they claimed to be from France, you could see they were aliens...
...Jack Scalia is something else...
...Only in America...
...They remind me of Roddy MacDowell in Plan-etof the Apes, or the young MBAs hovering around Grant Tinker at NBC...
...James role...
...It's as smart as the children on the average sitcom today...
...Tim Matheson, the euteone from Animal House, plays her nonpsychic gumshoe husband, whose powers include being allergic to cats...
...As you may have gathered from the promos throughout the summer, Matthew Star is a teenager from the planet Quad-ris who has been brought t o a small suburban California town and enrolled in the local high school for finishing and polishing...
...The major issue about retreads is whether the program brings good memories or bad of the show being repeated...
...Stephen Collins is Harrison Ford, I mean Jake Cutter, the handsome, cigar-smoking, brawling adventurer-pilot who flies a Grumman Goose seaplane...
...When we first meet this superbeing he seems a normal American adolescent in his mid-20s attending high school (they must age rapidly on the planet Quadris, since Matthew looks 25 if he's a day...
...With Peter Barton, TV's E.T., it is not as easy to tell...
...It's a jungle out there...
...You were expecting maybe brain surgeons...
...Another winner in t he Mr...
...Besides, although she may be the brains and legs and thighs of the private investigation agency (Tucker & Tucker), she is not nearly as resourceful as her cat...
...Tales of the Gold Monkey is original only in the sense that it does not have a lost ark everybody is frantically seeking...
...These coincidences in television are amazing...
...There is an endless supply of intrigue, romance, secret agents, Nazis and Japs, Eurasian beauties and white goddesses...
...Good grief," he says," I've got it," as he claps his hand to his head and dashes to a pay phone to call his agent: "Hello, Shifty, now here's the concept," he gasps, dictating the other guy's thoughts word for word...
...She can't twinkle her nose like Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched...
...this drama will make you forget the other cop shows you've seen, that one is taut and gripping—better than Hemingway...
...The wild and crazy thing about Amanda is that she doesn't have her ESP and psychokinesis down pat...
...Corporal Schicklegruber himself—the script uses period language?has dispatched the finest minds in the Third Reich to beat the bush in the South Seas...
...What kind of flashes are they...
...Immediately we knew we were on the planet of Los Angeles, where there is a shortage of water and ideas and an abundance of avocados for salads...
...That's why I'll never be rich, my wife tells me...
...A prime illustration is Tucker's Witch (CBS, Wednesday, 9:00 p.m.-10.00 p.m...
...He has been at it so long he really has the role perfected...
...no, she has to stare hard...
...According to the legend, a long time ago a boatload of monks was led to safety in a storm by a monkey who stood on the bow for seven days and nights, pointing the way...
...She has to practice by stopping clocks and the like—on our time, yet...
...Hot, or the rain coat variety...
...I'll have to ask my cat, Hep, the next time she strays by...
...In spring, all the upcoming series announced on the West Coast for the fall round of premieres sound great, at least to the network executives in New York...
...Somewhere between LA and New York the gems turn to drek...
...The bar run by the Frenchman has slowly turning ceiling fans...
...The Devlin Connection (NBC, Saturday, 10:00p.m.-11:0Op.m., starring Rock Hudson, is the freshly minted version of Macmillan and Wife...
...Both shows have virile protagonists likely to knock the socks off your grandmother...
...But he is a beautiful, sensitive person with a wonderful character...
...an effort that could only have sprung from the recycling lobe of the industry's brain...
...Both take place in the same locale and time and have Nazis and Japs chasing the hero, not to mention the same kind of bars with revolving wooden fans and beady-eyed characters cloned from Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre...
...Hitler apparently thinks the monkey belongs back in Berchtes-gaden because it is an Aryan (I must be making that up...
...Unfortunately Catherine Hicks, who plays private investigator-witch Amanda Tucker, is doing a Kim Novak imitation...
...They are deja vu-vision...
...The men who dreamed up the zany concept, Phillip Mandelker and Leonard Hill, scoff angrily at the Bewitched comparison, claiming to derive their inspiration from John Van Druten's Bell, Book and Candle...
...In the first episode Bennett couldn't even wring a story out of the natural conflict between the average superper-son and the average high school student, a sort of town and gown clash on the interstellar extracurricular level...
...The tropics...
...He doesn't lord it over his classmates, and he doesn't want special treatment...
...They do put on airs in television...
...Despite his mature appearance, he is still baffled by teen problems, such as girls...
...Hudson this time portrays Brian Devlin, a retired private investigator who has become the head of a Lincoln Center type institution in LA: Devlin is a music lover (no, this is not a sitcom...
...It's the old Superman story, crossed with, if you'll pardon the expression, The Greatest American Hero...
...He doesn't look like a Quadrant, as people from Quadris might be called...
...But the feline in Tucker's Witch is white, not black as in the Van Druten play—such innovating...
...Originality contest is Herve Bennett, the man behind The Powers of Matthew Star (NBC, Friday, 8:00p.m.-9:00p.m...
...It is not clear sometimes what producer Don Bellisario is doing, but he's doing it furiously...
...Actually, Amanda strikes me as simply another psychotic on the streets of LA, hearing voices and talking to the little green people who constitute one of the minorities there next to the Chican-os and the really creative people...
...This little critter turns on the phone answering machine in the opening episode at a crucial moment, for example, thereby saving Amanda from a deranged killer...
...You must ask, does Tucker's Witch remind you of the stage version of Bell, Book and Candle with Lili Palmer, or of the movie with Kim Novak...
...The result doesn't leaveone nearly as breathless as Hicks' rendition of Marilyn Monroe, which I thought was neat...
...Tales of the Gold Monkey (ABC, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m...
...Basically it is Bewitched with a twist—the husband and wife are detectives...
...It's called the TV season...
...Together they are TV's sappiest couple this year...
...Another theory maintains that any idea you have is immediately released into the LA air: Sitting at your desk, you come up with a bright idea—how about a series based on the adventure movies of the '40s...
...Second, the heroism in this case consists of ripping off Raiders of the Lost Ark without being sued by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas...
...The Islands...
...Hudson is always himself...
...And of course both are rip-offs of Gardner McKay's Adventures in Paradise, a series that was forgettable in 1959-62...
...smacks of double deja-vu-vision...
...And she has flashes...
...Or Korean greengrocers...
...The time is 1939...
...Yet he has strange powers, too: Where the others in the classroom are worried about acne, Matthew is coping with talents that would turn on Amanda Tucker...
...Then something goes wrong...
...They take pride in their lack of originality out thereon the other side of paradise, in the land of silk and money...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 20
