1973 – The TV Guide Fall Preview

When I looked at the 1972 TV Guide Fall Preview I described the 1972-73 season as being one of TV's golden years – the equivalent of a year like 1939 in the movie business – when a string of truly memorable series burst onto the scene. If there is an equivalent to the 1973-74 season in movies, I'm not aware of it. Perhaps because it would be the sort of year that no one writes about and few talk about except in the deepest darkest recesses of a studio's executive suites, and even then in hushed, conspiratorial tones. How bad was the 1973-74 season? This bad: out of seventeen series that debuted in September of 1973, on all three networks, only two were in the line-up for the 1974-75 season. Of the fifteen new shows that were cancelled ten were gone after thirteen episodes. Mid-season replacements did slightly better – but not much. Four of eight shows in that group were cancelled at the end of the season. The word carnage springs immediately to mind.

It's difficult to know where to start with a season that was this bad. Do you go with the shows that succeeded? The shows that failed? The trends? Or do you go network by network? Maybe a combination of all of them is the best way to go.

CBS was the network that had the most successful show to debut in the September 1973 with Kojak but not by much. Kojak ran for five years, and even though it debuted a month after NBC's Police Story and ended its run ten days before that show, it had twenty-two more episodes (118 for Kojak; 96 for Police Story). The basis of Kojak was an Emmy-winning made for TV movie called The Nelson-Marcus Murders which had aired during the 1972-73 season. The show was brilliantly cast, with Telly Savalas in the lead role of Theo Kojak and a supporting cast that included Dan Frazer as the detective commander at New York's 13^th Precinct, and Kevin Dobson, Mark Russell, Vince Conti and George Savalas (billed for most of the series' run as Demosthenes to avoid confusion or allegations of nepotism). But it was the charismatic Savalas who was the absolute focus of attention. Kojak was full of character traits that made him stand out from the assorted detectives on TV at the time. (The 1973 Fall Preview puts it this way, even though it doesn't really convey the strength of the character: "Television has a fat detective, a rumpled detective, a Hawaiian detective, a Polish-American detective, black detectives, a detective in a wheel chair, a detective in a loud sports coat. . . . And now at long last television has a bald detective. Let's hear it for Theo Kojak!") Not only was Kojak bald, he stood out in other ways. There were the clothes. Kojak always looked like he was wearing his entire pay check on his back, with beautifully tailored clothes and hats to go with them. And he was never at a loss for feminine companionship, though never the same woman twice. Then there were the lollipops. Not initially a feature of the character – like Savalas, Kojak was a heavy smoker – it was decided to have the character suck on a lollipop as a replacement for the cigarettes (or were they small cigars) that Kojak was always smoking. Finally there was the catch-phrase that couldn't have been adequately delivered by anyone except Telly Savalas: "Who loves ya baby!" No, Kojak was the stand-out series of the 1973-74 season.

Unfortunately the rest of the CBS line-up was nothing to write home (or articles) about. Someone at CBS decided that there needed to be a revival of the character Perry Mason, and with Raymond Burr still occupied with Ironside, it was decided that the series would be totally rebooted as The New Adventures Of Perry Mason. The cast wasn't horrible – Monte Markham played Mason, Sharon Acker was Della Street, Harry Guardino was Hamilton Burger and Dane Clark was Tragg. Up against Wonderful World Of Disney on NBC and The FBI on ABC it died after fifteen episodes. On Tuesday the network had a movie series that alternated with two series that each aired once a month. One was Shaft starring original cast members Richard Roundtree and Eddie Barth. The show altered the character of John Shaft. Instead of being at odds with the cops, he cooperated with the cops, personified by Eddie Barth's character Lt. Al Rossi. The other show in the timeslot was Hawkins, starring Jimmy Stewart as lawyer Billy-Jim Hawkins and Strother Martin as his investigator cousin R.J. Stewart's character was a country lawyer from West Virginia with a national reputation as a defense attorney. Even though the series was loved by the critics and won a Golden Globe for Stewart as Best Actor in a Drama series, the show only aired for eight episodes. CBS also debuted two comedies on Friday night. One was Calucci's Department starring the great James Coco as Joe Calucci, the supervisor of a New York City unemployment office. The most interesting part of this show wasn't the cast, which also included Candy Azarra, Peggy Pope and Bill Lazarus, but the fact that it was written by actors Joe Bologna and his wife Renee Taylor, with music by Marvin Hamlisch. It lasted thirteen episodes against Sanford And Son. The other comedy was just as successful. Someone at CBS apparently decided that M*A*S*H meant the time was ripe for a revival of service comedies so they came out with Roll Out! The show detailed the happenings at the 5050^th Quartermaster Trucking Company of the famous Red Ball Express, which transported supplies and fuel to the American armies after D-Day. The unit (like the units of the real Red Ball Express) was made up of Black enlisted men with White officers. Among the actors were Garrett Morris, Mel Stewart, Stu Gilliam, Val Bisoglio and Ed Begley Jr. It died a quick death against The Odd Couple.

CBS fared somewhat better with their replacement series. The New Adventures Of Perry Mason was replaced with Apple's Way, a family drama with Ronny Cox, Vince Van Patten, and Kristy MacNichol as part of a family that left the hustle and bustle of LA for the calm of the small town founded by one of their ancestors. The show, created by Earl Hamner Jr. who did The Waltons, was strong enough to outlast The FBI but not strong enough to last against The Wonderful World Of Disney. It ran for 28 episodes, from January 1974 to January 1975. The western Dirty Sally replaced Calucci's Department. Dirty Sally was amazingly enough a spin-off of Gunsmoke, starring Jeanette Nolan and Dack Rambo as a mismatched pair travelling to California to pan for gold. It lasted thirteen episodes. Replacing Roll Out! was the biggest success that CBS would have in the entire season: Good Times. A spin-off of Maude, starring Esther Rolle as Florida (Maude's former maid) the matriarch of the Evans family, Good Times ran for six seasons and 133 episodes. It was also the break-out role for a young stand-up comic named Jimmy Walker, who played the eldest Evans son, J.J. JJ's catch-phrase "Dy-No-Mite! became extremely popular as did the character, much to the irritation of Rolle, and John Amos (who played Rolle's husband James for the first three seasons of the show). The show was the first to show an African-American family living in the poverty of the Chicago housing projects, with the Evans family struggling to get by.

Turning to NBC the big success was – as previously mentioned – Police Story. The show was an anthology program created by novelist and (at the time) LAPD detective Joseph Wambaugh who had already written The New Centurions, The Blue Knight and the non-fiction Onion Fields. The series told stories about various LAPD cops. While there were no regular characters there were a number of characters who made repeated appearances. My personal favourites were the episodes starring Tony LoBianco and Don Meredith (yes, the Don Meredith who worked alongside Howard Cossell) as a pair of Robbery Homicide detectives, and the episodes featuring Vic Morrow as a surveillance expert. The series spun off three different series. The most successful of these was Police Woman, starring Angie Dickinson. The other two were less successful. Joe Forrester, starring Lloyd Bridges lasted one season, while Man Undercover with David Cassidy only lasted ten episodes.

NBC debuted three hour-long dramas, The Magician starring Bill Bixby as a playboy philanthropist and magician who uses his stage magic skills to solve crimes and help people in need. Initially the character travelled around the world in a Boeing 720 airliner – which he described as being "like any other mobile home, only faster" – but later moved into an apartment in LA's Magic Castle (a favourite haunt of one of my favourite bloggers Mark Evanier) with an entirely new supporting cast.. Interestingly enough, Bixby did all the magic himself, without trick photography. It lasted the entire season though it moved from Tuesdays at nine to Mondays at eight at the mid-season (about the same time that the location and supporting cast changed). So did another hour long series, Chase, starring Mitchell Ryan, which came from Jack Webb's Mark VII production house. The show started out with Ryan's character Chase Reddick heading a team of young cops who basically used a variety of "alternate" transportation methods to "chase" criminals. About half way through the season the show, which initially aired before The Magician, was moved to Wednesdays at eight (swapping time slots with Webb's Adam-12 as well as the first half-hour of the Wednesday Mystery Movie, which also moved to Tuesday). When Chase moved it also changed its supporting cast. The changes didn't help either series. The third hour-long series was another anthology series, Love Story. There's not much that can be said about this show – literally. TV.com, which is usually a good source for such material, can only manage cast lists for the episodes but not even a bare synopsis of the twelve episodes. This is only slightly better than the website's entry for The NBC Follies, a vaudeville style series that had rotating hosts, although most episodes were supposed to be hosted by either Sammy Davis Jr. or Mickey Rooney. It lasted thirteen episodes.

NBC's big push in the 1973-74 season was in the area of sitcoms. NBC had four of them none of which lasted more than a full season. Diana, starred Dianna Rigg as a newly divorced woman who moves to New York and lives in her brother's apartment. The show lasted thirteen episodes, including one in which Dianna's former flame appeared. He was played by Patrick MacNee in an obvious attempt to gain ratings. It failed (but I'm still running Dianna Rigg's picture here because it's my considered opinion that I should use any excuse to run a picture of Dianna Rigg that I can find). Needles and Pins Featured Norman Fell and Louis Nye as feuding partners in the New York rag trade who hire a young designer from Nebraska. In spite of Fell and Nye, the show died a swift and well-deserved death after thirteen episodes. Lotsa Luck, which started out on Monday nights, was an Americanization of the British show On The Buses, starring Dom Deluise and Kathleen Freeman. TV Guide didn't think too much of the pilot of the show. In their review, the stated that "Bill Persky and Sam Denoff (That Girl) are producing, and Carl Reiner (The Dick Van Dyke Show) wrote the toilet – er, pilot – episode." Despite the cast and the crew it only lasted one season. The Girl With Something Extra also lasted a single season. The show was the sort of sitcom that had been popular a few years before, a domestic situation with a young married couple with a gimmick. The couple were played by John Davidson (?!) and Sally Field, and the gimmick was that Sally Field could read people's minds.

The 1973-74 season was also the second and final season of NBC's Wednesday Mystery Movie. Cool Millions and Madigan were both gone while Banacek was retained for the second season. Added to the rotation were: The Snoop Sisters, with Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick as a pair of elderly sisters who were also mystery writers and solved crimes; Tenafly, starring James McEachin as a happily married private detective who is a cog in the corporate machine; and Faraday & Company, about an old time private eye who escaped from a South American jail after 25 years and found it hard to adjust to a world where cars didn't have hood ornaments let alone the fact that he had a son with his former secretary who had taken over his agency and made it into a big company. None of these shows was particularly successful, and when the line-up had to be juggled after Diana and Needles and Pins were cancelled Wednesday Mystery Movie moved to Tuesday nights (and was suitably renamed)... and didn't do any better than it had on Wednesdays.

ABC had, marginally, the worst line-up at the start of the year, although it's worth noting that one of the series listed in the Fall Preview issue was a success, but it can't be strictly speaking be lumped in with the rest of the ABC Fall line-up. And in truth there was one show which under ordinary circumstances was a sure thing to be renewed for a second season. That show was called Toma and dealt with the real life of a Newark undercover detective named David Toma. The show, which starred Tony Mussante and Susan Strasberg, was about an undercover cop who was a master of disguise and achieved a tremendous arrest record without once firing his gun. The show earned both critical accolades and strong ratings from the beginning, even as there were complaints about the show's violence. However, in a move which rivals just about anything that David Caruso has managed to pull off in terms of busting his own career, Mussante refused to do a second season of the show. True he had stated that he only intended to do a single season of the series when he signed on for it, but the producers figured that if the show was a success he'd change his mind. When he didn't they looked around for another actor to take over the role of Dave Toma, and settled on Robert Blake. Except that Blake refused to do it. He wasn't going to take on a role that had been created by another actor. So the show was cancelled and retooled to fit Blake, ditching the character's wife and two kids and replacing them with a cockatoo – but that's another story.

ABC put two sitcoms into their Fall line-up that were movie adaptations. Neither ran more than thirteen weeks but they still had some "interesting" qualities. The first was an adaptation of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice – the movie about two couples who experiment with swinging. This version starred Anita Gillette, Anne Archer and a young Robert Urich in his first starring role in a series. One can pretty much guess what the PTC would have said about this show – sight unseen of course – had they existed at the time. The other adaptation was Adam's Rib, an adaptation of the Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn movie. This one starred Ken Howard as the prosecutor and Blythe Danner as his activist defence attorney wife. They had appeared as a married couple the previous year in the movie 1776, as Tom and Martha Jefferson. (In looking at the publicity photos for Adam's Rib one is struck by how much Danner resembles her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow.) The other new ABC show was Griff, which starred Lorne Greene as a former police captain who became a highly paid private detective. Ben Murphy played his associate, the son of a cop killed in the line of duty. The show ran thirteen episodes.

ABC cancelled a number of shows at the mid-season in addition to the new series that they dropped. These were The New Temperature's Rising, Room 222, and Love American Style. Three of the replacement series the network put on, The Cowboys (a continuation of the John Wayne movie of the same name), Firehouse (about a small inner-city fire station, produced by Leonard Goldberg and Aaron Spelling), and medical drama Doc Elliot (starring James Franciscus), were cancelled by the end of the year. Doc Elliott originally once a month in the Wednesday time slot held down by Owen Marshall: Counsellor-At-Law and so was included in the Fall Preview issue. However, when Griff was cancelled Owen Marshall was moved to Saturdays and Doc Elliot took the Wednesday time slot for the rest of the season. Pretty much the same thing seems to have happened with The Six Million Dollar Man. The show, which starred Lee Majors (who was also on Owen Marshall) as Colonel Steve Austin, was originally scheduled to replace the Saturday Suspense Movie once a month, but when Room 222 and Adam's Rib were dropped it became a weekly series. The show ran for five years, made a star of Lee Majors, and made the words "we can rebuild him" something of a catch-phrase.

As for the other series to debut in the winter of 1974, well it had started as a failed pilot that had been converted into an episode of Love American Style. When the teenaged star of the episode was picked by George Lucas to appear in a major motion picture called American Graffiti, it was all that the network needed to revive the pilot, now named Happy Days after the Love American Style episode that spawned it – Love And The Happy Days. There were a couple of changes in the cast, with Tom Bosley replacing Harold Gould as Howard Cunningham, and the addition of a couple of supporting characters named Ralph Malph and Arthur Fonzarelli (initially a minor supporting character who worried the network censors – the forbade the producers to put him in a leather jacket), the circumstances were set for a series that would run for eleven years, and spawn expressions ranging from "Ayyyy" and "sit on it" to "jump the shark." Not bad for a busted pilot.

The end of the 1973-74 season also brought the end for a number of long-lived shows. ABC dropped the venerable – if by now hopelessly elegiac – FBI as well as Owen Marshall: Counsellor at Law, and both The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. NBC dropped both of their surviving variety shows, Flip Wilson and Dean Martin. As for CBS, Sonny and Cher's divorce ended not only their marriage but also their TV show (at least temporarily) but the big shocker (in its own way) was the cancellation of Here's Lucy. With the exception of a two year break between 1960 and 1962, Lucille Ball had been a staple on CBS since 1951.

(By the way, the missing mid-season shows for this season are ABC between 8 and 8:30 on Thursday, and NBC Thursday between 10 and 11. I'll just assume that the Wednesday from 9-11 time slot was given over to yet another movie package.)

Oddly enough there doesn't seem to be a 1973 ABC Fall Preview posted on YouTube, but I have managed to find a copy of the CBS preview for that year. Quality of the promo reel isn't great but it's there.

TV Guide Fall Preview 1972 – The Comments

First up some comments from Todd Mason:

Actually, the bitter Serling line about NIGHT GALLERY was that it was "MANNIX in a shroud."

Me: I grabbed the Serling "Mannix in a cemetery" quote from Wikipedia (naturally). I should have expected Serling to come up with something better.

Leaving aside social pressures on the brass at CBS, the rationale for dumping BRIDGET LOVES BERNIE was presumably the amount of the audience BLB was losing from ALL IN THE FAMILY, a consideration that would, for example, later doom any number of NBC sitcoms on Thursday nights in the '80s into the '90s, good, bad and indifferent.

Me: I'd accept that point – which I think was the point that Mike Dann was trying to make – except for a couple of things. First of course is that Dann was wrong about the show hammocking because it did finish the year with a higher rating than Mary Tyler Moore. If you cancel Bridget Loves Bernie wouldn't you cancel MTM following the same logic? The second thing is probably a bit more important. The show finished in fifth place for the year, ahead of MTM and every other show on CBS except Maude and Hawaii Five-0. Even if you think that the show can't stand on its own without the lead-in of All In The Family, surely it seems too highly rated to not at least try to keep it in the line-up by moving it to another night (a modern example was CBS's decision to move Shark out of the post CSI timeslot on Thursday night to Sunday night; it had strong ratings on Thursday but died on Sunday, but at least the network tried). And given the fate of CBS's new comedies launched on Friday nights in September 1973 – Calucci's Department which was cancelled after 12 episodes and Roll Out! which lasted 13 – I think it's fair to say that a relocated Bridget Loves Bernie couldn't have done worse. So why wasn't it tried unless there was pressure on CBS to dump the show.

(Of course, any reason to dump David Birney is usually a good one, as ST. ELSEWHERE would later discover.)

Me: Not to mention Meredith Baxter

Serling had his own side project at about this time...his radio serial ZERO HOUR.

Me: Serling's writing would be perfect for radio.

Certainly, my Saturday nights didn't improve after the move of M*A*S*H back out of the 8:30 slot till 1975, when I was able to watch AITF, the placeholder CBS put in behind AITF, MTM, BOB NEWHART, BURNETT, MONTY PYTHON on the local PBS affiliate, and over to NBC for the first season of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE or, every fourth week, WEEKEND. As a kid, a great if marathon night.

Me: That show at the start of the 1974-75 show would have been Paul Sand In Friends And Lovers. Not a show I ever warmed to, mostly because I couldn't stand Sand. It was replaced in the time slot by the All In The Family spin-off, The Jeffersons. Then the next season – 1975-76 – the FCC regulation on "The Family Hour" forced All In The Family to move to Monday nights at 9 p.m., which was deemed a "suitable" time for the show.

Todd caught this before I had a chance to post on the subject:

funny how memory goes. By the time SNL debuted in 1975, ALL IN THE FAMILY would've been moved to its Family-Friendly Monday slot, so it would've been an hour of relatively bland CBS programming, which I would still watch, before the MTM/BOB NEWHART/BURNETT/PYTHON/SNL (or WEEKEND) marathon for me.

Me: The thing about what I've dubbed as one of the greatest TV line-ups ever is that it only lasted for the 1973-74 season before the "broke up the Yankees" so to speak. The 1975-76 CBS Saturday schedule started with The Jeffersons, followed by Doc (starring Barnard Hughes), and then MTM, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett. Speaking of SNL there were actually two shows of that name in the Fall of 1975; the NBC late night show that everyone knows, and a primetime ABC variety show opposite The Jeffersons and Doc hosted by none other than Howard Cosell! I'm enough of a masochist to want to know what that show was like!

The attempt to humanize the M*A*S*H characters killed the comedy, as far as I was concerned. Sharp satire became often bland cuteness.

Me: Or worse, pretentious dramedy.
It's safe to say that the show changed significantly when Wayne Rogers and MacLean Stevenson left. Potter and BJ were interesting characters to be sure but they had what could probably be described as a more realistic quality. They also made Major Houlihan more human – more Margaret and less Hot Lips you might say – so that increasingly Frank Burns seemed out of place; like Yosemite Sam in a live action movie. Winchester was his "human" replacement. I'm not saying that he show didn't work with these changes because quite patently it did, but it was hugely changed (beyond effectively becoming the Alan Alda Show). However you are right that the sharp satire was gone. Maybe for satire to work it has to be largely populated with cartoon characters like the largely incompetent middle management bureaucratic (Colonel Blake), the hyper-efficient "secretary" (Radar), the by the book professional (Major Houlihan),and the gung-ho type with a little power and slightly less intelligence (Frank Burns), that the one or two "humans" (Hawkeye and Trapper) have to do battle with.

Next up more from "Mr. Television" Mike Doran:

The NBC replacement on Tuesday ... surprise, surprise - a movie! NBC had the biggest backlog of theatrical fims , and its long-standing sweetheart deal with MCA-Universal for TV movies, so when two hours opened up anywhere on the schedule, what could be easier? On other fronts, I was a liitle surprised that you didn't mention BANYON's replacement: Bobby Darin's variety show, brought back from the previous summer. The show fared badly and was dropped, and Darin's death followed not long thereafter (but I don't believe there was a connection). One other quick point: if you're wondering why there was so little about Robert Conrad's third of THE MEN, ASSIGNMENT: VIENNA, as opposed to the other two shows, that's because Conrad was a last-minute replacement for Roy Scheider, whose price went up dramatically when FRENCH CONNECTION became a huge boxoffice hit. It was probably still being retooled while ABC was putting the promo together. Back to the vaults now to await your next installment...

Me: Figures that NBC went with movies. Why bother to produce new shows when you can just slot in movies and probably get great ratings with them. And of course any new movies could be potential pilots for next year. Still, it kind of helps to explain why so much of NBC's product in the 1970s was – how should I put it – rather dismal.

The Bobby Darrin Show didn't get a mention because I really haven't been mentioning these short lived shows that often. I probably would have written more about it if I had remembered that he had died so soon after the show ended (about eight months later). And no, the TV work didn't have a connection to his death; it was a series of events starting with forgetting to take prescribe medication after dental work which led to blood poisoning, which led to damage to one of his heart valves which led to his eventual death.

I was wondering about the lack of material for Assignment: Vienna in the ABC preview show. The other two shows were given a lot of time in the show, and Jigsaw in particular looked interesting. Interesting to find this out about Roy Scheider. Twenty years later he wasn't so choosy about TV work (Seaquest DSV of course, a show which I'm sorry to say got progressively worse the longer it ran). It reminds me of the story of the Canadian version of Howdy Doody. The actor originally cast in the role of Timber Tom, James Doohan, wanted more money than the CBC was prepared to pay, so he had to be replaced. The eventual replacement wasn't available for the first week or so of the show so they brought in a temporary replacement named Ranger Bob...played by William Shatner.

And now a little conversation between Mike and Todd:

Mike: In the early to mid 70's ABC aired a program which was similar to Laugh In. It was so over the top it only lasted one episode. I sort of remember watching it. Do you have any idea what it was called?

Todd:
Mike, that was TURN ON. Only ott by the standards of a nervous ABC, but it was they who mattered.

Me: Turn-On was 1969 and Tim Conway, who was the guest host on the one and only episode, has dined out on this story ever since. He has always claimed that the show was cancelled midway through the episode. Not true, well not totally true. ABC officially dropped the show two days after it aired, but there were two local affiliates, in Cleveland and Denver, went to the first commercial break and didn't go back to the show, while some stations outside the Eastern Time zone simply refused to run the show at all while some stations that aired it told the network that they wouldn't be back the next week. To be fair to ABC (Me? Being fair to a network? Well bite my tongue!) this represented a mutiny by affiliates which makes the current business with NBC's Boston affiliate refusing to air the prime time Jay Leno show look minor by comparison. At the time station ownership was restricted to five stations per owner, so no network could afford to have stations dropping one of its shows so publicly. They could stand on principle and air a full 13 episode season on a dwindling network, or they could knuckle under and dump the show. Guess which one they chose? Turn-On was replaced by the squeaky clean King Family Show.

Turn-On was created by Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, who had also created Laugh-In. They had previously offered the show to NBC and CBS, both of which rejected it. A CBS executive reportedly stated that, "It was so fast with the cuts and chops that some of our people actually got physically disturbed by it." This may be a reference to Photsensitive Epilepsy. In 1977 Schlatter went on to do a revival of Laugh-In, sans Rowan and Martin. It too ran for one episode, largely on the strength of one of the cast members, Robin Williams, who between the time that the show was made and the episode was shown had became a superstar thanks to a little show called Mork & Mindy.

And now, some show themes. First up we have a persona favourite of mine, with music by Patrick Williams. Note the first guest star.

Next up, since we talked so much about it, here's the first couple of minutes of the very first episode of Bridget Loves Bernie. If nothing else, it's a pretty damned good cast. By the way, the pilot episode can be found, in three parts on YouTube.

Next week (or so) 1973. It wasn't the year 1972 was, but it wasn't too bad.

1972 – The TV Guide Fall Preview

There are those who say that 1939 was Hollywood's "greatest year" or its "golden year." I know; I bought the book, Hollywood's Golden Year: 1939. It's not a thesis that I'm entirely willing to accept because it is my belief that there have been other years – before and after 1939 – when Hollywood achieved artistic and commercial high points. Similarly I don't wish to suggest that any given year was "TV's Golden Year" but I would suggest that if someone were to come up with a list of "Greatest Seasons," 1972-73 would be very near the top. Even some of the failures were in their own way brilliant. With the possible exception of NBC, 1972 was a hell of a good year for just about everyone, in particular the viewers.

Let's take a look at the network with the biggest problems first. On the surface it didn't look as though NBC was having problems. They debuted five new series in 1972 compared to seven each for CBS and ABC. The problem was that of the new shows only two stuck, and both of them needed major surgery to stay in the line-up. In addition three series that started the season ended their seasons in January 1973. One of these was Rod Serling's Night Gallery. By this point Serling had essentially disowned the series because his contributions were being ignored and his complaints to producer Jack Laird were essentially being ignored. By the final season Serling was so dissatisfied that he labelled the show "Mannix in a cemetery." The situation with Bonanza was even worse and very similar to what happened with Petticoat Junction. The death of Dan Blocker after the 1971-72 season seriously damaged the dynamics of the show – which had suffered a significant ratings loss the season before – and competition from the new CBS series Maude were enough to kill it. As for The Bold Ones, the shows fourth season retained only the New Doctors segment after going to two segments the previous season. It also lost John Saxon as one of the characters, who was "replaced" by Robert Walden (yeah, not really much of a replacement). It ran sixteen episodes and I'm going to suggest that maybe the quality of the scripts was hurt by having to have new scripts every week rather than every other week (or every third week in the first two seasons). Me, I preferred the episodes with Burl Ives and company.

As for the new shows that NBC had that season, the only two shows that got a second season were The Little People with Brian Keith and Shelley Fabares, and the Wednesday Mystery Movie. In The Little People Keith play a pediatrician working with his daughter in a practice in Hawaii. The show was a comedy and did well enough in the ratings to get renewed. However when the show was renewed the decision was made to add a couple of new characters, a child-hating and very proper doctor, played by Roger Bowen, and the woman who owned the clinic – and much of Hawaii – played by Nancy Kulp. This changed the focus from the relationship between the two doctors and their patients (and the patients' parents) to the conflicts between the adults. (They also changed the name of the show in that season to The Brian Keith Show) further distancing itself from the original intent of the series. The Wednesday Mystery Movie was an attempt to expand the Mystery Movie franchise. The original group of shows – Columbo, McCloud, and MacMillan & Wife – were moved to Sunday night. They were supplemented by a fourth show, Hec Ramsey which starred Richard Boone as a former gunfighter and lawman (who in one episode claimed that he once worked under the name Paladin) who had left the west to study modern (for 1900) methods of detection, stuff we now call forensics. The show lasted two seasons and died not because of poor ratings but because star Richard Boone had disagreements with the studio (that doesn't seem to be an uncommon thing with Richard Boone). The Wednesday Mystery Movie was entirely new. It featured three shows; Cool Millions with James Farentino as a globe-trotting private detective who charges a million dollars to take a case (back when a million dollars was big bucks), Madigan with Richard Widmark recreating his role from the 1968 movie of the same name (although in the movie, Madigan dies at the end), and Banacek with George Peppard as freelance insurance investigator out to stick it to the insurance company that his father had worked at for years before. Banacek ran for two years and was picked up for a third...until Peppard quit to keep his ex-wife Elizabeth Ashley from taking a large percentage of his income in her divorce settlement.

As for the rest of the NBC shows, Banyon, was 1930s period piece starring Robert Forster as the title character and '30s movie star Joan Blondell as the owner of a secretarial school that provides Banyon with office employees. The show ran fifteen episodes. The other two NBC shows lasted a full season but while Search – about a high tech detective agency that constantly monitors its operatives – and the anthology Ghost Story (renamed Circle of Fear at the same time that it dropped host Sebastian Cabot) but weren't popular enough to pick up.

NBC also had one show that didn't make it beyond the 1972-73 season, but that was because it had literally run its course. That was America: A Personal History of the United States, writer-broadcaster Alistair Cooke's love letter to his adopted homeland which alternated with the NBC news show NBC Reports. Today no commercial network would put a show like America on; it would be relegated to PBS or to some cable network (after all opponents of PBS constantly say that cable can and will do everything that PBS does). In 1972-73 not only was it a popular success, it won the Emmy for the Outstanding New Series beating The Julie Andrews Hour, M*A*S*H, Kung Fu, Maude, and The Waltons, and was actually nominated in the Golden Globes as Best TV Show – Drama.

Over at ABC, the network unveiled some impressive new shows. In what may be one of the earliest examples of placing a show as a lead-in because of the gender of fans it would attract, the network put the male oriented cop show The Rookies as the lead in for Monday Night Football. The show fit the standard formula of a group of young people, three (male) rookie cops of various backgrounds (Georg Stanford Brown, Michael Ontkean and Sam Melville), being mentored by an older superior officer, played by Gerald S. O'Laughlin. Kate Jackson played the lone woman in the regular cast, a nurse married to Melville's character (years later he played her ex-husband in Scarecrow & Mrs. King). Another highly successful show for ABC was Streets of San Francisco the entire cast of which consisted of a former and a future acting Oscar winner. Karl Malden (Streetcar Named Desire) played Lieutenant Mike Stone, a veteran of over 20 years on the San Francisco PD while his partner, Steve Keller, was played by Michael Douglas (Wall Street). Keller was college educated but had no experience as a cop. Stone was (yet again) a mentor for the younger cop.

The third huge success for ABC was Kung Fu. Supposedly the show was based on a concept created by actor Bruce Lee (this is according to Lee's wife Linda who claimed that Warner Brothers stole the idea) and Lee had been considered for the part of Kwai Chang Caine – the producers decided that they needed someone "serene" for the role and that the only reason Lee was considered for the part was because the network wanted someone more muscular. The producers claimed that they wanted David Carradine of the role of Caine from the beginning even though he wasn't Asian (which stirred quite a bit of controversy in the Asian American acting community). At the time Carradine was in the middle of what can probably be called his "hippie phase" so the part of Caine seemed to be a perfect fit for him. The show was a perfect fit for the early 1970s with its mix of social responsibility, spirituality, Buddhist thought, and pacifism (at least until forced into action).

Kung Fu was initially scheduled to run once a month, alternating with ABC's other western Alias Smith & Jones on Saturday nights. However, the ABC line-up underwent a major reshuffle when the third hour of the Saturday night line-up, the paranormal thriller Sixth Sense died. Alias Smith & Jones was also dropped and Kung Fu and Streets of San Francisco moving to Thursday night in the second and third hours of primetime respectively. Owen Marshall: Counsellor At Law moved to Wednesday night while The Julie Andrews Hour (a variety show that was a major break for impressionist Rich Little) moved to the second hour of Saturdays replacing Kung Fu. The Men, a wheel show featuring Assignment: Vienna (Robert Conrad as an undercover spy in Vienna), Jigsaw (James Wainwright as a cop who chafes at standard police procedures but is effective in finding the missing persons he seeks), and The Delphi Bureau (Laurence Luckinbill as a counter-espionage agent with a photographic memory) moved to the third hour of Saturday nights. Both The Julie Andrews Hour and The Men were cancelled at the end of the season. The other new show cancelled at the end of the season was The Paul Lynde Show, in which Lynde played a family man who had to deal with his wife and two daughters as well as his eldest daughter's new husband Howie, the bane of Paul's existence.

The other ABC show to survive the season was Temperatures Rising, produced by William Asher.It probably shouldn't have survived given what happened to it. In the first season the show starred James Whitmore as the chief of staff at Capitol General Hospital in Washington, with Cleavon Little as Dr. Jerry Nolan, a resident who is also the hospital's chief "operator" (if there was a card game or a wheelchair race in the hospital, his character knew about it). Reportedly the public disliked Whitmore but liked the show and liked Lynde but hated his series so Whitmore was dumped – along with everyone else in the first season cast except Little – and Lynde and a new cast (including Mister John Dehner) were inserted. The result was a mess. Lynde's character, Paul Mercy, was thoroughly dislikeable but not as unpleasant as his invalid mother who bought the hospital. The series was cancelled and then revived, with the mother character dumped and replaced with a previously unknown sister played by Alice Ghostley. Of course, both Lynde and Ghostley were veterans of Asher's previous hit for ABC, Bewitched.

Of course it was CBS that had the greatest success in the 1972-73 TV season. Consider the CBS shows that debuted that year – M*A*S*H, Maude, The Waltons, and the Bob Newhart Show. Even when they failed something good came out of it. Consider the network's only mid-season cancellations of the year; Anna And The King starring Yul Brynner and Samantha Eggar in a non-musical (and allegedly a sit-com!) version of The King And I, and The Sandy Duncan Show which was an attempt to revive Duncan's earlier series Funny Face (which ended when Duncan was hospitalised due to cancer which took the sight in one eye). Both aired on Sunday nights along with M*A*S*H, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, and Mannix. When they cancelled the shows, CBS moved The New Dick Van Dyke Show from 9 p.m. Eastern to 7:30 p.m., shifted Mannix to 8:30 and added Buddy Ebsen's return to TV as a dramatic actor, Barnaby Jones. The show, which had ties to another CBS detective series Cannon, ran for a more than respectable eight years.

I don't think that much has to be said about most of the successful CBS shows in the 1972-73 season. Each of them achieved an iconic status. Who can forget Maude, the "liberal" spin-off of All In The Family where the lead character was the much married, opinionated, liberated force of nature who just happened to be the cousin of Archie Bunker's wife Edith. Then there was The Bob Newhart Show, which wasn't as politically opinionated as All In The Family or Maude but which meshed beautifully with its lead-in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Both shows managed a near perfect blend of their respective characters' work and domestic lives, filled in each case with interesting and quirky characters in both areas. And of course what can really needs to be said about M*A*S*H, the comedy with dramatic overtones set during the Korean War but really an allegory for Vietnam and the illogic of the military in general. M*A*S*H was one of the most honoured and respected TV shows ever even as it metamorphosed with the various cast changes over the years. Certainly the M*A*S*H that debuted in 1972 was far different from the show that ended its run in 1983, with the regular characters becoming increasingly realistic in tone, and the storylines becoming increasingly dramatic. And, I suppose, with the network becoming increasingly aware that they didn't have an "ordinary" sitcom on their hands (as we'll see in the 1973 season this realization took a while to dawn on them).

Then of course there was The Waltons. It may seem a bit surprising that CBS began airing a new rural series just two seasons after the great "Rural Purge" but I suspect that there were reasons for the network putting it on the air. I have a theory that its period setting allowed it to focus on what today would probably be called "traditional family values"; the children are polite and responsible and obviously don't become involved in drugs or protests, they respected their parents and their elders and the whole family eats dinner together every night. Might I suggest that the material is the sort of thing that would appeal to the Nixonian "silent majority?" At the same time of course writer Earl Hamner Jr. was able to develop storylines that related to the issues of the day. In its own way, The Waltons examined women's rights, race, addiction (in the form of alcoholism) and other issues that people could relate to. And perhaps the most impressive thing about the show is the way that its success seems to have come as a surprise. The 1972 TV Guide Fall Preview issue says the following about The Waltons: "They're descended from pioneer stock and they'll need all the strength they can muster – they're up against Flip Wilson and The Mod Squad." In fact it was those two shows that needed the strength; The Mod Squad was cancelled at the end of the 1972-73 season, while The Flip Wilson Show was cancelled the next season.

CBS cancelled two of its new shows at the end of the season. One was the low rated New Bill Cosby Show which, along with the fifth season of The Doris Day Show, hadn't been able to thrive opposite Monday Night Football. The other show was Bridget Loves Bernie which occupied the Saturday time slot between All In The Family and Mary Tyler Moore. The show was a variant on the 1922 play Abie's Irish Rose, which had been made into a movie twice and even been a radio series from 1942-1944, and dealt with a young Jewish cab driver and writer (David Birney) who married a wealthy Catholic girl (Meredith Baxter). The format is an old one that has been adapted to other situations over the years (the Canadian series Excuse My French dealt with a poor Quebecois girl who married the son of a wealthy Anglophone businessman and had to deal with both of their families; Dharma & Greg was about the son of a wealthy conservative family who married the daughter of unreformed hippies). Bridget Loves Bernie has the distinction of being the highest rated series ever cancelled by any American network. According to the 1972-73 ratings list on the Classic TV Hits website the show finished fifth overall with an average 15.681 million viewers, which means that it finished ahead of The Mary Tyler Moore Show which had an estimated audience of 15.293 million viewers. One suggestion is that the writers ran out of ideas after the first season, but it's generally accepted that CBS cancelled the show because of hate mail and protests from opponents of inter-religious marriage, supposedly various Jewish groups. However, at the time CBS denied the allegation. According to Robert Metz's CBS: Reflections In A Bloodshot Eye Mike Dann claimed that "though the ratings were good they weren't good enough. The show caused a "hammock effect" on the Saturday-night schedule. Sandwiched between Family which drew 46 million homes and The Mary Tyler Moore Show which drew 41 million, Bridget Loves Bernie only managed to attract 31 million." This assertion in particular seems erroneous (to say the least) given the data listed both by Classic TV Hits and The Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable Shows 1946-Present. The story of protests by people who vehemently objected to the show seems most plausible. Whatever the truth, the cancellation of Bridget Loves Bernie, together with mid-season moves that moved the aging Mission: Impossible (which would be cancelled at the end of the season) from Saturday to Friday (for Sonny & Cher) and The Carol Burnett Show from Thursday (where it's time slot was occupied by Sonny & Cher) would set up one of the greatest nights of TV ever, the CBS Saturday night line-up of All In The Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show.

(I'm still doing a bit of research on a couple of replacements for cancelled shows in the season. I need the show that filled the 8:30-9 p.m. slot on ABC and the two hours between 8 and 10 p.m. on Tuesday night on NBC. Help would be appreciated.) (Update: I found the ABC 8:30-9 show. It was A Touch Of Grace starring Shirley Booth, J. Pat O'Malley and Marian Mercer. I still need the NBC show(s).)

Below is the 1972 ABC Fall Preview in three parts. Sorry, no TV criticism from President Nixon this time.

TV Guide Fall Preview 1970 – The Comments

First up we have Mike Doran, helping to fill in some of the holes that I had in the ABC and CBS line-ups:

I can't call NBC's midseason moves to mind readily (I'll look them up when I get home), but here are the others: CBS replaced Tim Conway's hour with Jackie Gleason repeats from the few years before - most if not all Honeymooners. As for ABC, Lawrence Welk moved up an hour, and Pearl Bailey came in to take his old spot. With the other spots you mention, ABC decided to get a jump on the Prime Time Access Rule by leaving those timeslots open - giving the stations an hour on Sunday and 90 minutes on Saturday.

The Gleason repeats were all hour long Honeymooners from episodes he did in the late 1960s. These colour Honeymooners are nowhere near as well known as the half-hour episodes from the 1950s although the episodes are available on DVD from MPI Home Video and air on American Life TV in the US. I couldn't imagine colour working very well with The Honeymooners but that's probably because the shows I remember are the "classic 39" and the addition of colour makes the Kramden's apartment look somehow less squalid and depressing.

These days it is difficult to imagine a network not programming time that they had a right to, even if it is with reruns. The networks hold onto Saturday nights with a death grip in just this fashion, so it is a bit surprising that ABC would actually give the affiliates two and a half hours even with the Prime Time Access Rule coming into force. Then again that was ABC we're talking about, and not at the height of the network's popularity.

I would like to put in a word for THE MOST DEADLY GAME, which may have been the most snakebitten show in recent TV history. The original female lead was supposed to be Inger Stevens, but her unexpected death knocked things off the rails. Yvette Mimieux came on at literally the last minute to try to keep it going, but the premiere had to be delayed to late October, by which time GAME never had a chance.

I think that snakebitten is an accurate description, although whether it would have lasted longer than it did if everything had gone according to plan is questionable; it was going up against Mary Tyler Moore and the first half-hour of Mannix on CBS and the Saturday Night Movie on NBC. The show had a reasonably strong cast with Ralph Bellamy and George Maharis. Arguably Mimieux might have been more famous than Inger Stevens (although Stevens had been in some pretty good movies after she left her first TV series, The Farmer's Daughter, including Hang 'em High, Five Card Stud, and Madigan) which has to be considered an asset for the series.

One thing that I find interesting is the reluctance of TV to take a failed idea and try to tweak it and remake it into something better; in other words recycling their failures. This is a prime example of a show that could be tweaked a bit and be made into something that works. One could make "Mr. Arcane" (the Ralph Bellamy character) very mysterious – really living up to his name – while his ward (Mimieux's character) and her origins would be only slightly less mysterious. That would leave the Maharis character as an "ordinary" guy who splits his time between working on the cases that are brought to them – possibly cases touching on the "unexplained" or supernatural – and trying to discover the truth about his partners. But of course that's just the bare bones of a concept and there are probably plenty of reasons why it wouldn't work.

In a second comment Mike added:

I finally got around to looking up those NBC replacements, and the pattern set by the other two nets holds. CBS used Gleason reruns, already in house; ABC gave large chunks of time back to the local stations; and NBC simply started their Saturday night movie a half-hour earlier - all in anticipation of the Prime-Time Access Rule , which didn't officially kick in until fall (also known as the coward's way out). Meanwhile, BRACKEN'S WORLD gave way to STRANGE REPORT, a Sir Lew Grade product that had been sitting on NBC's shelf for a couple of years. STRANGE was a detective show starring Sir Anthony Quayle as a scientific sleuth in London. By 1971, Quayle was starring on Broadway in SLEUTH, appropriately enough, which might have been a factor in NBC's decision to finally put it on.

Strange Report had as one of its co-stars Anneke Wills, who dedicated Doctor Who fans might remember as Polly, one of The Doctor's companions. She debuted in The War Machines during Hartnell's time as The Doctor, and left in the first year of the Patrick Troughton's run in the role. Most of her episodes are missing but she once described her take on Polly was that she'd react to any threat by doing the sensible thing and running away. Wills was married to Michael Gough (today best known as Alfred in the Tim Burton-Joel Schumacher Batman movies), who worked with Anthony Quayle in Sarabande For Dead Lovers and QB VII.

The basic hook of Bracken's World – a show which I vaguely remember today – was that one never actually saw Bracken but his orders were generally filtered through the medium of his secretary, played by triple Oscar nominee Eleanor Parker. When the show debuted for its second season this conceit – and Parker – was gone and Bracken was seen, played by Leslie Nielsen. It probably wasn't what killed the show but it certainly didn't help it.

One question: are you moving forward or backward or both in this series? My strongest period for this knowledge is the early-to-mid 60s; my resources start to thin out around 1976.

Forward. 1969 was the earliest Fall Preview issue that I still have (there were earlier ones but in the nature of such ephemera were too damaged to retain). I'm going to run into some troubles the closer I get to modern times. I was never a subscriber to the magazine and towards the end of the Canadian edition's publication history the stores never seemed to get many copies of the Fall Preview issues, and they seemed to disappear from the stores almost as soon as they were put out. Maybe someday I'll get the opportunity to fill in and improve my collection.

And here's a comment from our old friend Sam Johnson:

I am diggin' on these TV guide recaps, Brent. I've always wanted to do a breakdown of Saturday morning cartoons from 1960 up until around the early Ninties kind of like this in some type of form. Still, free time keeps me away from the good times, but I digress.

TVSquad.com has been doing something along that line (the one I've linked to is part of a series but as is typical with TVSquad it isn't easy to locate them all). Still there's always room for more - and probably better – writing on the subject.

I know nothing much of the schedule, but a few of the shows I do remember. I recalled that Arnie had Arlene Gonkola as The Harried wife. The only reason for that was the name was just so weird to me as a kid.

Arlene Golonka (on the left here) didn't play the wife on Arnie; that was Sue Ane Langdon (on the right – this is the correct spelling, though you do see it as Sue Anne and Sue Ann). Arlene Golonka was on TV at this time, co-starring on Mayberry RFD as the love interest for Ken Berry's character Sam. It is not a particularly surprising mistake, since the ladies did bear a strong resemblance to each other. Sue Ane – who played Alice Kramden on Jackie Gleason's variety show for less than a year around 1962 – was a pretty hot number in the 1960s. A Google Image search under Sue Ann Langdon yields a couple of "interesting" photos she did for Playboy around 1966 in connection with a movie she did with Sean Connery called A Fine Madness.

I was just starting to read then and began to remember names of TV shows easier. But in my house, the name "Flip Wilson" was the easiest. Before then, it was Bill Cosby, Leslie Uggams, or Lou Rawls with shows (I think Miss Uggams and Mr. Rawls had Summer replacement shows), but seeing Flip with his own show made my family rush to the set to watch what he'd do that week. All I know is that the show brought a lot of pride to my family along with a lot of laughs.

As I pointed out last week, the Leslie Uggams Show debuted in September 1969 and ran for twelve or thirteen episodes before being cancelled. I believe that she was the first African-American woman – and maybe one of the first African-Americans of either sex – to have a variety series. Nat King Cole had a short lived series in the 1950s but that was exclusively a music show, with none of the extras (comedy, dancers) that made for a true variety show. I was a big fan of The Flip Wilson Show as well, but obviously it didn't have the same impact on a skinny white kid from Saskatchewan that it would for you. I suspect that it's in the nature of broad-casting that because it has to appeal to the mass audience it generally reflects, albeit with some delay, the direction that society is proceeding in.

Cappy writes:

The end of The Jackie Gleason Show and the start of Mary Tyler Moore marks the beginning of the decline of Western Civilization.

Interesting opinion. If meant humorously, funny; if meant seriously, it requires at least some explanation.

And now, a couple of themes from the 1970-71 season. First up, one that everyone knows. No, not that one, the other one that everybody knows.

And now for a really obscure one, from a replacement series.

Coming up next weekend 1972!

1970 – The TV Guide Fall Preview

Ah the 1970-71 Television season. Who knew in September of that year that you would turn into the first shot of a revolution that would sweep TV. The 1970-71 season would see television icons, that had been around practically since the beginning of the medium swept away and a new generation of shows become famous. Looking back, many would hale it as the beginning of new greatness; others – notably the Parents Television Council – would say that it marked the end of Television as a family friendly entertainment medium and the beginning of its descent into the pit of evil and decadence that it has become. But we'll get to that shortly.

To understand some of what would happen by the end of the 1970-71 season one first has to first deal with the events at the end of the 1969-70 season. At CBS Petticoat Junction had been cancelled after an attempt to replace Bea Benaderet, who had died during the 1968-69 season, with June Lockhart as a maternal figure – well really an older sister – had resulted in a serious decline in ratings. At the same time CBS cancelled two variety shows, The Jackie Gleason Show and The Red Skelton Show. Gleason had been with CBS Television since 1952 while Skelton had been with the network since 1953. The reason given for the cancellation of both shows was that they weren't appealing to younger audiences, and in Skelton's case a contract that promised annual salary increases. While Gleason would remain under contract with CBS until the mid-1970s Skelton would defect back to NBC, where he had his first TV show back in 1951. To say the least, the half-hour format of the new show didn't work. The 1969-70 season had also seen the decline of Mike Dann and his programming philosophy which regarded any audience as being acceptable regardless of age, and the full ascendance of network president Robert Wood who was an early believer in demographics and in particular the importance of the 18-49 year-old audience.

For CBS the beginnings of the 1970-71 season seemed relatively innocuous. With the demise of Petticoat Junction, Paul Henning's other "Hooterville" based series Green Acres was moved to Tuesday night between Beverly Hillbillies and Hee-Haw. Replacing Green Acres on Saturday was the Herschel Bernardi sitcom Arnie about a working class guy – the foreman on a loading dock – who suddenly is promoted to the executive suite as a corporate vice-president. His aristocratic, if somewhat dense, boss was portrayed by Roger Bowen who would had just finished playing Colonel Henry Blake in the movie M*A*S*H. The show that replaced Petticoat Junction starred a familiar face in a not so familiar role – Mary Tyler Moore. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (though technically the title card didn't include either the words "The" or "Show") may not have seemed particularly subversive at the time it debuted, but it really was. Mary was a single woman in the city (the city being the relatively benign Minneapolis rather than "wicked" New York or Los Angeles) who was actively in the work force, and not just as a secretary either. Mary at least titularly was an executive – associate producer of the evening news – even if the job paid less than being a secretary. Moreover, while she dated there was no regular man in her life, and for nearly all of the show's run there wasn't one. Of course TV Guide didn't entirely get the point; in their commentary about the show the magazine said, "She [Mary Tyler Moore] plays Mary Richards, 30-ish, unmarried and getting a little desperate about it." Trouble is that the show never really made a point of showing Mary as being desperate to get married. What it did show, admittedly rather timidly compared to series that followed in the next few years, was a woman who used birth control (in one episode she had to get her "pills" from her dresser) and occasionally stayed out overnight with men. In just about every respect, Mary Richards was a liberated woman. But Mary, subtly subversive though she was, may have been the first shot in the revolution to come but the big blow wouldn't come until the midseason replacements started rolling out.

Of course there were other trends and other networks. The "youth movement" – as in don't trust anyone over 30, or in TV terms anyone playing anyone over 30 – was continuing apace, as was the "mentoring" trend that I noted in the 1969 Preview. "Relevant" shows were the rage, although TV's notion of relevant wasn't entirely grounded in what was really relevant at the time. In the 1970 season you had two shows with young lawyers working on cases for people who couldn't afford lawyers. The ABC series was called, with one of those great leaps of imagination that TV was and still is famous for, The Young Lawyers. The one on CBS was more imaginatively named Storefront Lawyers, because they didn't work out of a conventional office but – surprise surprise – out of a storefront – much of the time. Actually there was a bit of deception going on here; the young lawyers in The Young Lawyers weren't actually lawyers, they were law students because in some states law students can go into court and try cases under the supervision of an experienced lawyer – or so said TV Guide. In this case the not quite lawyers – played by Judy Pace and Zalman King (who is best known today as a producer and director of sex-driven material as 9 ½ Weeks, Wild Orchid, Delta of Venus, and Red Shoes Diaries) were mentored by an experienced lawyer played by Lee J. Cobb. The characters in The Storefront Lawyers, led by Robert Foxworth provided legal services from the offices of Neighborhood Legal Services, which Foxworth's character created after he quit his job at a Great Big Law Firm. In the second half of the show's single season he went back to the job at the Great Big Law Firm, and took his younger associates with him.

Medical dramas were also big this year, with the emphasis still on being "relevant." Actually there was one relatively conventional medical drama, The Interns. The show, which was on CBS, featured a collection of young doctors including Christopher Stone and Mike Farrell (who would be playing another doctor in a few years in a much more successful show), all under the tutelage of Dr. Peter Goldstone (Broderick Crawford). The show played strongly to specific "types" including the married one, the woman (who faced hurdles because she was a woman) and the Black one (who faced problems with racism), so I suppose this qualifies under the rubric of "relevant." At one season this show lasted longer than the other two medical dramas of the year. Matt Lincoln, on ABC, starred Vince Edwards (formerly Dr. Ben Casey) as a psychiatrist who ran a free walk-in mental health clinic and teen help line in addition to his regular practices which was paying for all of this. It lasted thirteen episodes.

The third medical series, on NBC, was called The Psychiatrist and starred Roy Thinnes. It ran for six episodes but that was because it was part of another of those "wheel" series that were popular in the late '60s and early '70s (which is why I've separated it from the other medical shows). This one was called Four In One, and logically enough featured four different storylines. The difference was that in this one the series didn't rotate from week to week. Instead each one aired six one hour episodes in a row and then turned the time slot over to the next series. The other three were San Francisco International Airport, featuring Lloyd Bridges as the airport manager (but unlike his role in Airplane! this role was played totally seriously), McCloud featuring Dennis Weaver, and Night Gallery, created by Rod Serling. The latter two series continued on of course, with McCloud becoming part of the NBC Mystery Movie and being expanded to the familiar ninety minute format, while Night Gallery ran as a regular series that ran for two more seasons, one in the hour-long format and one in a half-hour format.

Besides Mary Tyler Moore and Vince Edward, several other iconic TV veterans were coming back to TV in new shows. Danny Thomas attempted to revive his old Make Room For Daddy series as Make Room For Granddaddy with most of the original cast – Marjorie Lord, Rusty Hamer, Angela Cartwright and Hans Conreid – supplemented by Stanley Myron Handelman and Rosey Grier. In the news series, done for ABC, Danny and his wife were taking care of their grandson while daughter Terry and her soldier husband were overseas. The show lasted one season. Two guys whose original series debuted on the original Make Room For Daddy also had shows in the 1970-71 season: Andy Griffith and Don Knotts. Griffith actually had two very different shows for CBS that season. The Headmaster was a "relevant" drama with Griffith dealing with problems as the headmaster in a high class boarding school. It ran thirteen episodes and was cancelled. Griffith came back almost immediately with The New Andy Griffith Show, a comedy in which he played a man who had worked in state government until the mayor of his old home town retired and he went back to fill the position. The show was only slightly more successful than The Headmaster. Don Knotts had better success with his self-titled NBC variety series – it ran for 26 episodes. And of course there was Tim Conway. Conway and his McHale's Navy colleague Joe Flynn had a failed mid-season replacement series in the 1969-70 season, but Conway was back in September 1970 with a variety series for CBS. It suffered the same fate as his other series before and after; gone in 13 weeks, but one member of the cast, Sally Struthers, was headed for something much much bigger.

Two of the most successful series to debut in the Fall of 1970, besides the Mary Tyler Moore Show were The Flip Wilson Show and The Partridge Family. Flip Wilson's series for NBC was an almost instant hit, becoming the second most watched show in the U.S. for the first two seasons of its run and spawned such catch-phrases as, "The Devil made me do it," and of course – as every Geek and Nerd knows – "What you see is what you get," both delivered by Wilson in drag as his character Geraldine Jones. Even the staging of the show was innovative, with the show being done in a "theatre-in-the-round" set-up. ABC's The Partridge Family wasn't anywhere near as innovative. It owed a lot more to The Monkees and The Brady Bunch than to any innovative thinking. But it worked, and in an odd sort of way it would mark the trail for the sort of youth oriented escapist fare that would vault ABC into a leading position in the second half of the 1970s. It wasn't "relevant" and it wasn't hip; in fact it was almost exactly the opposite, uninterested in the latest trends in the real world and old fashioned enough in its set-up that it didn't disturb too many people. Another big hit was one of two adaptations of a Broadway play and later movie that ABC had, The Odd Couple with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. Oh yeah, and ABC also had its biggest hit ever, with a show called Monday Night Football.

Inevitably there were cancellations during the season. As was common in this period the greatest number of failures came from ABC. They lost The Young Rebels, a series set around British-occupied Philadelphia during the American Revolution but naturally having deliberate echoes to the "young rebels" of 1970 (the show starred Louis Gossett Jr., with a very full head of hair), Silent Force (a half hour drama), Barefoot In The Park (the other TV adaptation of a Broadway play, this one with most of the cast being African American (it was cancelled when star Scoey Mitchell was fired by the producers); and The Immortal (about a man whose blood contained antibodies capable of curing any disease and a billionaire who wanted it – and the man whose body made it – all for himself). NBC dropped Bracken's World, which had barely survived the previous season; and Nancy, a comedy about the daughter of the (unseen) President of the United States who marries a veterinarian. But it was CBS that had the biggest line-up change. When the network cancelled the ailing Governor And JJ, which had debuted the previous season, In January 1971, they moved To Rome With Love from Tuesday night after Hee-Haw (and The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres) into the Wednesday night slot. The show they put after Hee-Haw (and The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres) was called All In The Family.

I can't imagine what it must have been like on January 12, 1970 when people finished watching Roy Clark and the rest of the Hee-Haw gang with their corn-pone humour and were confronted – because that's the only word that fits – with Archie Bunker talking about "Micks," "Polacks," "Hebes," "Spics," and so on. And truth be told the show was not a huge hit initially. In fact it finished 34^th in the ratings for the year, and probably if anyone but Robert Wood had been in charge of the CBS Television Network it would have been cancelled for just that reason. But Wood had a vision for the network that included shows like All In The Family and most emphatically did not include Hee-Haw or the rest. All In The Family was a bombshell, the biggest shot so far of the programming revolution that had first popped up with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. While shows like Storefront Lawyers played at being "relevant", All In The Family took on the issues of the day head on. The show talked about the Vietnam War, racial inequality, protests, rape, abortion, gay rights and a host of other issues. It was mentioned in the Watergate Tapes – Nixon hated the younger people but liked that Archie got dressed up to write a letter to him – and was a sensation in the media. Laura Hobson, author of Gentleman's Agreement even commented that the epithets in the show were mild by comparison with the words used in the real world. And over time an odd thing happened; Archie Bunker himself became popular. It was probably inevitable that older viewers regarded Archie as being closer to them, particularly if they were blue-collar workers like Archie. Of course it didn't hurt that the character of Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner) was, quite frankly, something of a pompous ass. For all of his faults Archie (played by Carroll O'Connor) loved his wife (Maureen Stapleton) even as she exasperated him, and adored his "little goil" Gloria (Sally Struthers) and thought that Mike wasn't good enough for her. It was undoubtedly unintended but CBS had a show that was attractive to younger and older viewers for entirely different reasons.

The net results of the successes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the critical success of All In The Family were inevitable with someone like Robert Woods in charge of CBS. Rural shows and older skewing shows were out once and for all. As Pat Butram, who played Mr. Haney on Green Acres put it, "It was the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it." And the so-called "Rural Purge" wasn't just restricted to rural shows, or just to CBS. CBS cancelled Hogan's Heroes, Mayberry RFD, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hee-Haw, To Rome With Love, The Jim Nabors Hour, and The New Andy Grifith Show. ABC dumped The Johnny Cash Show. NBC dropped two of their three remaining westerns, Men From Shiloh (which had been The Virginian until the 1970-71 season) and The High Chaparral (which was particularly popular around Saskatoon because one of the series stars, Cameron Mitchell, had ties to the city; his first wife Johanna, was the daughter of a very prominent local businessman and even after their divorce maintained close ties to the city), as well as Don Knotts's variety series.

And yes, I have left some shows out, because some of the biggest casualties in the Rural Purge weren't rural shows but shows that were closely tied with the beginnings of TV. ABC dropped The Lawrence Welk Show (debuted on ABC in 1955 but had begun on KTLA Los Angeles in 1951) as well as Make Room For Granddaddy, the revival of Make Room For Daddy (which ran from 1953-1964); NBC dropped the half-hour Red Skelton Show (Red had debuted on NBC in 1951, moved to CBS in 1953, and back to NBC in 1970), and the venerable Kraft Music Hall (debuted on TV in 1958 after starting on radio in 1933). And CBS got rid of the oldest of them all, The Ed Sullivan Show which had debuted in June 1948 as Toast of the Town. With the exception of Gunsmoke (debuted on TV in 1955) and Bonanza (debuted in 1959), every show with ties to the first full decade of television in America was gone. And if the Parents Television Council today complains that the debut of All In The Family marks the beginning of TV's descent into the gutter of sex and depravity – as one writer on their website claimed a few months ago – it is probably more accurate to say that All In The Family, and to some extent The Mary Tyler Moore Show ushered in a new sort of realism and true relevance that had never been a part of TV before.

(For those of you who are interested, I am missing details for replacement shows for the following timeslots in the 1970-71 season:

• ABC: Sunday 7:30-8, Thursday 10:30-11, Saturday 8:30-11.
  
• CBS: Sunday 10-11.
  
• NBC: Friday 10-11, Saturday 8:30-9.)
  

Let's take a look at the ABC Fall Preview Show narrated by William Schallert (these seem to be the most common ones on YouTube, and thanks to bobtwcatlanta for posting so many of these).

As a bonus we have a YouTube clip of Richard Nixon talking about Homosexuality and All In The Family from May 13, 1971.

TV Guide Fall Preview 1969 – The Comments

I was really rather happy with the way that my first post on the TV Guide Fall Previews was received in terms of comments, and the second post did almost as well. One of the things I've been able to do is fill in the holes in the schedule that opened up with the first cancellations. One of the weaknesses of Wikipedia is that it doesn't show the replacement shows for most of the early seasons – all that is shown is the original fall schedule. With that said, let's turn to those comments, starting first with the response to my request for help in filling in the holes in the 1969 line-up.

From Mike Doran:
ABC Wednesday at 10 (9 central): THE ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK SHOW, from Sir Lew Grade (in an attempt to make Tom Jones's lightning strike twice; it didn't). Hope this helps.

Mike, it certainly did help. I had vague memories of the Humperdinck show from my youth but could never remember – or didn't know – if it was a syndicated show or a network program. And yeah, the idea that Humperdinck would equal Tom Jones in popularity on TV – or just about any other medium – was a vain one. He had and has an excellent voice, but he certainly has none of the dynamism of the Welshman. Then or now. Of course, as Mike pointed out in another post, being up against Hawaii Five-0 in the time slot didn't help either Humperdinck or the NBC show in the time slot, Then Came Bronson.

Mentioning Mr. Humperdinck I reminds me of something I heard a few weeks ago. Someone in the media – a younger person, though I can't remember if it was on radio TV or a podcast – mentioned Englebert Humperdinck in some context and made a comment about why someone would make up such an absurd name. All of which made me despair, yet again, of the education of American youth, particularly in music. For as anyone with even a little knowledge of classical music would know, Engelbert Humperdinck (the original) was a classical composer and contemporary of Richard Wagner. In fact he taught music to Wagner's son Siegfried. His most famous composition is the opera Hansel und Gretel. As for the name Engelbert Humperdinck, he took it at the suggestion of his manager Gordon Mills who thought that Arnold Dorsey (the singer's real name) wasn't "arresting" enough. Mills also renamed a singer called Tom Woodward after the title character of a then popular movie: Tom Jones.

Mike Doran supplies the name of the second ABC show I was having trouble locating: When ABC dropped THE SURVIVORS in midseason, George Hamilton apparently had a pay-or-play with the studio or the network or somebody, so he went right into PARIS 7000, which got IT TAKES A THIEF's slot on Thursday. This was a by-the-numbers adventure show from the Universal mill, which everybody forgot about as soon as it aired.

You're not kidding about people forgetting it; there isn't even a mention of the show in Wikipedia. There were only ten episodes of the show, which featured Hamilton as a State Department trouble shooter in Paris, who worked with an aide played by screen veteran Gene Raymond and a contact in the gendarmes, played by Jacques Aubuchon (who despite the name was born in Fitchburg Massachusetts).

Also from Mike Doran:
A couple of points: as far as ABC was concerned THE GHOST & MRS. MUIR was new – for them (its first season was on NBC). Alos interesting to see the push for Joey Bishop's late night show - which Bishop quit cold in a matter of weeks, paving the way for Dick Cavett at the turn of the year. Oh, and that was William Schallert doing the v.o. on that promo piece, right?

It certainly sounds like Schallert. Not surprising really; Schallert has been doing voice-over work for most of his career.

Being a Canadian I either didn't remember or (more likely) was only vaguely aware that The Ghost & Mrs. Muir debuted on NBC before going over to ABC. I do have extremely fond memories of the series. There was definite chemistry between Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare, and the acting was just as strong as might be expected from actors of their calibre.

And still more from Mike:
Finally, I believe the credit for the famous/notorious "CBS Rural Purge" of 1970 correctly goes not to Fred Silverman but to his nominal boss at the network, President Robert Wood. The details are in Les Brown's book TELEVISION: THE BUSINESS BEHIND THE BOX, which I read when it first came out years ago. Here's the digest version: Wood was one of the first TV execs to buy into demographics in a big way. He was convinced that to forge ahead in the ratings, CBS needed to lose the shows and stars who appealed to older audiences (harder to sell to ad agencies). This was a surprisingly easy sell to CBS's supreme commander, William Paley, who, it turns out, was a snob who was always somewhat embarrassed by the corny rural comedies (remember, it was Paley who ordered the cancellation of the still-popular GILLIGAN'S ISLAND to keep GUNSMOKE on). Wood then forced the de-corning, along with the cashiering of Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton, on CBS's programming chief Mike Dann, who then quit, making way for Silverman (I'm oversimpifying here, but you get the idea). That's all I've got right now ("Isn't that enough?"), which means I'll probably think of something else as soon as I hit Publish.

As it happens I am currently re-reading, yet again, Robert Metz's Reflections In A Bloodshot Eye (it's what I currently take to the bathroom when I'm going to be there for a while). The book isn't one of my favourites; it has plenty of errors and even more interpretations – usually second guessing CBS and Bill Paley – and its picture of Frank Stanton as a poor executive doesn't seem to jibe with current thought on the subject. That said, he certainly does credit Robert Wood with the important aspects of "the rural purge," starting with the end of the Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason shows – losing Petticoat Junction was inevitable following Bea Benaderet's death though they worked mightily to resuscitate it – and gives him the credit for "de-cornifying" the network. Meanwhile Silverman – who Metz usually referred to using the diminutive "Freddy" (which Silverman hates) – is barely mentioned, and not at all in connection with many of the shows he is described in most sources as "masterminding." In her biography of Paley, In All His Glory, Sally Bedel Smith gives a little more credit to Silverman, describing him as "the prime architect of the schedule, along with wood..." Still Wood is credited with making the initial moves to "Get the wrinkles out of the face of the network without eroding our popularity," while Mike Dann was still in charge of programming and therefore while Silverman wasn't in that strong a position to accomplish much.

The interesting thing about Silverman as an advocate of demographics is of course that when he was head of his own production company, his shows skewed older; shows like Jake & The Fatman, The Father Dowling Mysteries, In The Heat Of The Night, Diagnosis Murder, the Perry Mason TV movies with Raymond Burr, and of course Abe Simpson's favourite show, Matlock.

That Paley was a snob, despite his birth in the Chicago neighbourhood known as "Back of the Yards," isn't any secret; his famous "golden gut" once failed him over a period piece about a wealthy family – he couldn't get his mind around the fact that it's hard to sell a show about people with a lot of servants. Still I think that if Mike Dann's 1970-71 line-up had been more successful – if he hadn't been forced to rely on gimmicks and "hiding" shows that weren't working (like Tim Conway's variety show) behind big events in order to beat NBC in the yearly ratings – Paley would probably have been willing to running with Dann's vision at least for a little while longer. Or maybe not; this was William Paley we're talking about after all. Paley was notoriously fickle when it came to executives. He'd have favourites for a while and then find something wanting and dispose of him (always a him) – not unlike the way he behaved with his women.

Next up, a comment from my friend The Real Sam Johnson:
I really wanted to comment about your first TV Guide post. However, I've had major time constraints lately which take me away from everything. What I wanted to say for that one was the fact that I actually remember having that issue as a kid. It was interesting to see how the magazine would as always describe the show, but never really did any handicapping or critiquing of the show. If we were to go by how bad some of the shows were, Survivors would have been gone sooner than later.

That's a major thing about TV Guide, particularly in this period. The magazine's focus was promotional rather than critical at least in the Fall Previews. TV Guide did have critics available, most notably Cleveland Amory, and they did do reviews, but not in the preview issues. I suppose that in the days before VCRs became more available outside of the industry, it might not have been very easy to review shows before they aired. One of the huge advantages that (professional) critics today have over their counterparts forty years ago is that they are being actively courted by producers and the networks in this increasingly competitive marketplace, and that technology in the form of the DVD screener makes that increasingly feasible (doesn't do me much good though – they don't court me).

In later years there seemed to have been a greater critical aspect to the fall previews. At least that was the case in the Canadian editions of the magazine, although they often shared little more than the title with the American magazine. By the last Canadian editions they included "what works" and "what doesn't work" in the previews of shows. Of course by the time of those last Canadian editions, the pictures were very large and the writing was very small...and I'm not talking about the size of the print.

Finishing up, I'm including a couple of YouTube clips of themes from the 1969-70 season. I really like doing these where I have the material, and would like to include a well known show and then something that is pretty obscure from each season. First off is one that is fairly well known, from a show that had a good run, Room 222.

And then there's this relative obscurity (really used only because the real obscurities I wanted to usehad their embedding disabled) The Bill Cosby Show. Proof - if any were really needed as to why Bill Cosby shouldn't be allowed to sing, even if the music is by Quincy Jones. Especially if the music is by Quincy Jones.