1969 – The TV Guide Fall Preview

1969 was a year of upheaval in many areas, but for the most part TV wasn't one of them. At least it wasn't in a business sense. In one way TV had a stability back then that we haven't seen in years. Shows were cancelled, but if you look at the history of the shows that were dropped in the 1969-70 season you will find that the bulk of them ran for a full season. Only five shows were cancelled at midseason and four of them were on one network – ABC. That doesn't mean that there wasn't upheaval. While only five shows were cancelled both CBS and ABC engaged in a process that most people would consider murderous to shows today, changing a show's timeslot at mid-season. And they didn't just swap new shows with each other; in a number of cases they moved established shows to fill holes in the line-up. It actually worked in one case.

Looking exclusively at the numbers of shows that were on in the Fall of 1969, one might be excused for thinking that television was intended as a delivery system for sitcoms and variety show. There were fourteen variety shows on the air including four new hours featuring Andy Williams, Jimmy Durante, Jim Nabors and Leslie Uggams. There were also two sketch comedy shows. There were also twenty-five sitcoms, eight of which were new. There were seven westerns (and this is stretching the definition of "western" to include shows like Daniel Boone and Here Come The Brides), but nothing new. As for the genre that would dominate the 1970s and beyond, the cop or detective series, there were only eight of those – none of them new either. A "wheel" series – a show that rotated several unrelated dramas – included a cop series as well as a medical drama (one of three that debuted in 1969) and the only lawyer show of the year. And then there were shows that didn't really fit into any conventional genre. Predictably several of these were on the weakest of the big three networks, ABC.

To be sure there were some notable shows, and I'll get to them shortly, but as is often the case failures can be more interesting than success. And that was the case with ABC's Monday night schedule. There were four shows, the most conventional of which was the only real success, the sketch comedy Love American Style. The rest of the line-up was full of show that can best be described as before their time. Take Harold Robbins' Survivors for example. The show was an adaptation of Robbins' novel of the same name featuring the lifestyle of the rich and famous. The producers said in the TV Guide preview, "Our stories are about human beings who have the same kind of problems as you or I." That is they're the sort of problems you have if you're a woman with an illegitimate teenage son that you have to protect from your world, a philandering embezzler husband, a playboy half-brother, and a tyrannical but dying father. The show had a star-studded cast – Lana Turner, Ralph Bellamy, George Hamilton, Jan-Michael Vincent (billed by TV Guide as Michael Vincent), and Rossano Brazzi. In other words it was a night time soap; not the first – that was probably ABC's own Peyton Place – but it did set a model for shows like Dallas, Falcon Crest, and Dynasty. The show was massively expensive and did poorly in the ratings. And while someone writing for IMDB claims that the show was meant to be the first "mini-series" there's no real indication that it was meant to last just a single season. As it stands the show didn't even last that long, disappearing after fifteen episodes.

And let's see if this sounds familiar. In explaining how The Music Scene would work as a modern take on Your Hit Parade, the producers explained that they would "build up a bank of pretaped performances by artists whose records appeared to be heading toward the top of the charts. The five days before air time, the get a peek at Billboard's latest rankings, pull out appropriate tapes and create a balanced show – a mixture of rock, country-and-western, jazz, ballads, folk etc." Sure sounds to me like ABC (re)invented the music video and a prototype of MTV a dozen years before MTV. The list of acts that appeared on The Music Scene included The Beatles, James Brown, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Three Dog Night, Janis Joplin, Smokey Roninson and the Miracles, Sly & the Family Stone, Isaac Hayes, and Stevie Wonder. The show was an odd length – 45 minutes – and was paired with another 45 minute show called The New People, the premise of which might also sound familiar: a planeload of young people crash on a remote Pacific Island. The chances of rescue are almost nil so they have to build a new society. Fortunately the island has a full complement of houses and supplies – it had been built as the site for a possible above ground nuclear test but never used. Gee, doesn't that sound familiar. Neither show drew a large audience (by the standards of the day: the debut episodes of The Music Scene and The New People had ratings of under 14.0 in the Fast Nationals according to the TV Obscurities article on the show – executives today would kill their own mothers for those sorts of numbers) and The Music Scene was probably not helped by the fact that the networks were more concerned with the size of the mass audience than they were with the make-up or demographics of the audience. Both shows were cancelled at the mid-season mark along with a third new series, a TV version of Mr. Deeds Goes To Town starring Monte Markham and Pat Harington, and ABC venerable variety show Hollywood Palace. The other networks didn't face such obvious problems, but then again they weren't being as daring in programming. The only show that either of the other two networks cancelled at the midseason point was The Leslie Uggams Show which was the first hour long variety show to be hosted by an African-American. It only lasted ten episodes.

The networks reacted to the cancellation of these shows in a way that would surprise people today – the moved established shows. Today this sort of thing would be regarded with horror by fans. Conventional wisdom is that moving a series to a new night at any time let alone during the season is not unlike getting a kiss from a Mafia Don – you won't survive – but it was what was done in 1969. ABC moved It Takes A Thief and the Wednesday Night Movie to Monday night (the latter show got a name change of course). The only survivor of the Monday night line-up, Love American Style replaced Jimmy Durante Presents The Lennon Sisters which in turn moved to replace Hollywood Palace (which in turn followed Lawrence Welk, the show where the Lennon Sisters originally debuted). To replace the Wednesday Night Movie ABC revived a series that had run the previous summer – The Johnny Cash Show. The Flying Nun moved to replace Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, and was in turn replaced by Nanny And The Professor. I haven't been able to identify the show that followed Johnny Cash, or what went into the time slot vacated by It Takes a Thief. Over at CBS the time slot after Ed Sullivan, which had been held down by The Leslie Uggams Show became the new home of The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour, while Campbell's old time was taken over by a new series called Hee Haw, which everybody hated, except of course the public (or at least that part of the public that the critics disliked).

The successful dramas that debuted in 1969 seem to have one thing in common. That is a mentor-protégé relationship. In ABC's Marcus Welby M.D. the mentor was the title character, a caring general practitioner who works out of his home and actually made house calls (!), while his protégé was, at least initially, a hot-headed young doctor who would prefer to be a neurologist and has nothing but scorn for general practice... but needs the money. In time Welby, played by Robert Young, and Steven Kiley, played by James Brolin, would develop a relationship more closely approaching a father and son. On Medical Center from CBS the mentor was Dr. Paul Lochner, played by James Daly (today probably better known as the father of Tyne and Tim Daly), while the protégé was Dr. Joe Gannon, played by Chad Everett (the role would later provide Everett with a famous commercial tagline: "I'm not a doctor, but I played one on TV."). Both series ran from 1969 to 1976. Somewhat less successful in terms of longevity were two of the components in the NBC "wheel" series The Bold Ones, but both The Doctors and The Lawyers featured the mentor-protégé model with a bit of a twist – two protégés. In The New Doctors the mentoring was done by E.G. Marshall as Dr. David Craig, head of the Craig Institute of New Medicine. His protégés were researcher Dr. Paul Hunter (David Hartman) and chief of surgery Dr. Ted Stuart (John Saxon). In The Lawyers the mentor was respected lawyer Walter Nicholls (Burl Ives) who brings younger lawyers Brian and Neil Darrell (Joseph Campanella and James Farentino respectively) in as partners. The third part of the wheel in the first season was The Protectors, which starred Hari Rhodes (from Daktari) as liberal District Attorney William Washburn who has run-ins with conservative Deputy Police Chief Sam Danforth (played by Leslie Nielsen back in the days when no one thought of him as a comedic actor). While The New Doctors would run for four years (though Saxon dropped out after the third season and was replaced with Robert Walden), and The Lawyers would run for three, The Protectors only got a single season. It was replaced in the 1970-71 season by The Senator, starring Hal Holbrook as Senator Hayes Stowe, which won five Emmys and was nominated for four more – none of which helped to extend its life.

The other drama that debuted in 1969 and lasted more than two seasons was something of an oddity from today's point of view. It was the half-hour drama Room 222 starring Lloyd Haynes, Denise Nicholas, Michael Constantine and Karen Valentine as teachers at a Los Angeles high school. Haynes played history teacher Pete Dixon, while Nicholls played his girlfriend Liz McIntyre, the school's guidance counsellor. Constantine played the school's well liked if long-suffering principal Seymour Kaufman, and Valentine played Alice, a young English teacher. There were a number of recurring student characters as well as a number of actors who made guest appearances on the show and would later go on to fame, including Bruno Kirby, Cindy Williams, Teri Garr, Rob Reiner, Anthony Geary, Richard Dreyfuss, Chuck Norris, Kurt Russell, and Mark Hamill. The show lasted for five seasons, despite nearly being cancelled after its first – apparently ABC relented when the show was nominated for five Emmy Awards and won three including Emmys for Constantine and Valentine as Supporting Actor and Actress in a Comedy and the now vanished category of Outstanding New Series. In the Fall Preview issue TV Guide raved about the show saying, "...in this half hour comedy-drama the life he leads has the feel of reality despite scripts that are shrewdly calculated to entertain. It shows up in things like the refreshingly natural man-woman relationship of Pete and Liz McIntyre."

Of course comedy, and in particular situation comedy, was the life blood of TV in the late 1960s. In all honesty 1969 was not a good year for sitcoms. Of eight introduced, only two ran for more than two season. These were The Courtship Of Eddie's Father which ran three seasons and appears to have ended primarily because of a dispute between star Bill Bixby and director and co-star James Komack about the direction the series was taking (this seems to be a running theme with Komack; both Gabe Kaplan and Marcia Strassman have spoken of a difficult relationship with Komack on Welcome Back Kotter where he apparently played the actors off against each other), and The Brady Bunch which ran for five, and of course lives on in perpetual reruns. Sketch comedy Love American Style ran for four and a half season and was the only show from ABC's Monday line-up to not only survive for more than half a season but to thrive. ABC's mid-season replacement Nanny And The Professor managed 54 episodes, being cancelled halfway through its second season. Sketch comedy Hee-Haw was also cancelled by CBS after its second season, but got the ultimate revenge by running for 21 more years in syndication. One show that ran only two year was The Bill Cosby Show, his first solo effort, after being teamed with Robert Culp in I Spy. Cosby played high school basketball coach Chet Kincaid. The situations on the show rotated around his work as a teacher and his dealings with his family. One rather unique feature of the show was that it didn't feature a laugh track. I was a big fan of Bill Cosby when this show came out, in part of course because of I Spy but primarily because of his records, which were everywhere, and of course from his appearances on various variety shows. In my opinion Cosby's 1969 show had a lot in common with his stand-up act, and I don't think that extensive use of a laugh track wouldn't have done a service to the show.

Besides Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, the two sitcoms that didn't last out the year were both from NBC: Debbie Reynolds Show, and My World And Welcome To It. The two shows couldn't have been more different. Debbie Reynolds's series was a standard domestic comedy with a very familiar hook to most episodes. A bored housewife desperately wants to break into her husband's line of work, a process which usually involves harebrained schemes involving the lead character and her best friend – or in this case her sister – much to the distress of both of their husbands. It sounds exactly like I Love Lucy, which is no real surprise since the show was created by Jess Openheimer who also created I Love Lucy (and before that Lucille Ball's radio show My Favourite Husband). The other show couldn't have been more different. It was My World And Welcome To It starring William Windom in a role based on James Thurber. Indeed Thurber's writings provided the plot for many of the stories on the series while his cartoons were the basis for a number of fantasy sequences. These were animated by the DePatie-Freleng animation studio, then most famous for the opening credits of the Pink Panther movies. The series was perhaps too innovative for 1969.

Of the four variety series introduced in 1969, the successes were The Jim Nabors Hour on CBS, and The Andy Williams Show on NBC. The Nabors show, which also featured his Gomer Pyle USMC co-stars Ronny Schell and Frank Sutton, was built on Nabors's singing and comedy skills. In 1971 it was a victim of the CBS "rural purge," presumably because of Nabors's Alabama accent and the fact that he had starred on Gomer Pyle and before that The Andy Griffith Show (I'm being facetious; the reason that was cited for much of the rural purge was that the shows either weren't doing well in the overall ratings – most of the "rural purge" shows had fallen below 30^th in the ratings – or the fact that they did not draw the "youth" demographic, which seems to have been the case with Nabors, whose show was 29^th in the annual ratings). The Andy Williams Show was a return to TV for the extremely relaxed Mr. Williams who had headlined a weekly series for NBC from 1962 to 1967. Indeed Brooks and Marsh in their Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable Shows 1946-Present don't split this show off from the older show (or from the two summer series he did for ABC and CBS in 1958 and 1959). Certainly TV Guide treated the show as a new one (not that I could tell when I saw it never having knowingly seen the original). The magazine pumped up the wide range of the guests and even stated that one episode "paired Lawrence Welk with Tiny Tim." That might have been something to see. Then again it couldn't have been much stranger than some of the things on the show, like "the Walking Suitcase," or "The Cookie Mooching Bear." The Andy Williams Show also ran from 1969-71 but in his case he seems to have jumped rather than having been pushed, preferring occasional specials (most famously at Christmas) to the weekly grind of a series. The best of the variety shows was probably the replacement series, The Johnny Cash Show simply because it was less a variety show and more a pure music show with a genuine passion for country music.

The 1969-70 season was the beginning of a transition in TV. The westerns were nearly gone – CBS would cancel Lancer at the end of the season, leaving only three in the line-up for 1970-71 when no new shows in the genre were announced. Some fondly remembered comedies would also leave the air: Get Smart (which had been picked up by CBS for the less than highly regarded fifth season, which saw the birth of Max and 99's twins), I Dream of Jeannie, The Flying Nun, and The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. And in truth little of substance would come out of the season. After all the show we remember most from the year is the story of a lovely lady who was bringing up three very lovely girls and a man named Brady who was busy with three boys of his own.

As a special bonus I've got a playlist set up featuring ABC's 1969 Fall Preview Show. It's probably has the best clips from The Music Scene (although it focuses on the comedy group The Committee – including Howard Hesseman and Peter Bonerz – rather than the music), The New People and the other 1969 new ABC shows that didn't last long. By the way, they're wrong about The Ghost & Mrs Muir – it debuted in the 1968 season.

1971 TV Guide Fall Preview – The Comments

I don't really know what I had planned for these retrospective pieces about the TV Guide Fall Previews but this one at least drew a sufficient number of comments that I thought I could wring a second posting out of responding to the comments so here goes.

First up we have this from my good friend Ivan G. Shreve:

The New Dick Van Dyke Show managed to hang on for three seasons. In its last season, Van Dyke's character got a gig on a soap opera and with the exception of Lange, the supporting cast were pretty much scrapped and replaced with new faces.

As tragic as this may seem, I also remember being a fan of The Chicago Teddy Bears. You're right about John Banner, he was the best thing on it.

Me: You're right about The New Dick Van Dyke Show. It did in fact run for three years rather than two. My memory problem on this show stems from the radical change in the show between the second and third seasons. As a result, in my mind – after 38 years of not really thinking about the show – the first and second seasons were condensed into a single season. The change in the show was really quite radical after all, going from a local talk show host in Phoenix to a soap opera actor in Los Angeles. What I do recall is that the Los Angeles season was far less enjoyable, for me at least, than the first two.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on the show, after writing the article I discovered a number of interesting things about things behind the scenes at the show. The show had drawn good ratings in the first season where it followed The Mary Tyler Moore Show but they were apparently lower than other shows on the night so the network moved it to Sunday night where it was placed between the revived Sandy Duncan Show and Mannix. The other shows on the night were Anna And The King with Samantha Eggar and Yul Brynner, and a little show called M*A*S*H. It wasn't exactly a strong night for CBS and ratings for The New Dick Van Dyke Show were worse than the previous season, low enough that under normal circumstances the show would have been cancelled. However, in order to lure Dick Van Dyke back to TV, CBS had given him a guaranteed three year contract, so instead of cancelling the show CBS totally recast the show except for Van Dyke, Hope Lange and Angela Powell (who played their daughter). Reportedly the ratings for the third season improved, but there was tension on the set. Carl Reiner, who had been reunited with Van Dyke as one of the writers on the show wrote an episode in which the daughter entered her parent's bedroom to find them making love. The network decided that such a story line was "incompatible with Van Dyke's family-friendly image." Reiner cried hypocrisy – after all CBS was airing All In The Family (starring Reiner's son Rob of course) – and vowed never to work for CBS again. The network was willing to renew the show but between Reiner quitting the show and his desire to get away from Los Angeles and back to Arizona, Dick Van Dyke refused to do a fourth season.

The Chicago Teddy Bears married a terrible idea with what mass of badly miscast actors. I mean really – Dean Jones as the owner of a speakeasy? John Banner as the uncle of both Jones and Art Metrano? The show was just barely funny even if you were just into your teens. I can hardly imagine an adult watching this – even a nostalgic adult almost forty years later.

Next up we have this snippet from Todd, who did a blog with the American TV Guide website until they discontinued those:

Gunsmoke and Bonanza were not the "only westerns left". Alias Smith and Jones was entering its second season.

Me: You're right of course. In my own defense, Alias Smith and Jones never aired in my (one station) part of Canada, so I've never actually seen the show, and the only time I think it ever came to my notice during the time it was running was when Peter Duel committed suicide. Now that's pretty morbid.

Next up this from Jeff Kingston Pierce, who is the publisher of The Rap Sheet blog:

What an absolutely fabulous idea! My own TV Guide collection begins in 1972, and I periodically feel the need to revisit some of my favorite old shows. 1971 was the year before I really became interested in U.S. network television (I was a bit young before that), but I remember fondly the NBC Mystery Movie, Longstreet, and Nichols (all the episodes of which I managed to acquire last year). I very much look forward to further installments of your blog series.

Me: First, let me just say how much I envy you the complete collection of Nichols. Like I said, my first big "TV crush" was on Margot Kidder in the low cut blouses that she wore from time to time on that show. Dare I say that those blouses made a lot out of a little?

One of the things that I dislike about the subsequent repackagings of the shows from the NBC Mystery Theater is the fact that they cut the Henry Mancini created theme. It was one of two that Mancini did that season – the other being the theme from Cade's County. In fact I have both on an album that Manicini released about that time. (You haven't lived till you've heard Mancini's instrumental version of the theme from Shaft!) Both themes were heavily reliant on Mancini fiddling around with an early model Moog synthesizer. I have a special fondness for the Cade's County theme myself (to the point where I'll probably embed a YouTube video of the theme music at the end of this post, and the Mystery Movie theme as well) as well as for the series. While it tended to be a bit pedestrian in terms of the sort of crimes being dealt with, the setting is unique and I suspect that our mutual friend Bill Crider might appreciate at least the concept.

With regard to the Mystery Movie format, each of the series had its own charms, whether it was the breezy sexy relationship between Stuart and Sally Macmillan that was reminiscent of Nick & Nora Charles, the fish out of water antics of Sam McCloud always accompanied by the hot-headed reactions of Chief Clifford (particularly when McCloud saves the day), or the apparently bumbling but actually brilliant Lieutenant Columbo. I think my favourite was always the MacMillan & Wife episodes because of the playfully sexy relationship between husband and wife, but really I loved them all.

Longstreet is another series that I have very fond although mostly vague memories of. The idea of a blind detective may seem a bit absurd today – after all look at the reaction to Blind Justice, the Stephen Bochco series that replaced NYPD Blue but didn't last too long. Back in 1971 when you had detectives combating various infirmities it seemed less absurd. The show was a cut above much of what was on the air at the time but had the bad fortune to be on ABC and the equally bad fortune to be running against Nichols and the CBS Tuesday Night Movie. It's not too surprising that about the only clips from the series I can find online are related to the appearances of Bruce Lee on the series, particularly the episode The Way Of The Intercepting Fist. For that reason – and probably that reason alone – the show is probably more likely to get a DVD release than most of the class of 1971. In fact there are DVDs out there; an authorized Japanese set and a rather expensive Region 0 set of "dubious" provenance. In fact, maybe they're the same disks – oh Ivan!

Next a brief comment from our friend Linda, who does the Yet Another Journal blog and a whole lot of others:

I'm surprised you didn't mention the Prime Time Access Rule, which began that year.

Me: I sort of, kind of did in a roundabout sort of way. I wrote, "In the United States the FCC required the networks to give an hour of what had previously been defined as primetime back to the local stations. The intention had been for the local stations to do their own local programming but what really happened was the birth of the syndication market – and not coincidentally a boost for the Canadian producers." That would be the Prime Time Access Rule, and as I said, for a time it represented a boon for Canadian producers and Canada's CTV network, who were able to defray the costs of shows that were classified as Canadian by selling them as part of syndication packages. The problem that I had was that while I was aware that the rule existed, the 1971 TV Guide didn't actually name it. Here's what the editorial from that issue says: "Perhaps the most important factor shaping the new season is the FCC rule cutting networks from three-and-a-half to three hours of prime-time programming each evening. This rule has sent stations scurrying to find material to fill the gap – and many of the shows they found are brand-new." There's no explanation of the actual name of the rule, although the impact is eminently clear. Incidentally, the Prime Time Access Rule was dropped in 1995, but the networks have not tried to reclaim the time, perhaps knowing that the stations that they don't actually owned themselves would laugh in their faces if they tried. This should serve as a cautionary note to any network boss (say Jeff Zucker) who even contemplates the idea of giving an hour a night or even a full day back to the affiliates – once you lose it you aren't going to get it back.

Finally we have the following from Mike Doran:

I have at least one copy of every TV GUIDE Fall Preview from the first one in 1953 up to the present day (Chicago editions mostly). They didn't start doing write-ups for individual shows until about 1959 or 60 - I'll have to go home and check for sure. Anyway, this is a whiz-bang idea; I'm looking forward to more.

Me: I envy you that collection. I'd love to see some of those early issues, particularly from the 1960s. I also envy the fact that you aren't surrounded by people saying "That's old, get rid of it," or "You don't use that anymore, get rid of it," or "The dog's tail tore the cover off of that one? Well throw it away." I just heard the last one about twenty minutes ago. And heaven forbid that they find out how much some copies sell for on eBay – it's all "Well why don't you sell it and get rid of it." People, at least the one's around me, understand collecting stamps or coins but apparently not collecting – or just keeping – old TV Guides.

My collection is hardly in the best shape. In fact I did have to throw away my first TV Guide – the 1966 edition with The Green Hornet, The Time Tunnels, Mission Impossible, Girl From U.N.C.L.E., The Monkees, and a little show called Star Trek (Spock was described as having "Beatle bangs") – simply because it was far too damaged from repeated reading, being looked at, general abuse in storage, and just being on the sort of paper that these magazines were printed on. Several of my issues don't have covers. And a number of them suffer from being in the hands of someone wasn't collecting when he (I) got them and did things like marking off shows that had been cancelled.

This problem of damage is a major reason why I am scanning the issues and burning them to DVD. Even though the OCR software that came with my All-In-One printer can provide some really funky results, it's still going to cut down on the number of times I'm going to open up those old magazines and make it much easier for me to find specific commentary from specific years. Right now I'm thinking about scanning and writing about one issue every two weeks, with (hopefully) a post like this one in the alternating weeks. That should make this a year-long project. A couple of disclaimers though. First, there are a few issues that I'm missing because I wasn't able to get the issue before they disappeared from the stores (I was never a subscriber). Second, after 1977 I'm dealing with the Canadian version of the magazine. That was the year that Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications was forced by the Canadian government to sell the magazine or include more Canadian content – Annenberg sold. Initially there wasn't much difference between the US and Canadian versions beyond some Canadian shows and schedules showing up in the main part of the magazine. By the 1990s though there seems to be a total disconnect between the two magazines to the point where nothing in the two magazines was the same, even the actual format. The Canadian edition of TV Guide ceased publication in October 2006.

Next week: 1969, the year of Marcus Welby, The Brady Bunch, and a little known show that was about twenty years before its time.

Meanwhile here's Henry Mancini's Cade's County theme from what appears to be a French dub of the show (which is titled Sam Cade for the French audience).

And here's Mancini's NBC Mystery Movie theme from the second season, when Universal decided to expand the rotation to four sets of characters and added Hec Ramsey (with Richard Boone). When I get to 1972 I have some rather interesting thoughts on Hec Ramsey.

1971 – The TV Guide Fall Preview

A few weeks ago I had the idea of scanning my collection of TV Guide Fall Preview editions into searchable PDF files. Some of the issues are rather fragile or otherwise difficult to handle. My initial plan was to scan them randomly however I've taken the time to sort them, and except for a couple that were previously misplaced I'll now be scanning them (and writing about them here) in chronological order.

Well the biggest trend in the 1971-72 season was the sudden appearance of a large number of movie stars doing series. No fewer than three Oscar winners and three nominees (one of whom would later win an Oscar) were given series... and not one of those shows would get a second season. These included Oscar winners Jimmy Stewart, Anthony Quinn, and George Kennedy and nominees Rupert Crosse, Tony Curtis and Shirley MacLaine. Glenn Ford also got a series as did Rock Hudson. Hudson was the only one of the season's movie stars whose show MacMillan And Wife got picked up for a second season. Hudson's charm translated well to television, although I think it helped that he was working in a ninety minute film format with high production values and plenty of time to get things right, since the series rotated MacMillan and Wife with the Dennis Weaver series McCloud (which had actually debuted the season before as part of another anthology) and what turned out to be the biggest hit of the bunch, rumpled detective Columbo starring Peter Falk. It also didn't hurt that Hudson was working with TV veterans Susan St. James (as his sexy wife) and Nancy Walker.

In the 1971 Fall Preview TV Guide noted that, "Never before have the networks gone into a season with so few holdovers from the previous year." There was a good reason for that – the 1971-72 season had seen the completion of Fred Silverman's "rural purge" at CBS. Gone were The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Mayberry RFD, The Jim Nabors Hour, and Hee Haw. The only rural themed shows remaining were Gunsmoke and The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour. Also dumped (unceremoniously thanks to rising costs and an older skewing audience) was The Ed Sullivan Show which had been a fixture on CBS practically since the network had begun – it had been on since 1948. By themselves the CBS cancellations represented three and a half hours of programming gone – more than a full night for CBS since the FCC had taken an hour of primetime from the three networks and handed it back to the local stations. Unfortunately most of what replaced the memorable CBS rural line-up was cancelled – a lot of it within thirteen weeks. These days people remember The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Mayberry RFD and have little or no memory of Cade's County, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, Bearcats! or The Chicago Teddy Bears (although perversely Bearcats!, which ran thirteen episodes, has a longer Wikipedia entry than Cannon which ran five.

Only three of the new shows that debuted in the fall of 1971 lasted more than two seasons. Besides the aforementioned NBC Mystery Movie (the rotation of Columbo, McCloud and MacMillan And Wife) the successes were Owen Marshall: Counsellor at Law which ran for three seasons, and the William Conrad series Cannon which lasted five seasons but was only cancelled because Conrad himself got tire of doing it. Cannon is probably a type of show that modern producers would alternately love to put in their line-up and be scared to death of. The show had a single regular – Conrad – with absolutely no supporting cast. And unlike Columbo, which also had a single regular character (if you don't count Lt. Columbo's dog who showed up occasionally) this show was done on a weekly basis. It certainly cut down on the amount you pay actors, but it did make the producers highly dependent on a single person who could not be replaced.

In terms of what sort of shows were popular, in terms of dramas, cops and private eyes were in, westerns were out. There were arguably only two shows that could arguably described as traditional westerns and that's stretching the definition of "traditional" to the limit. They were Nichols on NBC which starred James Garner as a reluctant sheriff in a 1914 Arizona town named after his family, and the aforementioned Bearcats! which starred Dennis Cole and Rod Taylor as a pair of soldiers of fortune travelling around the west in the show's real star, a Stutz Bearcat (replica) in 1914. The only other westerns left were Bonanza and Gunsmoke. As for private eyes and cops this was the era of the so-called "defective detective." There was Frank Cannon, who was unrepentantly fat (he was also a gourmet cook), Robert Ironside who was in a wheelchair, and Samuel Cavanaugh (George Kennedy) in Sarge who was a Catholic priest. My favourite of the "defective detectives" was Mike Longstreet in Longstreet. In this series James Franciscus played an insurance investigator who was blinded in an explosion that killed his wife. Being blind may have kept him from carrying a gun (I think) but it didn't stop him from becoming a martial arts expert with some tutoring from his antique dealer friend Li Tsung, played by Bruce Lee. In the "difficult to categorize" area there was The Persuaders on ABC, which was a co-production with Lew Grade's ATV, starring Tony Curtis and Roger Moore as a mismatched pair of wealthy playboys manipulated into solving crimes.

In a different take on the Cop genre you had Cade's County with Glenn Ford. This was a sort of modern western, with Ford playing a sheriff in New Mexico (or Arizona or California – it's never made clear where Madrid County is) who patrols in a jeep rather than on horseback. It did feature Edgar Buchanan (Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction) as his right hand man. In a more traditional vein there was David Jansen in O'Hara: US Treasury. The show, from Jack Webb starred Jansen as an agent of the US Treasury Department, although which law enforcement organization within the Treasury Department he worked for is not absolutely clear; one week the cases were the sort of thing the Secret Service dealt with, the next week it might be an Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms case or a Customs Department case. The same year, Webb produced a short lived series called The DA starring Robert Conrad. The show featured the investigation and trial of a new case every week...in a half hour format! The show did poorly in part because a number of NBC stations refused to carry it, apparently because it was up against ABC's Brady Bunch, and it was eventually replaced with Sanford And Son.

There were no new variety series in the 1971 fall preview, but there were a lot of new sitcoms. Dick Van Dyke returned to TV in The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Dick played a local talk show host in Phoenix (where the series was also shot - Van Dyke was living there at the time) with Hope Lange playing his wife. The series aired immediately before the show that starred his previous TV wife, Mary Tyler Moore. The New Dick Van Dyke Show was actually one of the more timeless concepts – it could be put on the air today with not much retooling (although the networks might object to the fact that Van Dyke and Lange weren't in their twenty or thirty somethings. Some of the other sitcom ideas just wouldn't fly today. There was Bobby Sherman and Wes Stern as struggling songwriters in a Partridge Family spin-off called Getting Together; Don Adams and Rupert Crosse as a pair of accident prone detectives in The Partners, and Jimmy Stewart as a college professor with an eight year-old son and an eight-year old grandson ("Now you know what's meant by an absent-minded professor."). There was also an hour-long sketch comedyA couple of shows are of particular interest in the area of dumb ideas. Dean Jones starred with Art Metrano, Huntz Hall (from the Bowery Boys movies) and John Banner in The Chicago Teddy Bears. The series was a comedy about speak-easies in the 1920s – the best thing about it was John Banner. The other show was The Good Life which starred a post-Jeannie Larry Hagman and a young Donna Mills as a middle class couple who escaped the rat race by becoming the butler and maid in the home of a clueless rich man's (David Wayne). Years later, when Hagman was playing J.R. Ewing on Dallas and Donna Mills showed up on Knott's Landing, their characters met and had a one night stand. There was also an hour-long sketch comedy show called The Funny Side, hosted by Gene Kelly (yes the dancer) which looked at potential issues in a marriage from the perspective of five stereotypical couples; a wealthy couple, a blue collar couple, a black couple, an elderly couple and a teenage couple). It was essentially a take-off of Love, American Style but ran for less than three months.

The show that preceded Van Dyke's series may have the saddest fate of any of the 1971 series. That was Funny Face, which starred Sandy Duncan as a part-time commercial actress who was studying to become a teacher. The series was doing very well in the ratings when Duncan was diagnosed with a tumor that was affecting her vision. The show was pulled from the CBS line-up when Duncan had to have surgery (which cost her the sight in one eye although contrary to popular belief the eye wasn't removed). The next year she was given a new show – The Sandy Duncan Show – which bombed in the ratings.

Canadian TV wasn't given much attention from TV Guide during this period. The Canadian version of the magazine was owned by the American parent company, Triangle Publications, until January 1977, and Canadian shows were only discussed as an afterthought in the local programming pages. This was interesting because there were a couple of regulatory changes that would have an impact on Canadian TV. In the United States the FCC required the networks to give an hour of what had previously been defined as primetime back to the local stations. The intention had been for the local stations to do their own local programming but what really happened was the birth of the syndication market – and not coincidentally a boost for the Canadian producers. At the same time the regulatory authority in Canada, the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) required Canadian stations to maintain a 60% Canadian content. Of course the regulations had some holes that you could drive a truck through. One of these was co-productions. Canadian producers could take on a foreign partner – usually American – and produce shows in Canada that would count as Canadian even if there was minimal participation of Canadian actors, writers or directors. The combination of these two sets of regulations meant that several Canadian made shows that were on the CTV network schedule (at the time CBC didn't need co-productions to make their 60% requirement), including Simon Locke M.D., Story Theatre, and Rollin' On The River (a variety show featuring Kenny Rogers And The First Edition) were all syndicated into the US.

One of the fun things about looking at these old issues of TV Guide is the opportunity to see people who would become TV or movie stars in very early roles. The 1971 issue is rather sparse in this respect. The Funny Side was an early appearance for both Cindy Williams and John Amos. Eilliams appeared as one half of the teenage couple with Michael Lembeck, while Amos was the male in the black couple with Teresa Graves (who had debuted on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and would later go on to star in Get Christie Love). Nichols was one of the earliest part in American TV for a very young Margot Kidder (it was also the role that made Kidder my first real TV crush – the character had a tendency to wear low-cut barmaid blouses). As I mentioned, Longstreet had Bruce Lee in his last American role before he emigrated to Hong Kong and his too brief stardom in martial arts movies there.

On the whole, despite the number of new series that appeared in the fall of 1971, the shows that started the year were pretty weak. Sarge, The Persuaders, Getting Together, The Partners, The Good Life, The Funny Side, Shirley's World, The Man And The City, Bearcats!, Chicago Teddy Bears, and The D.A. were all gone by the end of January 1972. A few of the shows that replaced them became major hits. Those included Emergency, Sonny & Cher, and Sanford & Son. The 1971-72 TV season wasn't one of the medium's greatest, but it had its moments.