Specials: Overdoing the Underdone

Every so often, TV ups and breaks a precedent. This season, spurred by the expanding market for specials, a few producers are taking a stab at new subjects. Trouble is, they try so hard to be original that the result is often a case of overdoing the underdone.

Last week NBC ran a dramatization of John Steinbeck's folksy odyssey, Travels with Charley. The scenery was impressive, but stagy re-enactments of scenes from the book were tossed in like roadblocks, and the show got lost east of the Black Hills. National Educational Television claimed an American TV first by showing a remarkable 30-minute color film of a baby's birth. But the program was spoiled by one of those dull panel discussions that plague so much of Public TV.

The week's most entertaining special dealt with seemingly the dullest subject for TV: The Strange Case of the English Language, a collaboration by CBS Commentator Harry Reasoner and Writer-Producer Andrew Rooney. Best bit: film clips of well-known speakers in the throes of foot-in-mouth disease.

Senator Henry Jackson went ah-ah-ah like an Evinrude. Senator William Fulbright rattled off the word commitment 15 times in one interview. And Congressman Gerald Ford got so hung up on a metaphor about the "ship of state" in "a storm-tossed sea" that Reasoner correctly observed: "People were beginning to feel seasick."