Television: Old Wrinkles

PREMIÈRES

With a couple of notable exceptions, the second week of the new season was about the same as the first: depressing.

CBS's The Leslie Uggams Show, and its star, contradicted most of the week's other evidence that the industry is immune to progress. The black singer, after all, made her TV debut in the patronizing Beulah series and then sang along with Mitch before taking over the Smothers' time slot last week. Now, at 26, she has emerged with a sweet, sassy authority that is just right for a variety-hour headlmer. She sang Those Were the Days with a panache that made the Mary Hopkin original seem lifeless. She played willing straight girl to Impressionist David Frye's show-stealing rendition of William F. Buckley Jr. She starred in "Sugar Hill," a slice-of-life sketch that will be a feature of the series; the opener was more pungent than The Goldbergs, if not in a class with The Honeymooners.

Another new weekly variety series, ABC's Music Scene, rattles with vibrations of Your Hit Parade, Hullaballoo and Laugh-In but bears a few promising new wrinkles. For one, the show does not commit itself to endless and eventually monotonous replays of the same top seven songs every week, as did Hit Parade. Instead, Music Scene tunes are picked from any place on any of the Billboard "Hot 100" or bestseller charts (soul, country, "easy listening"). On opening night the producers shrewdly mixed things up, booking Tom Jones, James Brown and Buck Owens—plus the Beatles. Between numbers, and sometimes during, an engaging young satirical company provided blackouts and sketches. A few too many of the premiere-night shots misfired, but considering the youthful audience the show is aimed at, the targets were bang on—female fans, senior proms, Richard Nixon and General Hershey.

ABC's other new variety offering is, by comparison, antediluvian. The title, Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters Hour, says it all. The 76-year-old vaudevillian co-stars with four sisters who, though the oldest is not quite 30, are all 14-year veterans of The Lawrence Welk Show. The standard finale of their series will be an upbeat musical tribute to a city. Opening night it was Chicago (that toddlin' town), which the girls cheerily hymned as "the convention center of the nation."

With similar insensitivity, ABC publicized that its new situation comedy, The Brady Bunch, will deal with "the most difficult integration of them all, that of the sexes." In the premiere of the series, which is perhaps the most cynically commercial offering of the season, a widow (Florence Henderson) with three daughters and a cat, wed a widower (Robert Reed) with three sons and a dog. The rival pets and siblings reduced the wedding to a sickening chaos that was about a thousand decibels less hysterically amusing than the show's laugh track suggested.