Television: The New Season: Perspiring with Relevance

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What did the Manhattan moguls of prime-time television do with the new season? To hear them talk, they discovered America. Blurb writers who could not spell "relevant" collected severance. Faster than a speeding memo, the West Coast got the word that the medium must have a message: entertainment TV could be cool no more but must be aflame, or at least perspiring, with social consciousness.

The premieres of NBC's and CBS's new shows last week (ABC held its fire until this week) suggest that life in televisionland is no more real this season than it ever was. It is just more earnest. The Beverly Hillbillies lit out for the White House to donate $95 million for pollution control. Lassie taped a show battling the same cause last week. Not to be out-involved, other series are tackling the grievances of migrant workers, the excesses of twitchy-fingered National Guardsmen, the spread of gonorrhea, the need for penal reform, the problems of abortion, and the Senate seniority system.

In self-conscious emulation of the youth they have helped to alienate, TV producers and writers keep proclaiming that their programming has suddenly become "heavy." Yet from the series already unveiled and the scenarios of those due this week, one can only conclude that the heaviness is not in the writers' hearts but in their hands.

Dramatic Series

Most pretentious of the new shows is The Senator, which will appear every third week on NBC's catchall The Bold Ones series. But except for an authoritative performance by Hal Holbrook and a patina of knowingness (terms like "Evans and Novak" popped up without explanation), the premiere was just another action show about an assassination plot.

Four-In-One (NBC) is really four different six-week series. The first, subtitled "McCloud," features old Gunsmoke Deputy Dennis Weaver. The gimmick is that McCloud is a New Mexico marshal assigned temporarily to take lessons from the New York City police. Naturally he turns the tables, proving himself Manhattan's fastest gun, lowest tipper, and the lucky stud who stashes his boots under the sofa of the police commissioner's worldly cousin. It is all hokum, of course, but more entertaining than most of the competition.

The Storefront Lawyers (CBS) and The Interns (CBS) both exploit Mod Squad's multihero angle, but neither one is genuinely mod or engrossing. The three attorneys, one a woman, earn their bread by serving a stuffy Los Angeles firm, and their kicks by melodramatically providing legal aid from a ghetto storefront. The five interns, including one female and one black, churn in a centrifuge of subplots as soaperific as any afternoon hospital show.

Situation Comedies