PRIME-TIME television is a well-balanced ecological system: it continually recycles its waste products. Names and faces may change; trends like this season's candor may throw a new light on things; but the basic material is shredded, pulped and reprocessed from year to year, reappearing each fall in soothingly familiar formats. Situation comedies, variety hours, cop-and-cowboy capers—the individual products may soon be discarded, but the molds are never broken.
So it is again this fall. While a show like CBS's Maude expands the limits of usable domestic subject matter, other new entries like ABC's...
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