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The medical generation gap was even more dramatically dominant in the generally engrossing premiere of NBC's The Bold Ones, which starred E. G. Marshall, David Hartman and John Saxon. In this case, the old-school practitioner, played flawlessly by Guest Star Pat Hingle, refused to declare a dying patient legally dead, thus exasperating an overeager young surgeon (Saxon) in search of a kidney to transplant. Hingle, it turned out, didn't have all those gray hairs for nothing; the dying patient miraculously improved. Bold Ones is a trilogy series, running in three-week cycles of lawyer stories, police dramas and medical shows.
A typical one-man itinerant series is . . . Then Came Bronson (NBC), a motorcycle version of Route 66. The star, Michael Parks, 31, has for several years been called Hollywood's next James Dean or next Marlon Brando, probably because he doesn't talk much. In the premiere, Parks laconically brought an autistic child to his senses in a scenic Wyoming camp for disturbed children and then varoomed off, presumably toward a less tearjerking episode.
Saddest of all the new drama series is Bracken's World (NBC), a sort of Peyton Place set in a movie lot that ABC had the sense to reject in 1963 and CBS gave up on in 1965. Bracken, a Howard Hughes-like studio chief, is never seen, and the day-to-day operation of the studio is handled by his executive secretary (Eleanor Parker). All told, the series includes eleven running parts and more cliches per foot than any other film in memory. Among them: a young contract player who comes on as a kind of poor man's Michael Parks; a starlet who will do anything for a part ("One thing I'm sure of is nobody can give you what I can"); a stage mother who says with a straight face that wearing a scarf that was the wrong color one day "cost me the part that made Rita Hayworth." It is theoretically possible that a shoddier and more tiresome series than Bracken will emerge in the second week of premières, but it is almost inconceivable.
SITUATION COMEDIES
No one can say that the makers of this year's new situation comedies didn't innovate. They invented the instant rerun. NBC's The Debbie Reynolds Show, for example, is an instant rerun of I Love Lucy, and small wonder; it is the handiwork of Lucy Producer Jess Oppenheimer. The only reason Debbie doesn't scheme to get into show business like her husband is that Debbie's husband Lew (Don Chastain) happens to be in the newspaper business. The only reason Debbie does not pose as a drummer auditioning for a band is that she happens to be posing as a caddie snooping on a politician's golf game. And the only reason it doesn't work is that Debbie isn't half the clown that Lucy is and the initial script was half-clowning and halfwit.
Once The Bill Cosby Show gets rolling on NBC, it promises to be an instant rerun of Our Miss Brooks, or maybe Mr. Peepers. Cosby is supposed to play a high school coach, although in last week's premiere he got nowhere near a school, a gym or a teenager. Instead, he jogged what might have been a good five-minute Cosby monologue into a 30-minute yawn about mistaken identity and false arrest.