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Pete and Gladys (CBS) sets up Actor Harry Morgan, the next-door neighbor from the defunct December Bride, in a show of his own. Pete and Gladys (Cara Williams) kid around a lot and have little spats and all that, but they are really mad about each other. "It's a new house," observed one character, in this week's first installment, "but still the same old jokes."
Expedition! (ABC), with Explorer-Author-TV Producer John D. (Danger Is My Business) Craig as host, follows the 1959-60 trail of Tracker John Gunther as the show wanders the earth looking for Abominable Snowmen, African bushmen and socially disinclined jungle Indians in Brazil. The Frozen Continent, this week's opening program, extends TV's stay-at-home commuter service to Antarctica, nicely balances biological and geophysical information with its documentation of winter life near the South Pole.
The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (NBC), reflecting TV's recent back-to-Poe trend toward suspenseful dilemmas that need to be solved rather than shot, opens its first regular season this week (after four shows last spring) with Rex Harrison and Tammy Grimes in a superb, spoofily whimsical adaptation by Drama Critic Walter Kerr of Richard Marsh's The Datchet Diamonds. Exchanging his Gladstone bag by error with another that contains some £36,000 worth of stolen gems, Rex manages to preserve his fortune, restore the diamonds, fall in love with Tammy and simultaneously avoid being done in by the woggiest group of thugs west of Conrad's Victory.
Raven (NBC) stars Skip Homeier as something called Dan Raven, a sort of semiprivate eye who shares his billing with such guest performers as Singers Bobby Darin and Paul Anka while he works his beat on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip. Boyish-looking and hyper-hip, he is apparently convinced that murder can be fun. The show may have to go some to avoid the epitaph: "Quoth the ratings, nevermore."