Nine out of ten physicians probably agree that a patient should resort to Amytal, Seconal, and phenobarbital only after he has tried TV. Last week, with the arrival of the last of the new season's premieres, it was clear that the prescription is still effective.
Since ABC discovered that stupendous profits can be made through the production of stupendous mediocrity, the other two networks have conformed nicely, performing the difficult feat of lowering their own standards. From precooked oatmeal to precast bullets, everyone is importing packaged pap from Hollywood by the case. But above all, the 1961-62 television season may go down in history as the year that canned laughter made its greatest comeback. Every new sitchcom (adspeak for situation comedy) is a masterpiece of electronic control: three hees and a hah for a cracking knuckle or a lifted eyebrow, a two-decibel avalanche for a two-bit joke.
The Rounded Cliché. Although the competition is fierce, no sitchcom is quite so cute, cute, cute as Ichabod and Me (CBS), wherein a metropolitan newsman (Robert Sterling) buys a small New England newspaper from owner Ichabod (George Chandler) Adams. The town is peopled by rounded, well-realized, three-dimensional clichés with names like Widow Ruskin and Cousin Martin, played by actors steeped in basic quaintsmanship. From ABC's Margie (1920s flapper) to CBS's Father of the Bride, the other new sitchcoms come close to the icky standards of Ichabod. Actress Shirley Booth has been caught in an NBC series called Hazel, based on the Saturday Evening Post's cartoon maid. She place-kicks footballs and tweaks the ears of her boss's clients. The Joey Bishop Show (NBC) presents its deadpan comic star as a small-time flack who is not as slick or tricky as the world around him. But the whole show is a little too cold and clanny.
The contrasting warmth of Gertrude Berg almost saves Mrs. G. Goes to College (CBS), although the situation itself is both sad and saccharine: a widow in her 50s enrolls as a freshman at U.C.L.A. Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who also played opposite her in Broadway's A Majority of One, helps a bit, but nothing can be done with a script that sets its sights along "the hippopotamus of a right triangle.'' And Car 54, Where Are You? is a question that does not deserve an answer. An NBC show written by Nat Hiken (who wrote Sergeant Bilko), it lionizes two New York cops named Toody and Muldoon (Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne) and reaches its pinnacles with such dialogue as "Where's Toody?" "Toody's on doody.''
Horses & Crime. The oat still thrives. CBS's Marshal Dillon (James Arness) now has one solid hour to thicken the air with Gunsmoke; and the imitable Paladin, clearly out to impress the FCC's rootin' tootin' Newton Minow, was reading a Dostoevsky novel during an episode of this year's Have Gun, Will Travel.