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The crime shows want to impress Minow too. The FCC chairman thinks television is unfit for human consumption, does he? A cultural slag heap? They'll show him. Result: the cultured, well-heeled flatfoot. Robert Taylor's retooled Detectives (NBC) now wear button-down collars, glen plaid suits, and shoot professorially from the mouth. "A beatnik," said one Taylor gumshoe last week, "is a vagrant with intellectual pretensions.'' ABC's The New Breed celebrates Lt. Price Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and the new, soft-spoken young cops of the Los Angeles Police Department, college men and nearly all scientists, who speak scornfully of the old-style "fat cops who steal apples." Straightforwardly acted, it is an absorbing story of men rather than dum-de-dum-dum bunnies.
Target: The Corrupters (ABC) is another good crime show, dramatizing each week a different area of corruption (waterfront, highway construction). But the rest of the season's prodigious list of new crime shows are mainly 30-caliber bull. NBC's 87th Precinct began with a gimmick (the heroine of the initial episodes was the deaf-mute wife of a police detective) and will undoubtedly end on one—soon. Cain's Hundred (also NBC) has introduced Nicholas Cain (Mark Richman), onetime attorney for the mob, now bent on revenge for the mob murder of his fiancée and out to get—one by one—the 100 biggest worms that ever came out of an Apalachin.
Doctors & Jokers. Two new medical shows have come on the air this season. In a medically accurate re-creation of
Hollywood's Dr. Kildare, Raymond Massey falls far shy of Lionel Barrymore as the wise old teaching physician, Dr. Gillespie; and Intern Kildare, as played by Richard Chamberlain, suggests nothing so much as an oversized white rabbit with a stethoscope instead of a watch.
The other medical show, Ben Casey, however, written by James (Medic) Moser and starring Vincent Edwards, is one of the great events in the long, hallowed annals of videosurgery. Neurosurgeon Ben Casey is so bright that his giant brain is already grappling with the most advanced encephalopathological problems of 1975. Meanwhile, he is a first-class, unsutured, 1961-style son of a bitch. Handling several cases an ABC-hour, his kindest words for his fellow physicians are: "What the hell do you use for brains?" Rabid women bite him. But, for all his foaming at the mouth, Casey is a marvelous character in a show that accurately captures the feeling of sleepless intensity in a metropolitan hospital.
The season's only new weekly TV comedian is Bob Newhart, who built his reputation on a handful of brilliant monologues. He has now committed himself to The Bob Newhart Show (NBC), which requires as much new material each week as he used to develop in months. Last week's premiére showed the strain, starting with a superb phone monologue and autobiographical sketch ("people thought I was taller than I am, but this is about as big as an accountant will get") and sliding slowly downhill thereafter.