Let us now praise television. Its longbows, drawn since springtime, finally twanged last week and 17 arrows flew. Wunk. Tunk. Boink. Doyng. One after another, TV's new series all hit on or near the mark.
The single word that best distinguishes this year's series is honest. Unlike many plays of Broadway and films of Hollywood, they are free of pretension—unprepossessing, undisturbing and unoffending. They are accomplishments of theatrical engineering, designed to say and mean nothing while being diverting, with a net moral value of point zero zero. All were offered by NBC and ABC—CBS has temporarily held its fire.
The most interesting trend visible so far is an emphasis on sex. The TV men have also forsaken their experiments with ever longer shows. In fact, most of the new series are 1954-style, hardtop, 30-minute comic potboilers.
Plot and situation, however well-turned or bizarre, have much less effect on the lifespan of a TV series than the personalities of its performers. If the performers are liked by the watching families, they are wanted back in the living room next week—and that is what keeps the Nielsen ratings high and the sponsors contented. Most of the new shows are adequately deep in personable people.
ABC
Valentine's Day, for example, is a house of cards about a young bachelor publisher who likes a white fuzzy drink called Cotton Gin and keeps a portable fireplug in his Jaguar XKE to help create parking spaces. Last week he was publishing a book called The Fraudulent Female, which claimed that women criminally exaggerate the burden of housework. To prove its thesis to a potentially dangerous female critic, he went off with her for a weekend on Staten Island, where he did all the chores for a family of five. Impossible as it may seem, the show was amusing, but only because Tony Franciosa, as the publisher, delivered a winning personality far in excess of the requirements of the script, and Jack Soo, who looks like Robert Mitchum, was irresistible as his Chinese manservant, who talks hip and fancies the ponies.
The Addams Family are successful incarnations of the necrogeists in Charles Addams' cartoons. Their house is a great Victorian cobweb with a bear rug that growls when stepped on, a stuffed sailfish that has the legs of a child protruding from its mouth, and a mailbox with a hand in it that receives letters. Including guillotined dolls and thoroughbred spiders that are raised by the children, the props are obviously first-rate, but the people are even better. Beautiful Carolyn Jones plays the mother, Morticia, with a chilling verve that should make any dead-blooded man want to share a bier with her. Her husband Gomez (John Astin) and Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan) are quite sufficiently insane, but one could research the annals of television and not discover the likes of her butler Lurch, who is played by Ted Cassidy, 6 ft. 9 in., 250 Ibs., with a massive, embalmed face and a deft touch on the parlor spinet.