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The Tycoon stars 70-year-old Walter Brennan as a board chairman. Both the show and the corporation obviously float on his style alone. Last week, on a bet, he went out to prove that he could start over again with $10 and captain a new industry in no time. He did, with a clanking assist from the script. But what he owed the writers was nothing beside what they owed him. He even scored with an old one-liner about banks: "Never trust a place where they pull the shades down at three o'clock in the afternoon."
In Wendy and Me, George Burns is the owner of a Los Angeles apartment building where he acts as chorus and narrator of a running story about his tenants, centering on the nutty wife of an airline pilot. She speaks in a kind of implosive syntax. "I didn't want you to think I was out when I was gone," she reassured her husband last week. "I always want you to know where I am even when we're together." Sadly, the fictional Wendy (played by Connie Stevens) recalls the late Gracie Allen, who died in August. There is nothing funereal about the show, however. Burns' interpolated remarks save it whenever it sags. Unexpectedly sticking his cigar into the action last week and looking straight into the camera, he said: "This show has everything." Perhaps not. But it has him.
The Bing Crosby Show has a similar asset. Crosby plays Bing Collins, an electrical engineer with a wife (Beverly Garland) and two daughters. All he did last week was drift through a nostalgic routine that kidded middle age. Even the laughs were wearing baggy sweaters, but he drew them.
Mickey presents Mickey Rooney as an Omaha salesman who inherits a marina in Southern California, and with it a crooked Chinese manager who has a lifetime contract. The situation is un promising and the dialogue ("Only registered guests are permitted to drown in the pool") needs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but inside Mickey Rooney there is a profound sense of the absurd; and last week in moments of wordless action — resisting seduction by Guest Star Dina Merrill or running through downtown streets wearing only a mink coat — he developed humor in the tradition of comic pathos.
Bewitched, on the other hand, succeeds because of its situation and not in spite of it. Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York are newly weds. She is a witch. Her mother (Agnes Moorehead) is a witch too. And it is a pleasure to watch a man try to cope with a mother-in-law who is a real one. When, with dilated pupils, the bridegroom approaches the hotel bridal chamber, he suddenly finds himself standing in the lobby.
No Time for Sergeants is TV's most deserving new show because it would seem to be high time for Sergeants to jump into the television trough and suck up some of the gravy from the hillbilly trend it started as a Broadway play—illiterate mountaineers burbling with uncorruptible goodness. As Will Stockdale, Actor Sammy Jackson ought to make it. Guys pick fights with him and drive their fists against his stomach again and again while he just stands there smiling. Reveille is at 6 a.m., he learned when he started basic last week. "I ain't going to get up that late for nobody," he said.