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Peyton Place glows in the night not once but twice a week. The camera impatiently scurries from house to house in the small New England town, functioning as a kind of sexual seismograph, recording the slightest tremor. Most of them are very slight, indeed. For example, last week's biggest one involved a man who had made his secretary his mistress but disapproved of his son's going out with the secretary's daughter. Yet, since all the other new comic and dramatic series are developed through broad caricature, the odd thing about this marathonical bore is that it is about the most realistic of the new shows that have opened so far.
Jonny Quest is this season's new animated series from Hanna-Barbera, producers of The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Yogi Bear. Dr. Benton Quest, jack of all sciences, and his son Jonny were last week combatting a horde of enemy agents dressed as lizards, who were destroying shipping with laser beams in the area of the Sargasso Sea. Zow. It is hard to imagine better television than that.
Only two of ABC's new shows are 60-minuters. Both are consecrated to the presentation of heroic deeds. Twelve O'Clock High, derived from the novel and movie of the same name, is about men who flew B-17s in World War II. Robert Lansing is the central figure—a flying general named Savage, who can spit 220 nails a minute. "I'm going to make you lay square eggs," he told one of his pilots last week. "I'm going to hand you a copilot who's all thumbs, a bombardier who can't hit his plate with his fork, a navigator who can't find his own feet." He did, too.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea owes something to Admiral Rickover and even more to Jules Verne. It is the story of an enormous nuclear submarine that patrols the ocean floor, combatting the sinister forces, human and natural, that threaten the American way. Last week earthquakes of unprecedented ferocity were about to produce tidal waves that would drown almost anyone in the U.S. who did not happen to be standing on Pikes Peak. To counteract these H-breakers, the sub had to blast them with H-bombs before they got rolling. For one hour, on land and at sea, machine guns chattered, torpedoes schlurped through the deep, and missiles sang in the air. Voyage is all it tries to be: fast-moving calisthenics for young eyeballs.
NBC