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Indeed, the 20 new series making their bow this fall add up to a veritable pride of prejudices. CBS's Bridget Loves Bernie concerns a well-heeled Catholic girl who falls for a poor Jewish cab driver. In last week's first episode they got married and promptly gave birth to dozens of Jewish-Catholic in-law gags. M* A* S* H, also on CBS, is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the grim-zany 1970 movie about an Army medical unit in the Korean War. It mixes sex, surgery and insubordination until they are almost indistinguishable (Surgeon to nurse leaning over operating table: "If you don't move, Captain, I'm going to have to cut around your B cups").
The culmination of the whole trend may lie in NBC's The Little People, which is contrived to capitalize on nearly every current vogue. It deals with the adventures of a pediatrician (thus getting into the medical bag) who practices with his rebellious daughter (the generation gap) in Hawaii (ethnic tensions) on patients whose problems go beyond mumps to things like mental retardation (controversial topics).
Bolder is not necessarily better. It is just as possible for TV shows to be inane about sex as about fathers losing their car keys. After all, the daytime soap operas have been doing it for years. By the standards of today's movies or cocktail parties, bolder is not even much bolder. Nor are all of the season's shows cultivating a racier-than-thou attitude. The coming months will offer a spate of conventional programming in every category.
But on TV, a medium that magnifies the importance of things even as it shrinks their size, small gains loom large. Even allowing for a wide margin of shlock in the new season, some of it will be the shlock of recognition. With a gibe at anti-Semitism here, a humorous insight into sexual hang-ups there, home screen entertainment is beginning to be a little less of a window on a void. It is becoming a little more of a mirror.
Who is behind this transformation on the tube? A new, iconoclastic generation of creative talents? An insurgent band of reformers from outside the wasteland's preserve? Hardly. If any individuals can be said to be the catalysts, they are a pair of tanned and creased Hollywood veterans named Alan ("Bud") Yorkin and Norman Lear.
Both are canny professionals who grew up with the medium. Lear served an apprenticeship as a comedy writer in the '50s and '60s with Martin and Lewis, George Gobel, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Andy Williams, among others. Yorkin staged such shows as Martin and Lewis's, Gobel's and Dinah Shore's, later directed specials for Jack Benny and Fred Astaire. Together, as partners in a venture called Tandem Productions, they revolutionized TV comedy by adapting a British TV hit into All in the Family.
The night Family went on the air in January 1971, a nervous CBS posted extra operators on its switchboard to handle the calls of protest. An outvoted censor prepared to say "I told you so," and several programming executives felt premonitions of the guillotine tingling at the backs of their necks. The network did not know whether the show would be a scandal or a flop. It was neither, of course, but instead a piece of instant American folklore.