The situation comedy has long been the most outlandish and outmoded of the television genres. No man is Gilligan's Island. Whatever network programming vice presidents think, there is a difference between a fantasy classic like Peter Pan and a Screen Gems gimmick show like The Flying Nun.
Despite this record, there was some hope that the impetus of last year's comparatively fresh All in the Family, and the influx of top-drawer stars might lift the current season above the midden of the past. In fact, the networks' ten new comedy series—though their caricatures are slightly less grotesque—have sunk into the old predictability and sentimentality.
THE NEW DICK VAN DYKE SHOW (CBS).
This go-round, Van Dyke is cast as the host of a TV talk show in Phoenix, Ariz.; Hope Lange, after two seasons of sublimation in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, plays Mary Tyler Moore. In the witless premiere, Van Dyke was stuck with one joke, and one as grizzled as his new sideburns: the recidivism of reformed smokers. But the second episode—concerning the humiliation of a local-station headliner screen-testing for a network slot—portended a return to form by TV's consummate situation comedian and by the series' witty "creative consultant," Carl Reiner.
THE PARTNERS (NBC). Don Adams, the nutball hero of Get Smart!, a golden oldie of the sitcom form, returns as author and star of a derivative series with the same lunatic intensity and sporadically hilarious style. This time, Adams and a new partner, droll black Actor Rupert Crosse (The Reivers), are bungling plainclothesmen. Inevitably, they do not play as freshly or score as often as old Agents 99 and 86, but would you believe 89 and 76?
SHIRLEY'S WORLD (ABC). In this import from England, Shirley MacLaine portrays an impulsive photojournalist from the States, based in London. The premiere established her credentials in the face of a male-chauvinist editor; in the second segment, she got unprofessionally overinvolved in the tax problems of a home-distiller in Scotland. Both scripts were absurdly implausible and unworthy of the performer's literacy and charm. But Executive Producer Sheldon Leonard, who in better days produced I Spy and the old Dick Van Dyke Show, insists that Shirley will be the first TV comedienne to have an obviously healthy sex life. There is no sign of exactly what Leonard has in mind, but on Women's Lib terms, Shirley's consciousness is already raised several levels above that of CBS's Doris Day, who this season has just been promoted from secretary to token female reporter on her San Francisco magazine.
NICHOLS (NBC). A $40,000-a-week salary and a $1,000,000 TV-movie guarantee lured James Garner (Maverick) back to the comedy-western business. Cast as a sheriff in need of vocational guidance, he emotes with accustomed facetiousness, his eyes flecked with fear and with understandable lust for the bosomy barmaid (Margot Kidder) who is the town's tease. The second episode took a clumsy swipe at U.S. jingoism and even Viet Nam (a 1914 cavalry officer notes: "Sometimes to save a town, you have to destroy it"). But there is a loco charm and potential intelligence ticking in Nichols that distinguish it from most of the competition.