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THE JIMMY STEWART SHOW (NBC). At 63, the still-winning old star finds himself in a not very winning extended-family situation. Stewart plays an idiosyncratic anthropology professor who wears a hairpiece and a ten-gallon hat, says grace with a gag punch line, and plays the accordion. His younger son and his grandson, as it happens, are both eight year olds ("Now you know what's meant by an absent-minded professor," Stewart comments). The level of script and wit is such that Stewart even delivers contrived asides and winks to the audience, appealing for sympathy and, at the show's conclusion, another chance next week. He should seek succor instead from the producer-director-writer, Hal Kanter, whose previous contribution was Julia.
GETTING TOGETHER (ABC). Screen Gems and Bernard Slade, creators of The Partridge Family, are tightening their choke-hold on the teeny-bop audience. Pop Idol Bobby Sherman (Bubble Gum and Braces) is the sure draw as the composer in an unsung songwriting team. He is also guardian of his twelve-year-old sister (Susan Neher), who serves as housekeeper for him and his sappy live-in lyricist (Wes Stern), to the agitation of local social workers. The series' premise is a rather icky wicket, and Simon and Garfunkel the boys are not. But, as in The Partridge Family, the cast is disarming and the whole production surprisingly artful.
FUNNY FACE (CBS). Sandy Duncan stars in this show, which owes nothing to the 1956 Audrey Hepburn movie musical and everything to TV's That Girl and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Sandy plays an aspiring teacher working her way through college doing TV commercials. The package is too cute for comfort.
THE GOOD LIFE (NBC) and THE CHICAGO TEDDY BEARS (CBS) are the most annoying nitwits of the new situation travesties. In Good Life, a stockbroker and his wife (Larry Hagman and Donna Mills) check out of the bourgeoisie for the presumed comforts of becoming scrape-prone butler and cook to an anachronistic family of plutocrats (David Wayne and Hermione Baddeley). The plot smacks of those 1930s films that had fun with the Depression. Teddy Bears attempts to cash in on the nostalgia binge for the by-now-boring '20s, playing the gangland speakeasy scene for slapstick laughs. An apter title for this show would be The Unwatchables.
THE FUNNY SIDE (NBC). This mating of Laugh-In and sitcom is at least topical. Each week, the stock company of five couples (one young, one old, one cosmopolitan, one black, one hardhat) lights into a subject. Last week it was sex, and most of the gags were past their prime. The premiere the previous week took on health and, without drawing much blood, did at least pink such vulnerable targets as Americans' hypochondria, overcrowded waiting rooms, and the inadequacies of health insurance ("At today's prices, the only one who can afford to be sick is Howard Hughes"). The program's interlocutor, Gene Kelly, did not dance, and his material did not sing. Most of the sting in the first two weeks came from sassy Teresa Graves (formerly of Laugh-In) and the blue-collar couple, Warren Berlinger and Pat Finley. The elderly Burt Mustin and Queenie Smith were wry and especially welcome, considering that old people have heretofore been virtually anathema to television.