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Andy Griffith and Mary Tyler Moore have been coaxed back to CBS and situation comedy this season, but only for Andy does it seem like a halfway happy return. In Headmaster, the old sheriff of Mayberry smartens up and takes over a coed prep school in California. The series' intention, says Griffith, is "to tell it like it is for the young people while remaining palatable to older audiences." The premiere involved a student who refused to pop "uppers" and "downers" like the rest of the kids. The comic relief, provided mostly by the school's bicep-brained athletic director (Jerry Van Dyke), was a downer. As usual, Griffith came off as platitudinous but rather engaging.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, on opening night at least, was a disaster for the old co-star of the Dick Van Dyke Show. She plays an inadvertent career girl, jilted by the rounder she put through medical school, and working as a "gofer" at a Minneapolis TV station. Her bosses, a drunken clown of a news director and a narcissistic nincompoop of an anchorman, do an injustice to even the worst of local TV news.
Herschel Bernardi is another talent entombed in a seemingly moribund CBS property. Arnie, as his series is titled, has a possibly workable premise: a lifelong blue-collar worker is suddenly hoisted from the loading dock to an executive desk. But what laughs there were in the first episode belonged to the firm's fatuous, polo-playing president (Roger Bowen), whose main professional interest seems to be avoiding handclasps lest he endanger his mallet hand. Arnie is around obviously to provide hardhat wisdom and wit, but the premiere script suggests that Eric Hoffer he isn't.
Without question, the most contemptible show of the season so far is Nancy (NBC), a sappy comedy about the President's daughter (Renne Jarrett) and her fiance, a clod-kicking Iowa veterinarian (John Fink). Producer Sidney Sheldon denies lifting the idea from CBS's Governor and J.J. He got the idea, he says, during the Johnson Administration (which, in possibly its wisest decision, was unofficially unreceptive). The Nixon girls saw the pilot and found it "cute." Nancy's most embarrassing character, actually, is a wisecracking White House woman aide (Celeste Holm) with some of the most pitiable material on the air. Liz Carpenter should sue for equal time.
Variety
The Don Knotts Show (NBC) and the Tim Conway Comedy Hour (CBS) attempt to elevate two old situation comics to variety headliners. Conway, late of
McHale's Navy and the short-lived sitcom bearing his own name, made it obvious that he is, at best, a second banana. Knotts, the Milquetoast deputy sheriff on the old Andy Griffith Show, tried to make a virtue of his inability to sing, dance or string a show together. Opening night, Guest Anthony Newley pushed Knotts around and took command—a running gag that provoked a feeling of sympathy. But can other guests and the same gag make a season?