Retreads, spin-offs and rip-offs dominate prime time
If American mass culture is a true index of the national spirit, then the 1980s may be more boring than the 1970s. Or so one might conclude after surveying the network television schedules that will usher in the next decade. The new series of the 1979-80 season are a mostly flavorless assortment of retreads, spin-offs and ripoffs; there are no innovative programs and few fresh faces in sight. Though the past few years were not much better, they did at least offer such novel phenomena as Soap, Lifeline, Suzanne Somers and Robin Williams. The 1979-80 network lineup is so tame that it even lacks that saving spice of commercial television —triumphantly bad taste.
One of the season's most bizarre, and inexplicable, developments is the resurgence of cop and detective shows. They account for a third of the new series. California police, already glorified by NBC'S CHiPs, will now be featured in both ABC's 240-Robert (from the creator of CHiPs) and CBS's Paris (starring James Earl Jones). Joe Don Baker plays the New York City chief of detectives in NBC's Eischied (a spin-off of the TV miniseries To Kill a Cop); Claude Akins is a smalltown Southern sheriff in the same network's The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (a spin-off of B.J. and the Bear). ABC's Hart to Hart stars a jet-set husband-wife sleuthing team (Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers). In CBS's Big Shamus, Little Shamus, father and son (Brian Dennehy and Doug McKeon) become the first TV detectives to police Atlantic City's new casinos. For audiences who take crime lightly, ABC has a sitcom called Detective School. NBC is unveiling a James Bond clone (Robert Conrad) in A Man Called Shane.
When cops dominate the tube, doctors and lawyers usually follow close behind. Both ABC and CBS have new medical hours: The Lazarus Syndrome (starring Louis Gossett Jr.) and Trapper John, M.D. (a M* A* S* H spin-off starring Pernell Roberts and set 28 years after the Korean War). ABC's sitcom The Associates, from the creators of Taxi, takes place in a Wall Street law firm. Other new sitcoms are built around fatherless families, in imitation of CBS's long-running Norman Lear sitcom One Day at a Time. Shirley Jones, years ago a single mom in The Partridge Family, will do it again on NBC's hour-long Shirley. Eileen Brennan gets her own set of kiddies in ABC's A New Kind of Family.
If there is any cause for optimism about the new season, it derives only from the fact that the ratings race should kill many of the new series early on. Already there is one potential casualty: last week ABC yanked Nobody's Perfect, another new detective comedy, from the fall schedule for extensive repairs. That trouble spot notwithstanding, former CBS Programming Chief Mike Dann predicts that ABC will once again sweep the Nielsens, winning 28 of prime time's 44 weekly half-hours, with CBS taking twelve and NBC four. Should this prognosis prove accurate —and it probably will—the losing networks will be reshuffling their programs with mad abandon by Thanksgiving, if not before.