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The runaway hit Rich Man, Poor Man was last year's most influential show. It used heartthrob, class envy, suicide, seduction, desolation and disease with all the abandon of Days of Our Lives. Along with ABC's four-hour Eleanor and Franklin, it jolted the networks into restructuring the traditional grid of episodic family and doctor dramas. RM. PM, a $6 million mini-series based on Irwin Shaw's novel, picks up the plot this season as a full-fledged ABC serial called RM, PM Book II.
Other new dramatic serials, notably CBS's Executive Suite, which uses a corporate shelter for exploring the lives of dozens of people and their families employed by one company, also borrow the daytime shows' mode of interweaving multiple plots. Notes Bud Grant, CBS programming chief: "The serial is the most powerful form invented for television. Once you hook an audience, it stays hooked."
The biggest investor in long-form dynasty drama is NBC, with its Thursday evening Best Sellers series. Its opener, starring Henry Fonda, will be a nine-hour serialization of Taylor Caldwell's The Captains and the Kings, the saga of a Kennedy-esque Irish immigrant clan's rise to power. Other entries are based on Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle and Thornton Wilder's The Eighth Day.
Some of these shows will surely provide fresh entertainment, but most of the season's prime time will be devoted to crashingly familiar formulas. The lineup, by category, follows:
COP SHOWS will occupy 28 half-hours a week, a reduction from last year's cop content. A promising entry on CBS is Delvecchio, a big-city (write in Los Angeles) police detective with a law degree. NBC is countering with Serpico, based on the best-selling book and hit movie about a real-life New York cop. ABC has a conventional cop show, Most Wanted, starring the able but unexciting Robert Stack. A bigger gamble is ABC's opulently produced Charlie's Angels, in which three sexy women investigators—Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Jaclyn Smith—are given high-risk assignments, Mission: Impossible style, by a superdetective whom they never see.
THE WESTERN, which went thataway years ago, returns on NBC with Quest, the story of two brothers' search for a long-lost sister who has been raised by an Indian tribe. It is all suspiciously similar to John Ford's film The Searchers.
THE SITCOM has two new entries from Norman Lear and one from Mary Tyler Moore's mill. As might be expected, the most sophisticated, All's Fair, is a Lear production for CBS. The story about a conservative Washington columnist in his late 40s, played by Richard Crenna, and his affair with a young, radical chic photographer, gives saucer-eyed Bernadette Peters a long-overdue opportunity to close in on an identifiable personality. But All's Fair is not for all viewers. In the damning words of one West Coast handicapper: "It's a thinking man's show."
Lear's other new sitcom, The Nancy Walker Show, has the inspired notion of casting the crafty comedienne as a high-powered Hollywood agent married to a Navy officer who decides to retire from the sea. (Lear's low regard for TV brass is reflected in the character of a network executive whose eight-year-old son makes all his programming decisions.) A likely hit.