This week in TV Guide: September 6, 1969

Eddie Albert loves to work. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by that; acting is, after all, a job just like any other, albeit one that pays more than most of us are accustomed to. And Eddie Albert, who has been in the business long enough that he appeared in the first teleplay ever written for television (back in 1936, on W2XBS in New York) and who most assuredly does not need the money, is now enjoying the fruits of that labor, most recently four years as co-star of CBS's hit sitcom Green Acres. Still, in his sixties, one might have expected him to slow down, even just a little. 

He's a man of many means, or perhaps, as Leslie Raddatz points out, there are many Eddie Alberts out there: besides Albert the actor, there is Albert the family man—his most important role, he says; Albert the philosopher, who while he declaims the title, can quote Chardin, Sir Arthur Eddington, Einstein and Gandhi, and was talking about Zen Buddhism "before it became fashionable"; and Albert the compulsive worker, a man in constant motion. "I enjoy doing other shows," he says, "where I can sing or recite serious poetry. The commercials are like that—a chance to do something I’ve never done before. Happiness to me means constant growth. If I see a chance to do something, even if it stinks, I do it. I’m always on the side of action—I just can’t sit on my butt and do Green Acres."

His film career was far from a failure—he was nominated for two Academy Awards for Supporting Actor, and twice more for Golden Globes—but he enjoys television, "the idea of TV's hitting so many people, diverting them for a half-hour from the rather violent world we live in." He enjoys meeting the people who watch him on TV, during the many personal appearances and fairs that he plays during the summer; working on the stage gives him a chance to "try new things, and if they work, you use them when you get back to Hollywood, even if it's just a slight change of expression or the way you smile when you say a line." 

When he's not working in front of the camera, he's often working out, running two or three miles a day in the sand near the modest home he's lived in for the last twelve years, with his wife Margo, to whom he's been married since 1945, and his two children, Maria and Edward, the latter of which will follow his footsteps in acting. Why does he work out? He enjoys it, for one thing; in addition, he's preparing for a summer mountain-climbing expedition in Alaska, and "I didn't want to have to say, 'Wait for me, fellows.' That would have been humiliating, and I don’t like that." He says that he wants to "be able to ru with my kids when I'm 75 years old. I intend to."

He's not the most popular man in Hollywood, which I suspect bothers him not one bit; "We who live and work in Hollywood discuss almost nothing but our work and each other and our fairly cramped lives," he has said, and a friend adds that "He resents having to become involved in things he really isn’t interested in." He is an interesting man; I'll admit that he was never quite my cup of tea, although he's terrific in Green Acres, in which, he says, he plays "one aspect of myself." And maybe that's all we really need to ask of him, a man who loves his work, that he transmits some of that love to us through his performances. As Oliver Wendell Douglas, we can have no complaints.

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With the new television season kicking off next week (including the fabulous T.V. Guide Fall Preview Issue!) the networks frequently offer a special or two to whet our appetites, and this year is no exception. And you can see several of them!

Traditionally, the Miss America Pageant has served as the first major special of the  season, and on Saturday we'll make the trip to Atlantic City for the 49th annual presentation (7:00 p.m. PT, NBC, watch here), with the grandmother of them all putting on a "mod face" to honor this year's theme, "The Sound of Young." (Yeah, that's what it says.) Bert Parks and 1966 Miss America Debbie Bryant are our hosts, and if you can make it through all the modness to the end, you'll see last year's winner, Judith Anne Ford, crown Miss Michigan, Pamela Eldred, as Miss America, 1970. Incidentally, one of the runners-up is Susan Anton, and Eldred will, next year, pass her crown off to Phyllis George.

There's no college football on TV this weekend; the start of the season hasn't yet been bumped up to the middle of August. The pros aren't around either, although you can catch some practice football, which goes under the name of "pre-season" action. That doesn't mean there's no sports to be seen, though: the U.S. Open Tennis Championships wrap up this week in Forest Hills, New York, with the women's final on Saturday at 1:00 p.m., while the men face off Sunday at 11:30 a.m. (CBS) Two great champions walk off with the prizes: Margaret Court wins the women's final over championship over American Nancy Richey, while on the men's side, Rod Laver completes his second Grand Slam, defeating Tony Roche (which you can see here). Laver remains, to this day, the last man to win the Grand Slam, and the only player, male or female, to win it twice.

On Monday, it's The Singers (10:00 p.m., CBS), a "way-out melange of music and comedy" including "wild visual interpretations of perfectly normal tunes," produced by Mel Torme and Bill Foster, and featuring performances by Jack Jones, Michele Lee, Frankie Laine, Cliff Robertson, Bobby Van, Harve Presnell and Gerri Granger, and the Sapphire Thinkers. Like, groovy, man.

Tuesday, CBS takes us back to last year's tumultuous presidential campaign with The Making of the President: 1968 (9:30 p.m.), based on the best-seller by Theodore H. White and written by White, produced by Mel Stuart, and narrated by Joseph Campanella. Looking back on it now, I'm still amazed that the country made it through all that. Conveniently, the book is also a selection of the Literary Guild of America, for which an advertisement appears on the following page.

On Wednesday, Lena Horne takes the spotlight in her first network television special (10:00 p.m., NBC) with guests David Janssen and O.C. Smith; the orchestra is conducted by her husband, Lennie Hayton. It's an all-singing, all-dancing hour, and I have to admit that David Janssen is not the first name that comes to mind when looking at potential special guests for such a special. On the other hand, he did host The Hollywood Palace once, and after spending four years on the run from the law, he probably knows a thing or two about moving quickly on his feet. By the way, next week in this time slot, it's the premiere of Then Came Bronson.

Thursday's highlights can be found mostly in the past, with reruns of "Fall-Out," the dramatic and controversial final episode of The Prisoner (8:00 p.m., CBS, video here), and "Male of the Species" (8:30 p.m., NBC), a Prudential: On Stage presentation of a trio of plays by Alun Owen that tell stories of the battle of the sexes, starring Paul Scofield, Michael Caine, and Sean Connery as the three men, and Anna Calder-Marshall as the woman each of them pursues. Scofield and Calder-Marshall each won Emmys, and in case the cast doesn't have enough star power for you, the production is hosted and narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. Here's play one, with links included for the other two.

I mentioned college football earlier; it's the 100th anniversary of college football, and in honor of next week's season opener, sportscaster Chris Schenkel hosts an hour-long documentary on the history of the sport (Friday, 8:00 p.m., ABC), with footage of some of the game's all-time greats, including Red Grange, Don Hutson, Jim Thorpe, and the Four Horsemen. 

Oh, and one more thing about football: the award for the most incomplete story of the year goes to Thursday night's O.J. (8:00 p.m., KTUV), highlighting the career of Heisman Trophy winner O.J. Simpson, and talking about his plans for the future. When asked about those plans, Simpson reportedly replied, "I plan on breaking a few records, and then going into television and commercials, where I expect to make a killing. Or two."

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The new season may be just around the corner, but NBC and ABC are rolling out their new Saturday morning lineups, a mixture of old friends and new faces—or something like that. I was never able to get into some of these new cartoons; I was always a Bugs Bunny/Road Runner fan myself. I'm sure, though, that some of these titles will bring back fond memories for you. Forthwith, a look at the new lineups, along with my observations:

ABC, by virtue of the alphabet, comes first, and their new shows include:

• Smokey Bear (7:30 a.m. PT): Cartoon adventures of the fire-preventing bear. (Adding new stories to the canon, because how many fire-prevention stories are there?)
• Cattanooga Cats (8:00): Animated rock-music cats host this cartoon series. (And who can possibly resist a rock group comprised of cats?)
• Hot Wheels (9:00): Cartoon adventures of young, responsible auto enthusiasts. (Driving cars that look remarkably like those you can find in the store.)
• The Hardy Boys (9:30): Animated series based on the Hardy boys mystery books. (Because Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson aren't quite ready for prime-time yet.)
• Sky Hawks (10:00): Animated aerial adventures of the Wilson family. (See also: Sky King, with his niece Penny.)

Not to be outdone, here's what the Peacock Network has in store, a lineup that includes one certifiable classic:

• Heckle and Jeckle (7:00): Cartoons with the know-it-all magpies. (A blast from the past, and as I recall these are reruns from the show that ran Saturday mornings on CBS from 1956 to 1966.)
• Here Comes the Grump (8:00): Animated adventures of a boy and his dog in a fantasy land. (I don't know why I remember the theme to this cartoon, but since I do, I must have watched it.)
• The Pink Panther (8:30): Cartoons with the internationally known pussycat. (An instant classic that has held up remarkably well, along with "The Inspector" and "The Ant and the Aardvark" features.)
• H.R. Pufnstuf (9:00): Jack Wild, the Artful Dodger of Oliver!, stars as Mimmy in this fanciful series about a boy's escapades on a magic island. (It says here that Pufnstuf is a dragon. I was never sure of that. A show that lives on, nonetheless.)
• Jambo (10:30): Marshall Thompson (Daktari), aided by Judy the Chimp, narrates this series of live-action animal stories produced by Ivan Tors. (Yes, but without Cheryl Miller? Not to mention Clarence.)

CBS kicks off its Saturday schedule next week, but no fear: on Sunday, Sebastian Cabot, Anissa Jones, and Johnnie Whitaker host The Funtastic Show (7:30 p.m.), an advance look at the network's new offerings, including Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Looking at some of these titles, maybe it was a Golden Age of Saturday morning cartoons after all.

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Some odds and ends from the Teletype this week: 

• Frank Sinatra returns for his annual television special on CBS November 12. (It eventually airs on November 5. This one is just Frank, with no guests, and isn't that about all you need?
• Bing Crosby's annual Christmas special airs on NBC this year, after four years of Christmas shows on ABC's Hollywood Palace. Although it isn't mentioned, Bing's special guest is Carol Burnett; Roy Clark and Juliet Prowse also appear.
• Six episodes of Tom Jones's series will be taped in Hollywood this season rather than London. "Tickets to a Jones taping session—or even a dress rehearsal—are as hard to get as Lawrence Welk ducats. And that's where the comparison stops." 
• Ed Sullivan's season opener falls on his 67th birthday, September 28. Helping Ed celebrate are Barbra Streisand, Red Skelton, and the Temptations. Unknown at the time: it's Ed's next-to-last season opener.

In other insider news, Richard K. Doan reports that the Smothers Brothers have been reduced to making guest appearances and local-station syndication after being sacked by CBS. The episode that the network refused to air last spring is being sold to individual stations for broadcast (Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., KTXL), while the brothers hope to produce a series of specials for first-run syndication. Tom appeared with Merv Griffin last month, and the duo join Glen Campbell for his season premiere. 

And FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, the closest thing the government has to a loose cannon (this side of Spiro Agnew, anyway), had plenty to say on a recent Dick Cavett show. Referring to a bill that would eliminate the three-year renewal cycle of TV and radio station licenses, Johnson called it "the final takeover by the broadcasters," and added that while it might be too late to stop, the public ought to know "what it is that’s about to happen to them in Washington as they sell off their democratic rights to the broadcasting industry." A visibly nervous Cavett asked Johnson, "if he had anything else he'd like to get off his chest," to which Johnson replied, "My thesis is that television can’t stand truth. It can’t stand reality."

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Speaking of talk shows, this really is something of a Golden Age for the genre. As opposed to the vapidity of late-night talkers and the celebrity-obsessed daytimers, we see a succession of shows that frequently combine entertainment with some quality conversation.

We're in the era when all three networks have their late-night shows. Johnny Carson still rules the roost, of course, and among the king's guests this week are Alan King, Jacqueline Susann, Charlie Callas, Robert Merrill, and Bob and Ray. Johnny's opposition on ABC is Joey Bishop, who welcomes Barbara McNair, Ross Martin, Anthony Newley, and Louis Prima. Not to be outdone, over on CBS, Merv Griffin has Dr. Sam Sheppard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sen. Edmund Muskie, Steve Lawrence, Erroll Garner, and Jimmy Dean. Gotta give Merv the edge for the week. 

But that's not all! Dick Cavett hasn't yet taken over Bishop's late-night slot, but his thrice-weekly show (Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, 10:00 p.m., ABC) has its share of stars, with Johnny Mathis, Robert Young, Ralph Nader, and California's Democratic party leader Jesse Unruh.

During the daytime, Steve Allen's talk-comedy series (9:30 a.m., KOVR) has Diana Trask, Bill Dana, O.C. Smith, Anna Maria Alberghetti, and the Ike and Tina Turner Review. There's old standby Mike Douglas (airing at 3:00 p.m. on KPIX and 4:00 p.m. on KXTV); his co-host for the week is Doug McClure, and his guests include Monte Markham, Diana Trask (again!), Lily Tomlin, and Pearl Buck. Meanwhile, David Frost's guests for the week (4:30 p.m., KPIX) include Chet Huntley, Burt Reynolds, Arthur Ashe, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Sugar Ray Robinson, Averell Harriman, and Stiller and Meara.

Finally, in the late-late-night spots, Joan Rivers has Sam Levenson, Brenda Vaccaro, Soupy Sales, and Kay Thompson. Finally, Hugh Hefner's weekly show (Friday, 1:00 a.m., KCRA) features Gore Vidal, Mort Sahl, Morgana King, John Hartford and hypnotist Pat Collins. 

Now, you may not recognize all the names I've listed; I could look them up for you, but it won't hurt if you check them out yourself. The point is that most of the names are familiar, and those that aren't are still important people in the worlds of entertainment, news, or politics. And I'd say that the weekly lineup for any of them beats what we have today.

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However, there's one legendary talk show host you won't find on weekly television anymore but who makes an appearance this week nonetheless: Jack Paar, who continued to appear in a series of occasional specials after leaving the regular grind on NBC. On Monday night (8:00 p.m.), Jack Paar and His Lions presents Jack and, well, some lions, including his pet lion Amani, who lives with Paar and his family in Paar's 13-room house (and once accompanied Paar's daughter Randy to college). He also looks at the journey of the three offspring from the lions featured in Born Free, en route from Kenya to their new home at Lion Country Safari in Florida. Paar, who wrote, narrated, and partially photographed the special, is well-known for his love of lions and other wild animals, having gone on safari in Africa, and is thoroughly in his element here.

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MST3K alert: The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) After being burned in a plutonium explosion, an Army colonel starts growing at the rate of 10 feet per day. Glenn Langan, Cathy Downs, William Hudson, James Seay, Larry Thor, Frank Jenks, Russ Dender, Lyn Osborn, Diana Darrin, William Hughes. (Saturday, 1:00 p.m., KGO in San Francisco) Admit it; you'd be plenty teed off too if you'd been transformed, through no fault of your own, into a 70-foot giant. Unfortunately, since the rights to use the movie expired, you can no longer see the MST3K version except on YouTube. However, you can catch the unwanted, unasked-for sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, with a completely different cast. Take it from me: if you've seen one colossal man, you've seen them all.  TV

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Around the dial

In case you've been asleep all week, Darkness in Primetime published this week. You can find out how to order it here. My latest interview, with Doug Hess of the Forgotten Hollywood podcast, is available here. And on an non-book related note, here's the latest edition of Eventually Supertrain, in which Dan and I continue to look at the very entertaining Garrison's Gorillas. I think that's about enough self-serving content for one week, don't you?

At The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik asks whether Colbert's cancellation signals the last call for late night talk shows. It's one of those stories that asks and answers its own question, giving ample proof as to why these big-mouth chatterboxes are no longer must-see, or even maybe-see, TV.

The latest Brit mystery to fall under John's gaze at Cult TV Blog is the 1974 anthology series Dial M for Murder, which is not about the famous Hitchcock movie or the play from which it's derived, but a series of, well, murder mysteries, including this week's excellent "Whatever's Peter Playing At?"

Speaking of Hitch, at Clasic Film & TV Café, Rick presents us with seven things to know about Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Some fun factoids here, and a pleasant reminder of an anthology that was frequently quite entertaining, and which I should probably return to someday.

From the Ford 50th Anniversary Show of 1953, the Broadcast Archives presents a very funny sketch by Mary Martin, staged by famed choreographer Jerome Robbins, on the history of fashion. I wonder what they'd do with today's fashions?

At Comfort TV, David looks at what he refers to as "the carefree era of commercials," when ads had personality, distinctiveness, even a sense of humor—and, I might add, were not a source of political controversy regarding the latest cause célèbre.

Television's New Frontier: the 1960s returns with the 1962 episodes of the seminal cartoon series The Jetsons, which spawned comic books, soundtrack recordings, toys aplenty, and a surprisingly accurate look at how automation might affect our way of living.

At Mavis Movie Madness!, Paul examines Lee Marvin's only dramatic television series, M Squad, which literally packed a punch over its three seasons, and is absolutely my idea of what a half-hour police drama should be like. 

Maddie looks at the great Eve Arden at Classic Film and TV Corner; on television, she was Our Miss Brooks and one of The Mothers-In-Law, and she had an incomparable film career as the premier essayist of what has come to be called the "Eve Arden Role."

At A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence pays tribute to a couple of fallen stars: Tom Lehrer, the satiric songwriter who died last month (you've already read a couple of tributes to him), and Danielle Spencer, former child star on What's Happening!! who later became a DVM.

Martin Grams is back with more reviews of classic books from Bear Manor Media, including biographies of Grant (The Incredible Shrinking Man, Hawaiian Eye) Williams, Virginia Gregg, Steve Ihnat, and Joi Lansing.

A View from the Junkyard gives us our weekly A-Team fix, as Roger reviews the episode "The Only Church in Town," in which Our Heroes are hired by one of their own, Face, in a bittersweet kind of story. TV  

Ayn Rand on The Tonight Show, 1967

Late night talk shows have been quite the topic of conversation lately, and so it seems like a good time to at how an actual, real-life talk show handled an actual, real-life guest.

Ayn Rand, political philosopher and author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, among other novels, has never really been out of the public eye, though it's likely that few of the people who read her and debate her ideas today ever had the chance to see her live. So let's take this opportunity to look at footage of Rand appearing with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on August 11, 1967. (Johnny's other guests included Florence Henderson and the Temptations—an eclectic show to say the least.)

This was the first of three 1967 appearances by Rand with Carson, and not only does this give us a chance to hear Rand describe the philosophy of Objectivism in her own voice, it points out the vapidity of today's late night talk shows. In fact, Carson's own version of The Tonight Show was a shadow of its former self by the time it came to an end, but it towers as an ivory tower of intellectualism compared to the Three Stooges of late night we currently suffer with. I don't think she suffered fools gladly, and Lord knows she would be confronted with them today*; I rather suspect she would have handed Colbert his head on a platter, while Kimmel and Myers would have been the appetizer and dessert, respectively.

*They remind me of one of my favorite Tom Wolfe quotes, from The Right Stuff: "It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity."

I've frequently written in the past about the decline of what Terry Teachout used to refer to as "middlebrow" culture on television. Usually I'm talking about the lack of classical music, drama or documentary shows, but this reminds us that the dearth of smart programming extends to the talk show as well. Sure, you might have been able to find something like this from Charlie Rose (as a matter of fact, offhand he's the only one I can think of who would have done something like this), but perish the thought that a stimulating political discussion (that wasn't also a piece of partisan advocacy) would appear on one of the broadcast networks today. 
As for daytime talk shows—well, we won't even go there; although it would have been interesting to see what Ayn Rand would have done to Oprah. TV  

This week in TV Guide: August 30, 1969

His name, he reminds you at the start of every show, is Johnny Cash. He's been around since 1955, and he's recognized as one of the biggest names in American country music, the successor to JImmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. But, as Neil Hickey writes in this week's cover story, it's only been in the last year that he's become a major figure in non-country America; first, with his epic live album from Folsom Prison in California, and now with his ABC summer series, The Johnny Cash Show. He is, in fact, well on the way to becoming not just a music superstar, but an American legend. 

Hickey calls him "television's roughest diamond," and it's no surprise, considering that he sings about lost loves and jail time, poverty and homecoming and Bible stories offering redemption. A child of the depression, he began writing and recording songs after a sting in the Air Force; in 1955, Sun Records finally took a chance on him with "Hey, Porter" and "Cry! Cry! Cry!" He'd become a major star by the next year ("with deceptive ease"), performing with the Grand Ole Opry and doing one-night-stands throughout the South; his hit "I Walk the Line" was high on the charts. 

His success hid a darker side, though. His first marriage was crumbling, and combined with the stress and strain of his constant touring, he soon was on "a psysiological roller-coaster ride," taking as many as 100 pep pills a day to get him through his work, followed by fistfulls of tranquilizers to calm him down. Even as recently as two years ago, he was known as the "biggest no-show" in the business, either missing concerts completely or showing up missing his voice. He was arrested for drug possession in 1965 (and given a suspended sentence), he'd lost 100 pounds, and his family had decided to commit him at one point to save him from himself. 

That he has come back from all this, unlike Rodgers and Williams, both of whom succumbed to their darker demons, is a testament to the love of family and friends, and particularly his second wife, June Carter, herself from a legendary country music family. He got off the pills and settled down to a life of hard work, crowned by a successful 1967 concert to a sold-out audience at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Says actor Dale Robertson, "He's to country music what John Wayne is to Westerns." Whereas he once picked cotton and hauled water for work ganges, he's now a millionaire from his recordings and concerts, Says Cash, "I’m happy to be alive—lucky to be alive. I know damn well I'm a good man."

The Johnny Cash Show runs from 1969 to 1971, hosting some of the biggest names in the country music world, not to mention stars such as Louis Armstrong, Jose Feliciano, Liza Minnelli, and Joni Mitchell; surely, on a per-show basis it has to be considered one of the most star-studded variety series ever seen on television, hosted by one of the biggest stars to ever host a series while still in his prime. It fell victim to the double-barrelled challenge of the Prime-Time Access rule, eliminating a half-hour per night of network programming, and the Rural Purge. For Johnny Cash, though, the star continued to shine, adding some acclaimed acting roles to his portfolio, working with U2, and covering songs by Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode. His troubles did not end; he went through additional stints of drug addiction and rehab. He remained, in many ways, a rough diamond, as I suspect he'd have been the first to admit, and I don't think he'd have been embarrased to admit it.

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This week, the Doan Report updates us on what is now a three-way battle for late-night supremacy, what with Merv Griffin's August 18 debut on CBS. Insiders agree that it's "much too early to tell" how this race is going to end (it is, after all, a marathon, not a sprint), but the early returns auger well for Johnny holding on to his crown. CBS boasted that the Griffin show won opening night, with a 31 percent share compared to Carson's 25 and Bishop's 8; NBC, however, was equally quick to throw cold water on that boast, pointing out that "while Griffin opened with a big lead, by the end fo the 90-minute heat Carson had the larger audience." Said one NBC vice president, "I guess a lot of people sampled Griffin, then when back to their old favorite." 

One factor that might have contributed to the early ratings: the quality of guest lineups. Griffin was plagued by no-shows, including New York Major John Lindsay and New York Jets star quarterback Joe Namath; meanwhile, Carson, broadcasting that week from Hollywood, countered with "TV's biggest draw," Bob Hope. (Interestingly enough, Bishop's lineup that night included the Smothers Brothers, to no ratings avail; fame is fleeting, isn't it?)

Which leads us to this week's feature. Back in the day, I used to enjoy going through TV Guide, looking at the lineups for the talk shows and seeing who had the best guests, even though I couldn't stay up and watch them. What with this being Merv's third week on the job, it and having seen the importance of booking big-name guests when it comes to ratings, it seemed like it might be kind of interesting to resume the practice, at least for one week. Let's see who's got the strongest lineup, and whether Johnny really has become the King of Late Night, or if he's just a comfortable habit.

Now, the guest list in TV Guide has always been full of caveats, with clauses like "tentatively scheduled guests," and the like. And we know how Merv was victimized by no-shows on his opening night. So, in the interests of providing you, the loyal reader, with the most accurate information possible, I've augmented the guest list found in this week's issue with info from sources ranging from the IMDb to the TV listings of various newspapers. In addition, since a lot of you may not recognize the names here, I've linked to their bios on Wikipedia and other places. (Rather than running the risk of insulting your intelligence, I've just gone ahead and linked all of them, even though you probably know who Tony Randall and William Holden are.) So have a go at it, and see what you think.

		JOHNNY	MERV	JOEY
	MON.	• Tony Randall • William Holden • Pat Morita • Marilyn Maye • Turley Richards	• Hermione Gingold • Bobby Sherman • George Carlin • Barbara Tai-Sing • The Free Design • Gwen Davis	• Polly Bergen (guest host) • Laurindo Almeida • Arlene Golonka • Robert Goulet • Nick Ullett
	TUES.	• Jaye P. Morgan • John Byner • Orson Bean • Adela Rogers St. Johns	• David Susskind • Hugh O'Brian • Polly Bergen • Lily Tomlin • Dr. Roger O. Egeberg • Eloise Haws • Slappy White and Steve Rossi • Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Armstrong	• Art Linkletter • Dino, Desi & Billy • Jeannie C. Riley
	WED.	• Phyllis Newman • Corbett Monica • Mel Tormé • The People Tree	• Tommy Smothers • Theodore H. White • Phil Ford and Mimi Hines • Katie Drew-Wllkinson • Virginia Graham • Rip Taylor • The Checkmates	• Merle Haggard and the Strangers • Bobbi Martin
	THURS.	• Dana Valery • The Youngbloods • Jimmie Rodgers	• Soupy Sales • Phil Leeds • Dr. James Brussel • Eddy Arnold • Terry O'Mara • Children's fashion show featuring Merv's son	• Charo • Hedgemon Lewis • Ryan O'Neal • Smokey Robinson • Leigh Taylor-Young
	FRI.	• David Frye • Linda Bennett • Gary Lewis & the Playboys	• Zsa Zsa Gabor • Madeline Kahn • Robert Klein • Hubert Humphrey • Harry Hershfield • Oliver	• Abbe Lane • Norm Crosby • Pierre Salinger • Chris and Peter Allen

In the meantime, Dick Cavett has yet to become part of the late-night troika; having started out with a five-day-a-week daytime show on ABC, he's now been moved to prime time for the summer, where he airs each Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 10:00 p.m. (He'll be in the Joey Bishop timeslot before the end of the year, though.) Nonetheless, he might have the best guest lineup of the week: Monday, it's actor Sal Mineo, B.B. King, and journalist I.F. Stone; Tuesday features William Holden, Eartha Kitt, and Nero Wolfe author Rex Stout; and Friday he spends the entire hour with Groucho Marx. Yes, I'd call that lineup a winner.

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But as we all know, television does not live by late-night alone. Amid the reruns that populate the waning weeks of summer, Saturday's Get Smart repeat bears watching (8:00 p.m. PT, NBC). It's a spoof of Rear Window, with Max taking on the Jimmy Stewart role (and who had that phrase on their TV Guide bingo card?), watching through binoculars as 99 takes on KAOS. I suspect she'll be able to handle herself, don't you? If you're looking for the real Jimmy Stewart though, you'll find him in brilliant form in Anatomy of a Murder (midnight, KPIX in San Francisco), with George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, Eve Arden, and Arthur O'Connell all in equally top form. It's an adult movie in the classic sense of the word, in that it deals with mature themes in a serious manner, but it was also controversial in its time for the sexual frankness of the dialog; it's said to be the first movie in which the words ""contraceptive," "climax," and "spermatogenesis" were used. I wonder if they made it on TV in 1969?

Culture, both highbrow and middlebrow, is on display Sunday; with no Hollywood Palace to go up against, Ed Sullivan has the field to himself (8:00 p.m., CBS), and he comes through in style, with Metropolitan Opera soprano Anna Moffo, singers Sandler and Young, Sam and Dave, and Roslyn Kind; the Ballet America; comics Jackie Mason and Pat Cooper; and clown Charlie Cairoli. At the same time, NET's Sounds of Summer presents the farewell concert of legendary conductor Erich Leinsdorf, retiring from the Boston Symphony. A star-studded lineup, including Beverly Sills and Justino Diaz, is on hand for the finale from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. At the intermission, Leinsdorf is interviewed by host Steve Allen.

Vivian Vance returns to The Lucy Show on Monday (8:30 p.m., CBS), in a flashback-filled show that has the two recalling past adventures while Lucy recovers from a broken leg. Meanwhile, Jimmie Rodgers finishes up his stint as summer replacement for Carol Burnett with a show featuring pianist Roger Williams and comic Scoey Mitchell, along with two of Carol's regulars, Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner. 

You remember a few paragraphs ago, when we learned that Ryan O'Neal and his wife, Leigh Taylor-Young, were guests on The Joey Bishop Show? There's probably a good reason for that; on Tuesday, the couple stars in an unsold pilot, Under the Yum Yum Tree (Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., ABC), based on the 1963 movie of the same name, which starred Jack Lemmon and Carol Lynley. It's no criticism of O'Neal to note that he's no Jack Lemmon.

Helen Hayes makes a rare television appearance on Wednesday's episode of Tarzan (7:30 p.m., CBS), along with her son, James MacArthur, whom we all know and love as Danno on Hawaii Five-O. For those of you who thought Tarzan was an NBC series, you're right; its original run was from 1966-68, and CBS aired reruns during the 1969 summer. And Darren McGavin's unjustly-forgotten private detective series The Outsider comes to an end with an episode involvung a millionaire "who has never been photographed." (10:00 p.m., NBC) The reclusive Howard Hughes, anyone? 

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was cancelled after a single season on NBC, but it's been picked up by ABC for the coming season, and to celebrate, the show's stars, Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare, host an hour-long special previewing the network's Super Saturday morning cartoon lineup. (Thursday, 7:30 p.m.) Not everyone will agree with me on this—it depends a lot on your childhood memories—but the new Saturday schedule is far from the glory days of cartoons, with a scheule that includes "Smokey the Bear, a cartoon with a conservation message; The Cattanooga Cats, an hour hosted by five soft-rock felines; Hot Wheels, the adventures of a car club; The Hardy Boys, based on the mystery-book series; and Sky Hawks, the saga of a flying family." Jonathan Frid is along for the ride, along with the regulars from Ghost.

The John Davidson Show ends its summer run on Friday, and his final show features a fine cast, including the Moody Blues, Rich Little (impersonating W.C. Fields), the Committee, and Mireille Mathieu. (8:00 p.m., ABC) To be perfectly frank, the weakest link in the show is the host himself. Opposite this is a Bell Telephone Hour special on the life and art of the legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein (8:30 p.m. NBC). And Dick Powell gives the definitive interpretation of Raymond Chandler's fabled private detective Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (9:00 p.m., KTXL in Sacramento). A good way to close out the week.

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Judith Crist, TV Guide's movie critic, has a thing or two to say about TV-movies. Movies on television, as we know, have been big business for some time, and ever since the studios loosened their grip and began to allow newer films to grace the small screen, the "sad truth" has been that "the worst of the Hollywood product would pull in more viewers than the best of creative television could." Lesson learned, network executives determined that "anything that Hollywood could do badly for itself, it could do worse for television, and in color yet."

It's long been accepted that Hollywood's backlog of movies has been drying up, and that there aren't enough movies being made to fill the insatiable demand from television. It's now been three years, and 31 telemovies, since the first "world premiere" movie made its appearance. And, says Crist, the "cold fact" is that "for the most part, and emphasize the 'most' part, the public’s been offered a series of pilot and pseudo-pilot films, the vast majority of which wouldn’t have earned a B rating on any theatrical movie meter bill." They stand out from their theatrical bretheren in that they generally feature cheap production values, stars "who have not quite retained their place at the top or not quite found it," and plots that are clearly shaped around the needs for commercials at set times. But people watch them—their ratings have been very close to those of theatrical premieres—and so we can count on more of them.

A major selling point to TV-movies, one that makes the positive ratings even more attractive, is that they're relatively cheap to make. The costs run anywhere between $800,000 and $1.3 million, for which the network gets to show the movie twice during the season, sell it off in a syndicated package with other movies, and then sell it again for foreign theatrical release. At that rate, she says, the expenditures have not only been recouped, but doubled. And that doesn't even begin to include the benefits if the movie is made into a successful series. It is, therefore, profitable junk 

Not all of it is junk; stars of the calibur of Henry Fonda and Anne Baxter can give telemovies a veneer of quality. Still, Crist can point to "perhaps three our four" of the past season's movies had a claim to special interest: Something for a Lonely Man, a Western starring Dan Blocker, and two courtroom dramas that would become the basis for "The Lawyers" segment of The Bold Ones, "The Sound of Anger" and "The Whole World is Watching." Interestingly enough, Crist is unimpressed by Prescription: Murder, the first movie to feature Peter Falk's Lieutenant Columbo, calling it "one of those how-to-kill-your-wife" bores." (She notes that NBC speculates that "The Falk character could return annually"; in truth, it was the second Columbo movie, Ransom for a Dead Man, that sold the concept as part of the Mystery Movie wheel. 

One observation is that many TV-movies have the feel of a regular series episode that's been padded out to fill a larger timeslot; the answer to that lies in shorter movies (ABC's Movie of the Week famously runs for 75 minutes plus commercials) or movies with multiple, distinct stories (such as NBC's Night Gallery pilot). In the long run, Crist feels, TV-movies will improve with experience, but much depends on the industry's ability to attract good writers, which itself will depend on whether television goes the route of "factory productions" (think of the Warner Bros. assembly line method) or the "workshop" way of thinking, in which writers are invited to write about whatever interests them. 

Today, despite Crist's criticisms, many people have fond memories from this era of TV-movies, particularly the ABC Movie of the Week, which wasn't afraid to tackle controversial issues as well as making frequent foray into horror movies. I don't think it's the case that these movies have improve in retrospect, either; many of them were highly-rated and critically reviewed at the time. It's likely that Crist's standards were high, as they were for theatrical movies, and that she was inherently inclined to look down at these movies. What she's right about, though, is that eventually the quality of the TV-movie would improve in time; by the time of prestige television, many of them surpass theatrical movies in quality.

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MST3K alert: 12 to the Moon (1960) Moon beings fear that earthmen are bringing greed and destruction to their world. Ken Clark, Michi Kobi. (Wednesday, 6:30 p.m., KTXL) This is one of those MST3K occasions where the short is actually more disturbing than the feature. In the musical short "Design for Living," "a woman dreams of a mysterious masked man who takes her to see the future." It's actuallySa an ad for the 1956 General Motors Motorama, but to borrrow a phrase from Tom Servo, "This has all the markings of a Clay Shaw party!" TV  

If I ran the network, part 4

Recently I kicked off a new feature, "If I Ran the Network," a series of TV concepts that would never have made it to the small screen without network executives screwing them up. If you have similar ideas, please share them in the comments section; if I get enough, I'll use them to put together a complete prime-time lineup for the fictional HBC Network!

As ABC and CBS eventually discovered, a network has to have a late-night talk show in its lineup in order to achieve some level of credibility; the Fox network even kicked off its programming with one, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, a full six months before its primetime lineup debuted. The sad fact is that many of these shows were failures, in terms of ratings if not quality, and the even sadder fact is that we would be infinitely better off if we had old movies running in place of the "talk" shows that exist in late-night today. 

I don't say this because of any particular political content (note that, Guardian), but because today's shows have completely lost the art of conversation; there isn’t much talking, guests don’t stick around to engage in banter, and an hour isn’t much time to get a good conversation in anyway. Let’s face it; today’s shows are mostly for actors and singers to talk about their latest movies or albums, and for comedians to tell a few jokes. Everything’s been pre-screened, and the host isn’t much more than a glorified press agent setting the guests up for whatever it is they want to plug. Such has always been the case, to a point, but Carson and Paar and Cavett knew how to interview someone, rather than simply feed them lines. Perhaps more important, they knew how to listen.

So in developing the station's flagship late-night show, I had several criteria to keep in mind. First, the running time needed to be restored to the traditional 90 minutes; second, guests should be encouraged to remain for the entire show, taking part in the conversation; third, the show had to have a host that could carry the load—glib, knowledgeable, a good listener as well as talker, with the ability to not only interview guests but keep the conversation going, and able to handle serious interviews as well as light ones. A sardonic sense of humor was definitely a plus. That's not asking too much, is it?

Thus was the genesis of The Bobby Rivers Show. I enjoyed him on his VH-1 program Watch Bobby Rivers, and thought he'd be perfect for the kind of program I had in mind. Like Cavett, he had the ability to ask incisive questions; like Carson, he knew how to play off of his guests; like Paar, he knew the show would only be as good as the guests made it. He could puncture pomposity without being cruel, and didn't take himself too seriously. And he knew everyone. I thought that with a format similar to that used by, say, Graham Norton—no desk, guests sitting around in a way conducive to conversation—and a Tonight Show-style house band led by a Quincy Jones protégé, we'd have a hit on our hands. I'd kind of filed the idea away, but was reminded of it when he died last year, and I still think it would have been a terrific show.

After that, viewers need something to wind down, and to provide a contrast to Bobby Rivers, I propose a one-hour show called Q&A. Similar to the original format of Tom Snyder's Tomorrow, this would have been a one-on-one interview, appropriate to a 1:00 a.m. hour: no studio audience, no musical guests, and no set—just a black backdrop, illuminating only the host and the guest. And here's the twist: except for the introduction at the beginning of the show and the transitions going into and coming out of the commercial break, the camera would remain focused only on the guest. No reaction shots of the host, no mugging for the viewers. You might see that guest from two or three different angles; it wouldn't be a static shot, as if you were watching a security camera. But this would be all about the guest.

Obviously you'd need a special kind of host for a program like this, and I never did come up with someone I thought would really work, which is why Q&A probably would never have seen the light of day. (Airing at one in the morning, it wouldn't have seen the light anyway, but you know what I mean.) The obvious contemporary choice would have been someone like Charlie Rose, or Brian Lamb from C-SPAN's Booknotes. James Lipton might have been a good choice, but I don't think he could have been satisfied with not being seen on camera, and I've got other plans for him anyway. 

The problems with a late-night lineup like this should be obvious to you. Too boring, the network suits would have said. Nobody wants to think just before they go to sleep—they want personalities. In other words, these shows would have been too smart for viewers. And maybe they're right, but I don't think so. Late-night programs nowadays have a very narrow, niche audience; they're not mainstream, and they don't try to be. It's unfortunate, and that's why I think there would be an audience for them. We'd have to get someone other than Bobby Rivers, unfortunately; maybe we can check and see what Graham Norton is doing. TV