From the archives: The new season (1980) of old ideas: Ideas recycled

Nothing travels on TV faster than an old idea. The fall program schedules announced by all three networks have the look of recycled obsolescence, a prime time of gleaming, brand-spanking-new, freshly painted, just-off-the-assembly line Edsels.

What better example of the stale creative atmosphere in TV than the current urgency over “nonfiction” programs, the industry’s great new wave of “reality” entertainment?

With ABC somersaulting over “That’s Incredible!” and NBC hugging “Real People” as if it were the last lifeboat on the Titanic, there was never a doubt that “nonfiction” programs would loom ever larger in 1980-81.

You have to laugh. “Saturday Night Live” was right on hilarious target last weekend with a wicked spoof called “Real Incredible People.” The way things are going, the spoof probably will be picked up as a series.

Listen, “nonfiction” is “nonfiction.”

Here we go. At 11:30 p.m. Fridays, opposite “Fridays,” which is ABC’s intended replica of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” CBS has shoved “No Holds Barred,” an hour of-stop giggling, now-”unconventional and unique” people. That lets out politicians and TV executives.

“No Holds Barred” is from “That’s Incredible” creator Alan Landsburg Productions, which also is responsible for “Those Amazing Animals” for ABC, with the amazing and incredible Priscilla Presley, Jim Stafford and Burgess Meredith (in what has lo be the low point of his career) giving us long-awaited news of such species as the frog that cries and the 50-year old termite.

And yes, you’re right, Priscilla will get to fondle a tarantula, just as Cathy Lee Crosby did on “That’s Incredible!”

On NBC, the mother of “nonfiction,” meanwhile, “Real People” creator George Schlatter’s two pilots for “Speak Up America” bombed in the ratings sufficiently for NBC to promptly deploy the weird little show in the fall schedule amid various holdover clunkers.

“Speak Up America” is the show where ex-evangelist Marjoe Gartner exhorts all these “Network” Howard Beale and Al Julius munchkins to get screaming mad over such things as the quality of life and the price of grits.

“Outrageous, provocative, topical, truly fresh,” proclaims NBC. Oh sure.

Still more “nonfiction” arrives with NBC’s “Thursday Games,” a celebration, says the network, of “the games the average sports fan likes lo play for his own amusement.”

On the recently aired pilot ( titled “Sunday Games” for obvious reasons), that included two stunt drivers crashing and demolishing their cars in midair. I’m waiting for Russian roulette.

So much for such new/old ideas as “nonfiction” TV and on to the real meat, the old/old ideas.

At a meeting of CBS station executives, network broadcast group president Gene F. Jankowski pledged CBS to “avoid underestimating the audience, (and) to provide the viewer the best that money and the considerable talents of our own staff and the Hollywood community can offer.”

You judge.

Among five CBS prime-time series now designated for a fall start, decadence prevails. “The Secrets of Midland Heights” is an hour drama from “Dallas” and “Knots Landing” creator David Jacobs, but which really has closer ties to “Peyton Place.”

The drippy-looking comedy, “Ladies Man,” stars Laurence Pressman as a single parent whose life ls patrolled by a matriarchy, whose daughter is naturally precocious and whose next-door neighbor is naturally overly helpful. Oh, deliver us.

And then there is the new CBS cop corps. “Magnum, P.l” is about a womanizing private eye in conflict with the conservative caretaker of the estate where he lives. Movie-inspired “Freebie and the Bean” is about a womanizing policeman in conflict with his conservative partner. Their approach to police work is, of course, unorthodox.

Finally, there is “Enos.” Wait till Daryl Gates sees “Enos.”

On the premise that two heaps are better than one, CBS has spun off the Deputy Enos character from “The Dukes of Hazzard” and come up with a series of uncommon mental atrophy. Sonny Shroyer is a neo Gomer Pyle whose car-smashing and naturally unorthodox approach to police work as a Los Angeles cop drives his boss up a wall.

“Can you believe this?” a CBS station manager asked me. Unfortunately, I could.

It was only two months ago that ABC-TV president Fred Pierce called for more innovation in TV and “greater range of choice.” Great sense of humor, that Fred.

Except for the “nonfiction,” non-anything “Those Amazing Animals,” ABC has opted for new comedies, and, of course, second-hand concepts.

“But I’m a Big Girl Now” embraces every cliche known to sitcomdom while presenting Danny Thomas and Diana Canova in yet another variation of the daughter battling with protective father.

Some of those who brought us “Three’s Company” are up to more mischief with “Too Close for Comfort.” Yes sir, it’s Ted Knight as a protective (“to hilarious fault”) father of two spectacular daughters in a show that repeats all the dodo-blond witlessness of “Three’s Company,” with a touch of “Hello, Larry” thrown in for the sake of sadism.

“It’s a Living” presents the jiggle joys of five scantily clad and “curvaceous waitresses who serve up a banquet of zesty comedy.” It’s courtesy of the team responsible for “Soap” and “Benson.”

“Bosom Buddies” is about two guys masquerading as females in a women’s hotel. The cast is good, men in dresses are always a cheap, easy laugh and the pilot is very funny in spots. but never as funny as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were in “Some Like It Hot,” the inspiration for “Bosom Buddies.”

“Breaking Away,” of course, is ABC’s series version of the charming movie, which won an Oscar for writer Steve Tesich. If the pilot, also by Tesich, is representative, however, the series has broken too far away, substituting broader comedy and diminished appeal.

Vincent Gardenia replaces Paul Dooley as the father, Shaun Cassidy misplays the young biking hero as a mental defective and wonderful, subtle Barbara Barrie returns as the mother, but with little to do but smile stoically and think good thoughts. It’s a lot of martyrdom to bear, but still the promise is there.

NBC has three fall shows in the blocks in addition to “Thursday Games” and “Speak Up America.”

More than a few of the seeds of “Dallas” are sown in “Flamingo Road,” a drama whose two-hour pilot demonstrated a certain steamy potential as camp. Its social and sexual clashes take a low road inspired by an old Joan Crawford movie, and the cast is good, with Howard Duff deliciously devious and Morgan Fairchild showing astonishing promise as the potential trash goddess or the ‘80s.

“Harper Valley PTA,” of course, is based on the Nielsen-anointed movie, which was inspired by the hit record. Miniskirted heroine Stella Johnson is “wily and wacky,” says the NBC publicity release. What it doesn’t say is that series star Barbara Eden makes up in acting ineptitude what she lacks in range.

It’s always risky judging a series from its pilot, which may not necessarily be representative. But I’ll chance it anyway. NBC’s new “Hill Street Blues” is the most promising TV drama I’ve seen in years. The performances and direction, the tone, the look, the impeccable production values, the honesty, the approach to controversial social issues put the pilot into a rarely achieved stratosphere for TV shows.

This is a police series from MTM Enterprises, set in a precinct house in a poor urban neighborhood. There’s a skillful, subtle use of satire here within a stern drama that matches the best of “Police Story” in exploring the man beneath the badge. Yet it goes further, confronting hot issues as police racism in black neighborhoods. For the most part, the script is excellent and so is the cast.

Even if the series doesn’t match the pilot, this still looks like dynamite.

Although NBC takes more chances these days than CBS and ABC, networks generally don’t walk tightropes without a dozen safety nets.

So what in the world is “Hill Street Blues” doing on a network schedule? It must have slipped by when everyone was looking at “Real People.”