Viewpoints

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Television's second season is that midwinter's madness time when network leaders turn upon their pack of shows. They mercilessly thin out the old, the weak and the lame, while encouraging the newborn to join their endless trek across the TV tundra. This year the second season has produced three newcomers that seem certain to survive into the 1974-75 season. They are:

Good Times. CBS. Friday, 8:30-9 p.m. E.D.T. Already renewed for next season, this is yet another "relevant" sitcom spun off the earlier creations of Tandem Productions (All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude). Indeed, Florida (Esther Rolle) used to be Maude's maid. Now relocated in a Chicago housing project, she is seen as the matriarch of a black family that talks Burbank jive and is short of money. But in composition, attitudes and ambitions, the household is indistinguishable from the white families that heretofore have had exclusive domain in this TV neighborhood. There is one adolescent of each gender whose prime function is to be cute and awkward about sexual awakening; a precocious kid brother who always understands more than people think he does about what's "going down"; a good-natured father who is either baffled or angry about his brood, but not much good at problem solving. Mom, of course, is warm and wise.

As with the other Tandem shows, the gags on Good Times are often slickly pleasingly crafted. But the occasional references to sociologically sober matters seem to spring less from conscience than from a need to create product identity. That is no less a formula than anyone else's formula--and no less tiresome.

Happy Days. ABC. Tuesday, 8-8:30 p.m. E.D.T. This is the American Graffiti rip-off in which the producers made off with the movie's star (Ron Howard) and its ambience (smalltown America in the 1950s), but with none of the sensitivity and sensibility that made the film memorable.

Graffiti's adolescents were caught at a moment of subtle tension, when their comfortable pleasure with the familiar was challenged by their yearnings for a larger, more stimulating world--a world that scared them, yet beckoned them on into adulthood. Happy Days' teen-agers hang around the same drive-ins, drive the same hot-rods, listen to the same rock music, but otherwise bear no resemblance to Graffiti's kids. Instead they are the inheritors of the Henry Aldrich tradition, in which the awkwardness, sexual inexperience and general un-worldliness of youth are good only for an indulgent, nostalgic laugh. They are never touched by honest rue, let alone intimations of tragedy. The program is full of period references--Mickey Spillane, stuffing telephone booths, a wondrous new gadget known as the seat belt--but there is never a reference to the human heart.

The Six Million Dollar Man. ABC. Friday, 8:30-9:30 p.m. E.D.T. This may be the top-rated prime-time show among the nation's six-to-ten-year-olds-and it is not doing badly with their parents either. It is easy to understand the lads' interest-Colonel Steve Austin (Lee Majors), an astronaut badly battered in a crash and given a number of better-than-life replacement parts by NASA'S doctors, is an update on that old favorite of the latency period, Superman. Like Krypton's favorite son, he can run fast, leap far and has a reasonable approximation of X-ray vision. Better still, when he gets wounded (at least once a week) it is always an occasion to haul out the old screwdriver and rewire him. These scenes are bound to appeal to every child who ever got his own computer-construction kit for Christmas.

What adults see in Steve is hard to imagine, but it is probably that touch of soul the scientists forgot to remove when they were tinkering with him. On loan to a supersecret U.S. intelligence agency, Austin is always brooding that his control (Richard Anderson) has forgotten that Austin is something more than a machine, that he has feelings too. Generally he expresses himself on this point by busting down a wall, which cannot be all that reassuring to Anderson, but is entirely typical of the show's subtle approach. It is so bad it is funny, and that is doubtless the source of its strong appeal. . Richard Schickel

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