Word: faye
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...there is a trend no bigger than a program director's soul to be discerned here it is two half-hour comedies that deal with fortyish women trying to start new lives. Fay (NBC, Thursday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.) is played by Lee Grant, and she is a divorcee. Phyllis (CBS, Monday, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.) is a newly widowed Cloris Leachman. Both, coincidentally, are trying to work things out in overused San Francisco...
...these conditions. Silly, honest, human errors occur when someone is trying to make a new life, and it should be possible to make gentle rueful human comedy out of the attempt to muddle through. But Phyllis is paced and played as if it were a zany farce. Fay is hobbled by an ex-husband whose profession is surely borscht-belt comedy. It is impossible to understand why she ever married this yakster. He is a creature of the anything-for-a-laugh desperation that turns both shows into exercises in false hysterics. Still, they are efforts to find the humor...
...package-24 original shows with 28 mandatory reruns-here and in 101 foreign countries. Ninety-five percent of the U.S. stations planning to air Space are affiliates of the networks. Most of them are scheduling it in prime time, pre-empting such new shows as The Invisible Man, Fay and Phyllis and established hits like Rhoda, Cher and Sanford and Son. Space's success could not only bite deeply into the audience ratings for network shows, but perhaps even sink a couple in the first few critical weeks...
...shows are having an even tougher passage. Phyllis, starring Cloris Leachman, and Fay, with Lee Grant, came close to never getting on the air at all. Phyllis Executive Producer Ed Weinberger almost choked when CBS meddled with the pilot, in which the widowed Phyllis suspects her 17-year-old daughter of having an affair. Says Phyllis, as she ends an explanatory phone conversation with her daughter: "Nothing happened-if she is telling the truth." CBS cut the tag line...
...objected to a romantic situation merely implied in Fay's pilot. Says Grant, who plays a divorcee with three kids, "I can't have affairs, only serious relationships." But even they are risky. In another episode, Fay goes out with a man who has no sexual interest in her. The network had a fit. Says one frustrated scriptwriter: "They want to return to shows like Leave It to Beaver-except that that title would never get past the censors...