decision last fall: There was absolutely nothing that could make the adult American television watcher feel silly. The pop art fad. one of whose twitches is an enthusiasm for old comic books, had made Batman almost flop-proof. As long as the pop fad lasted there could be no such thing as bad pop art: What in the world could it be? Of course, when the fad fizzled there would be no such thing as good pop art. The trick was to guess how much time was left before the fizzling set in. Dozier and ABC guessed there was time enough; the pop fad would stay alive, or if it didn't, the news of its death would take a long time to reach the sleepless dreamers who watch TV.

There is a captivating theory, advanced by citizens who become irritable and depressed when they count other people's money, that Batman is a success because it is television doing what television does best: doing things badly. Batman, in other words, is so bad, it's good. Howie Horwitz, the show's producer, is not sympathetic to this view. "If all we had to do was be bad, we wouldn't be working so hard," he says, with much exasperation.

Horwitz is entitled to be exasperated. To say that Batman is bad (or good, for that matter) is to be unrealistic. As cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who likes comics, wrote in his book The Great Comic Book Heroes, "Comic books, first of all, are junk. To accuse them of being what they are is to make no accusation at all; there is no such thing as uncorrupt junk or moral junk or educational junk TV melodrama is also junk, and Feiffer's reasoning can be extended: there is no such thing as good junk, only successful or un successful junk. Batman, faithfully translated from one junk medium into another junk medium, is junk squared. But it is thoroughly successful and- this troubles critics for whom good and bad are art's only poles-it can be surprisingly likable.

Members of the mind-bending profession- ad men, art hustlers, TV reviewers-call Batman "camp," however, not junk. "Camp," "campy" and "camping" are this season's vogue words. The notion behind camp is mean-spirited: a sneering fake enthusiasm for whatever is pretentious and not quite successful, a jeering private laugh at anyone square enough to take the pretension seriously. Oddly enough, camp owes its popularity to an article in the indomitably dense quarterly, Partisan Review. It was written by a young critic named Susan Sontag, who owes her popularity to her ability to make totally obscure references in such a way that the reader feels intellectually unclean for not understanding them. In her "Notes on Camp" she says the movie King Kong is camp. Nothing obscure here, except that she refers to the film as "Schoedsack's" King Kong. (EMBARRASSMENT!! DISMAY!!) The abashed reader discovers upon inquiry to the Library of Congress. that Ernest Schoedsack was the director of King Kong. Only Schoedsack's mother knew it then and only Miss Sontag knows it now. This is Girl Scout camp. The author has more merit badges than anybody.

Camp, in short, is contempt set in code. That is why Batman is not camp. Producer Dozier says that "up to twelve years old, they take Batman seriously. From thirteen on, we've got them chuckling into their beer." Another beer, in that case, for California's 13-year-olds; but what kind of code is it that fools only children too young to open a pop-top? "Junk" is the word that everyone has been searching for.

"Everyone has a certain amount of guilt about Balman," said Lorenzo Semple Jr., who is chief writer and editorial adviser for the show (BAT- BARD is the title on his desk). "It was all so fantastically easy..."

Semple's remark was not an apology for Batman's light-mindedness. "I've always hated the so-called 'serious' dramatic shows," he said. "They're nothing but semi-truths and evasions. We started out to do a pop-art thing and we're doing it." The comment was, I think, a coin thrown into the fountain for good luck by a man who knows the odds against any new show, and who knows also the dreary fact that since the quality of the writing is more or less the same for all TV series, quality has very little to do with success. (The reason the writing is of the same quality is that most of it is done by the same writers. A writer may turn out a script for Batman one month and for The Fugitive the next. Minor actors and directors move from show to show, the directors often moving so quickly they do not have time to fit together even roughly the film segments they have shot. The producer and stars stay with a series; the rest are Hessians who fight competently but not fanatically for anyone willing to pay their salaries.)

It was Semple, more than anyone else, who set the tone of the show. He is a veteran magazine short-story writer who discovered several years ago that he could live comfortably in Spain free lancing TV scripts. Semple wrote five Batman episodes, and drew up a list of commandments for other writers. Killing, for instance, is forbidden. "This makes our plotting more difficult; there isn't much for the villains to do except steal things," said Semple. But the taboo is necessary; much of the show depends on the "guest villains"-The Riddler, The Joker (played by Cesar Romero), The Cat Woman (Julie Newmar) and The Penguin (Burgess Meredith)-who return to plague Gotham City every few weeks. "It would be immoral for them to commit murder and then come back on the air." Semple, a mild, medium-sized, pink-faced man in his late 30's, looked serious as he said this.

The profession of producing nonsense, it turns out, is very serious." You just asked me about espionage," Semple was saying. It wouldn't make any -

Click Here to Go To Page 4