The Bodies in Question

By RICHARD CORLISS

The new season puts a lecherous sneer back into sex

Blame it on OPEC. Blame it on the mood of the country. Blame it on Suzanne Somers. Blame it on anything you want; there's plenty to go around. As the new TV comedy series finally slink into view after the actors' strike, an ominous trend becomes evident. The witty humanism of the best '70s shows--Mary Tyler Moore, MASH, Taxi--has given way to jokes built around bustlines and pratfalls. Out goes the humor of social complicity, of reasonably mature characters; in stomps the japery of sexual humiliation, in which grimly aggressive caricatures swat each other with gag lines. Mary Richards' chic office wear is declasse; this year's line consists of tank tops and tight jeans. Goodbye, Golden Age of TV comedy; hello, Little Annie Fanny. Watch 'em and weep: the age of the smutcom is upon us.

Viewers tuning in over the next month may think that they have entered a time warp, for the programs seem like instant artifacts of the '50s, when automobiles were first recognized as sex objects and a movie star like Jayne Mansfield seemed manufactured on the voyeur's assembly line. There is a difference though: most of the new fare pretends to an awareness of feminism. It's a Living (ABC, Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. E.S.T.) is set in a posh Los Angeles restaurant, where five spunky women try to keep a sense of humor as they fight off lecherous customers. Lecherous viewers, however, are encouraged: the waitress uniforms look to have been painted on by Frederick's of Hollywood. On Wendy Schaal, who brings just the right mixture of innocence and sensuous vitality to her role, the character fits as well as the uniform.

I'm a Big Girl Now (ABC, Fridays at 8:30 p.m. E.S.T.) means to be a battle of wills and wits between a young divorcee (Diana Canova) and her haranguing father (Danny Thomas). Diana is sweet and smart, but, in the opening episode at least, it is father who knows best: he turns from Jewish mother to father confessor in record time. She must endure his sudden wisdom even as she trades toilet and underwear jokes with the rest of the cast, including her boss (Sheree North), who has an I.Q. of 190 but talks only of trysts with men who dress up in rubber.

Ladies' Man (CBS, Mondays at 8:30 p.m. E.S.T.) is a clumsy attempt to satirize almost every woman who has a good job and a little ambition. It is set in the offices of a woman's magazine that publishes articles on both "Sexual Harassment and the Working Woman" and "17 Ways with Tuna Fish." The boss is an amalgam of famous woman editors -- a sort of Helen Gloria Vreeland. But the moment a token male (Lawrence Pressman) joins the staff, the gals go man-crazy.

The editor in chief (Louise Sorel) tests the new man his first day on the job, promising to advance his career if he agrees to spend the weekend with her. Ladies ' Man may develop into a vehicle for sprightly social comedy but, at the moment, this vehicle is a Ms. carriage.

It is not easy to blend social comedy with slapstick, especially when the emphasis is on the latter. Farce is a precision instrument: the cuckolded husband must negotiate a labyrinth of plot twists before he opens his bedroom door at the split second his lovely young wife adjusts her peignoir and the milkman defenestrates himself. Farce demands ingenuity, grace and discipline -- qualities in short supply on network TV. Occasionally those magic imps Penny Marshall (Laverne) and Cindy Williams (Shir ley) bring it off. Now Chris Thompson and Joel Zwick, two veterans of L & S, have devised Bosom Buddies (ABC, Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. E.S.T.). The first ep isode is as silly as its prem ise: two guys dress as women to secure lodging in an all-girl hotel. Some Like It Hot this is not, and some of the jokes are more than nine days old. But there is promise here: the young stars, Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, know when to underplay a line and when to run with it. If Thompson and Zwick can find inventive ways to extend this single-joke situation, Bosom Buddies could be worth watching.

One wishes that could be said for Ted Knight and Too Close for Comfort (ABC, Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m. E.S.T.). As Mary Tyler Moore's Ted Baxter, Knight embodied a wonderful comic oaf: vain, inept and hilarious. In his new series he is just another henpecked husband, who must put up with two nubile daughters and fall over a loveseat every eight minutes. The other seven minutes, Too Close slavers over the sight of bountiful Lydia Cornell as she ponders the implications of taking a deep breath. The show can not see the farce for the tease. The actors exaggerate their gestures grotesquely, as if performing R-rated charades for the nearsighted. Too Close for Comfort marks a milestone in TV history: the eclipse of a fine comic actor, and the full festering of the smutcom. Never has the medium more fully deserved its reputation as the boob tube .

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