And Mister Ed Begat Mr. Smith

By RICHARD CORLISS

The new TV series are all crossbred, and the strains show

The Deal may be the classic Hollywood art form, but crossbreeding is the way to an audience's heart. In the entertainment industry, nothing "new" succeeds like last year's success, with a twist. Star Wars? It is like 2001, but cute. E.T.?Disney meets Alien. Flashdance? MTV with a plot. The same, but different. In network television, with its older, more sedentary and conservative audience, the emphasis is on same. Virtually all of the 22 series making their debuts on ABC, CBS and NBC in the next month are clones or hybrids of other TV shows. To hit it big, you just have to know which strains to breed. The trouble is that in most of this fall's premieres the breeding does not show, only the strain.

With the exceptions of AfterMASH (CBS) and Bay City Blues (NBC's major-league series about a minor-league baseball team, from the producers of Hill Street Blues), the new shows find their role models not in TV trailblazers but in the Lowest Common Dreck. I Dream of Jeannie inspired Just Our Luck (ABC); Mister Ed begat Mr. Smith (NBC); Bewitched gave birth to Jennifer Slept Here (NBC). Webster (ABC) is Diff'rent Strokes with a foster mother. The Rousters (NBC) is more dudes of Hazzard. Lottery$ (ABC) is The Millionaire after inflation. Two shows, Cutter to Houston (CBS) and Trauma Center (ABC), could be called The Mod Squad Goes to Med School. Manimal (NBC) is a menagerie of ripoffs, and It's Not Easy (ABC) is a rip-off of manages. We Got It Made (NBC) is Three's Company with a sex change.

Movies and pay cable may brandish their R-rated license, but none of the saltier four-letter words has yet passed the lips of a prime-time hero. No sitcom vixen has bared so much as a nipple. In the new shows one can detect a struggling within the mass-media straitjacket of language and sex. Prime time is like a twelve-year-old tentatively imitating his big bad brother: sneaking a cigarette, practicing a curse word, miming an open-mouthed kiss. Sex can only be suggested, of course, but it may also be suggestive; one smoldering glance can steam up any innuendo. Extract from the pilot script for Emerald Point N.A.S. (CBS), a Jacuzzi-hot soap opera set on a naval base: "PAN FROM the clothes on the floor TO a man's jeans and Levi jacket draped over a chair. From just [off screen], little bleating sounds of passion, at once ladylike and sensual. Now PAN ON OVER TO the bed and FIND Hilary and a young man locked in naked and breathless embrace. As Hilary is swept... from passion to frenzy that approaches violence, biting and clawing at the young man in bed with her, GO TO [a jet plane] firing up with a great, pulsing roar."

Emerald Point's producers call their show, which stars Dennis Weaver as an admiral with three lubricious daughters, "a modern King Lear." (Then what's Dallas? Oedipus Tex?) This and the other new dramas offer the easy thrills of a paperback bought at a bus terminal; even the season's best sitcoms, Just Our Luck and Mr. Smith, are no more demanding than a vintage comic book in Dad's attic. Still, trash has its charms. Herewith a look at ten fall shows, good, bad and same-different:

Hardcastle and McCormick (ABC, Sundays, 8 p.m. E.S.T.). Under his robes, Judge Milton C. Hardcastle wears Hawaiian shirts, jogging shorts and filthy sneakers. But if you think his haberdashery is reprehensible, wait till you hear his judicial philosophy: "Hunt 'em, hear 'em and hang 'em!" The A.C.L.U. may run for help, but "Hardcase" (Brian Keith) figures the law is too soft on criminals. So he hires one (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) to help him catch the bad guys. With a face of aged granite and a voice that sounds like Duke Wayne over ground glass, Keith has a certain mastodon appeal. He can keep appealing until his show is canceled--or until Hardcase is appointed to the Reagan Supreme Court.

Scarecrow and Mrs. King (CBS, Mondays, 8 p.m.). Or: Mary Richards Meets James Bond. She (Kate Jackson) is recently divorced, a Cub Scout den mother of two. He (Bruce Boxleitner) is brave, suave, handsome; a spy. He leads her through a cheerfully baroque maze of international intrigue; she alternates between frying and saving his bacon, not to mention the Free World. In Jackson, who has acquired a crinkly allure, and Boxleitner, who looks like Robert Redford just before puberty, this series has two stars worth catching on cold Monday nights. Like just about every other new show, Scarecrow speaks to the conservative national mood: the villains work for the KGB. After a decade of Le Carre naturalism, cold war chic rides again.

Boone (NBC, Mondays, 8 p.m.). Boone Sawyer (Tom Byrd), the pride of Trinity, Term., wants to be a country singing star. Created by Earl Hamner (The Waltons), Boone argues that you can pursue an artistic dream and still love your folks. It dispenses much sugar-coated wisdom, and bathes John-Boone's homestead in the sunlight of reverie. Byrd is almost convincing when he proclaims that "it's my heart's craving--it's my passion--to sing." Alas, he sings with neither pitch nor power. Alovin' and afightin' and asingin' off key? Paging Marni Nixon.

Just Our Luck (ABC, Tuesdays, 8 p.m.). Executive Producer Chuck Gordon calls this "a 'relationship' show, sort of I Dream of the Odd Couple. "How odd? Keith Barrow (Richard Gilliland) is a nebbishy TV weatherman who spiffs up his act with help from a 3,000-year-old black genie (T.K. Carter). Not much promise here, but it is the delivery that counts. Like Bosom Buddies of a few seasons backs, Just Our Luck scores as hip, underplayed farce. The chemistry must keep working to please adults, while special effects keep the kids happy. (Example: Shabu metamorphoses into a soul quartet called the Shabettes, in which Carter parodies Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Rick James and Lionel Richie, all at the same time.)

Oh Madeline (ABC, Tuesdays, 9:30 p.m.). Madeline Kahn is often a sexy, dizzy comedian. In this domestic sitcom, Kahn still gets laughs trilling coloratura inanities, or scrunching up her mouth like a Senor Wences hand puppet. But her show leans too heavily on mistaken identities and enervated gags; to keep the show upright, she pushes too hard. Oh Madeline.

Whiz Kids (CBS, Wednesdays, 8 p.m.). With good eye-hand coordination, you can master Pac Man or Q*bert; if you have good eye-brain coordination, you can rule the world by remote control. Such is the potential of the computer generation, and the premise of this slick TV cousin to the hit movie WarGames. With real-life teen-age "hackers" making news tapping into corporate computers, Whiz Kids Executive Producer Philip DeGuere is already at work sanitizing his show. This is as redundant a pastime as vacuuming Disneyland. The series' white-collar meanies are too plastic to make one anxious; the young stars (led by Matthew Laborteaux) are too wimpy to make one care. Back to the arcade, guys.

Hotel (ABC, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.). That lowest form of plant life, The Love Boat, has spawned more plankton this fall. In San Francisco's St. Gregory Hotel, a landlocked Love Boat, guest stars of medium wattage (notably the deliciously tawdry Morgan Fairchild) register for a brief encounter, while the staff (James Brolin, Connie Selleca and those two glorious cat fighters from All About Eve, Bette Davis and Anne Baxter) smooth egos and smother the occasional crime. The place should be a Gland Hotel, but in an Aaron Spelling series no one is encouraged to strike erotic sparks. Hotel is so anemic it makes even its true subject--ostentatious greed--unsexy.

Mr. Smith (NBC, Fridays, 8 p.m.). An orangutan with an IQ of 256 is a valued government consultant. His voice is urban-gruff, like a taxi driver's in a traffic jam. He looks a bit like Herman Kahn, the late thermonuclear gamesman. He employs a snippy major domo (Leonard Frey) who wonders how he got involved with a monkey. Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniels and David Lloyd, who made Mary Tyler Moore the best sitcom hi television, may be asking themselves the same question. And yet Lloyd's Mr. Smith script is a diverting parody of Washington politics, with on-target jokes about Jackie Kennedy, the diplomatic corps and a top Administration executive who once spent bedtime with Bonzo.

For Love and Honor (NBC, Fridays, 10 p.m.). Just your typical squadron: two compassionate yet tough sergeants (Cliff Potts and Yaphet Kotto); a budding psychopath of a captain (Gary Grubbs); and a whole bunch of horny yet dedicated boys and girls. This is today's Army and last year's hit movie, An Officer and a Gentleman with just a little less raunch and a lot more compassion. When For Love and Honor forgets about being gung-ho, it demonstrates snap and savvy and a barracksful of fine young players, especially Rachel Ticotin and Eddie Velez.

The Yellow Rose (NBC, Saturdays, 10 p.m.). That old patriarch Wade Champion, he sired more boys than Ibn Saud put together: Roy (David Soul), who runs the Yellow Rose ranch; Quisto (Edward Albert), who wants to put oil derricks on the grazing land; and now Chance (Sam Elliott), fresh from a seven-year stretch for murder one. The women, too, can be hard as a Texas dirt road and twice as dangerous: Grace McKenzie (a sizzling Susan Anspach), the cook, serves up more than biscuits, and Colleen Champion (a restored Cybill Shepherd) looks ready to make trouble with every male on the show. The first episode gives hints of money wrangles and byzantine plot twists, but The Yellow Rose could be more than a prairiefied Dallas. NBC says the series is "in the tradition of Giant and Hud, "and it is. It is also in the Saturday-night graveyard slot, so it will have to corral an audience quickly. The Yellow Rose deserves a shot: this lowdown hoedown is the fall's juiciest new show. --By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.