Lonely Beat Joe Bash; Abc;

By Richard Zoglin

A comedy series with no cackling studio audience, no laugh track--indeed, almost no laughs? Forget it. A police show in which cars never careen through the streets, drug pushers are strangely absent, and nobody draws a gun? No way. A network midseason replacement that tiptoes into the little-watched time period opposite Dallas for an unheralded six-show run? So long, Charlie.

Hello, Joe Bash. This ABC entry, created by Danny Arnold (Barney Miller), is not only the oddest new comedy of the season, it is also the smartest and most unexpectedly moving. Peter Boyle plays Joe, an embittered middle-aged New York cop who pounds the beat with a brash young partner, Willie (Andrew Rubin). The pair traverse the desolate city streets and cope with the unglamorous trivia of everyday police life. A woman is found dead in her apartment, and Joe and Willie debate what to do with the bag of money she has left. An old man wanders into a deli and orders a meal he cannot pay for; he turns out to be an Alzheimer's victim who has escaped from a senior citizens' home.

All of this swirls around the surly character of Joe, TV's most convincing misanthrope since Archie Bunker. In Boyle's sharp and unsentimental portrayal, crustiness never becomes cute, and there are echoes of authentic urban despair in the patter. "What are you gonna do over the weekend?" Willie asks Joe, whose wife left him 15 years ago. "Same as I always do. Sit it out till Monday," he replies. Willie nags him to get out of the apartment and make friends. "I had friends," Joe snaps. "I didn't like it." At the end of one episode, Joe is even found in bed with a prostitute, without apologies. Not exactly the stuff of Nielsen winners, but a TV breakthrough: the first sitcom about loneliness. R.Z.