Critics' Choice

By Compiled by Andrea Sachs

TELEVISION

MISS UNIVERSE PAGEANT (CBS, April 15, 9 p.m. EDT). Dick Clark and Leeza Gibbons are this year's hosts, and new onscreen technology will show viewers up-to-the-minute scores as the contestants are winnowed. What is this, a beauty pageant or a game show?

PROFIT THE EARTH (PBS, April 16, 8 p.m. on most stations). Public TV launches a yearlong campaign of environmental programming with this hour-long special that examines free-enterprise solutions to the pollution problem.

THE OUTSIDERS (SUNDAYS, 7 p.m. EDT, FOX). TV has discovered a new genre: working-class romanticism. First came Elvis, with its nostalgic retelling of the King's early rise from blue-collar boredom to Top 40 stardom. Now Francis Coppola has turned his 1983 movie about Oklahoma teenagers (based on the S.E. $ Hinton novel) into a lyrical, lovingly crafted TV series. Class conflict is the theme: the three Curtis brothers, scraping along together after the death of their parents, are part of a wrong-side-of-the-tracks crowd known as the Greasers. Their snooty, letter-sweatered antagonists are called the Socs (that's So-shes). The show pushes its James Dean angst a bit hard ("What do I got? Nothin'! Just another greaser goin' nowhere"). But the milieu is sharply etched, and rarely have the disaffected been so affecting. The best drama series yet from TV's hottest network, Fox.

BOOKS

DECEPTION by Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster; $18.95). The master deceiver again teases his fans with a fictive fan dance about a writer named Philip who may or may not be having an affair with a married woman who may or may not be a character in a novel in progress. The woman he lives with doesn't buy it, but readers who appreciate first-rate talent will be thoroughly taken in.

OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO! by Dr. Seuss (Random House; $12.95). Eighty-six- year-old Dr. Seuss continues to rhyme with reason in book No. 43, an illustrated philosophy lesson about bouncing back that contains the sage advice, "Be sure when you step./ Step with care and great tact/ and remember that Life's/ a Great Balancing Act."

THEATER

GET ANY GUY THRU PSYCHIC MIND CONTROL OR YOUR MONEY BACK. The title may promise the impossible, but it captures the playful tone in this tale of Southern sisters who dream about Nashville stardom and of the men who derail them. At Act I Arena Theater in Framingham, Mass.

PRELUDE TO A KISS. The best play yet in response to AIDS never mentions the word but asks whether love is really forever when the young, beautiful person you married is suddenly a dying old man. Writer Craig Lucas and director Norman Rene have an off-Broadway winner, on its way to Broadway, and Mary- Louise Parker is the most fetching dizball leading lady since Judy Holliday.

OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY. The robust, raunchily funny depiction of a hostile corporate takeover drew the limo-and-luxury investment bankers off-Broadway and is now on tour, currently in Chicago. If, in the changed economy, this is no longer a bulletin from the front, it's at least an instructive look back in anger.

FEAST OF FOOLS. Clowning through the centuries, British-born Geoff Hoyle is by turns a medieval jester, a fly-eating Arlecchino and two dueling waiters. | Imaginative and skillful physically, if a bit labored verbally, Hoyle peaks in an inspired bit of off-Broadway lunacy proving that, when it comes to dancing, three legs are better than two.

MOVIES

THE HANDMAID'S TALE. Set in a political and sexual dictatorship of the near future, this anti-fundamentalist fable carries a heady pedigree: screenplay by Harold Pinter from the Margaret Atwood novel. But a fine cast is zombified under Volker Schlondorff's drab direction.

HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. Running into Henry is like winning a satanic lottery; you die, at random. John McNaughton's icy essay in depravity, made for peanuts in Chicago four years ago, forces the moviegoer to stare into the face of evil.

PRETTY WOMAN. Pretty ugly. 'Nuff said.

MUSIC

COWBOY JUNKIES: THE CAUTION HORSES (RCA). The Junkies are still laying down their special blend of Thorazine country -- slow, dreamy and spiritual -- but the novelty's worn dime-thin. Not so fresh as last year's exemplary debut, but the band still has mystique to burn and mystery to spare. Wait till next year.

THE NOTTING HILLBILLIES: MISSING . . . PRESUMED HAVING A GOOD TIME (Warner Bros.). Mark Knopfler, of Dire Straits, and three mates of similar musical inclination cook up a relaxed set of old-time guitar music and dusty folk. A sort of after-hours version of the Traveling Wilburys, with a solid Knopfler original (Your Own Sweet Way) nestled among the well-roasted chestnuts.

JAZZ PIANO (Smithsonian Collection). A four-CD (six-LP) compendium of outstanding keyboard artists recorded between 1924 and 1978. Virtually every American jazz pianist of note -- 42 in all, ranging from Jelly Roll Morton to Keith Jarret -- is represented in these 68 solo tracks. As if a gold mine of great music were not enough, the scholarly notes by Dick Katz, Martin Williams and Francis Davis make this a must-have for serious jazz aficionados.