TROUBLE IN TOONTOWN

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Ask James Girolamo, 5, or Everett Webre, a mature 4, which Saturday-morning television shows they like best, and they will look at you blankly as though you were quizzing them about hedge funds or Harold Pinter. The boys, no budding back-to-the-landers, are the sons of TV-friendly Manhattan media professionals, but neither James nor Everett has ever watched Saturday-morning cartoons. "This is family time," explains Everett's mom Priscilla Glover, "one of the few times during the week we can all be together. Everett knows he can watch the Disney Channel whenever he wants, so he doesn't beg to glue himself to the TV on the weekends. He doesn't even know what he is missing."

The broadcast networks, however, are all too aware of what Everett is missing, and they are desperate to do something about it. Distracted by home videos, computer games and round-the-clock cable channels such as Disney, the Cartoon Network and most significantly of all, Nickelodeon, children have abandoned traditional Saturday-morning television like so many grownups shunning whole milk. For the first six weeks of the new season, on average 4.16 million kids 2 to 11 years old tuned into Saturday-morning network shows, down 20% from last season, according to Nielsen Media Research, and a whopping 60% from 1986. During the past year alone, CBS has lost 50% of its young Saturday-morning viewers, the WB network 26%, and Fox 9%, even though it carries the thriller series Goosebumps, TV's highest-rated children's program. (Seeing the writing on the wall, NBC dropped its kids' programming altogether four years ago.)

"I'm worried," concedes Margaret Loesch, chairman of Fox Kids Networks Worldwide. "There are only a certain number of kids, and with more and more programming services, the ratings pie is being sliced into too many pieces."

And Nickelodeon is gaining a big chunk. As the networks have watched their ratings dwindle, Nick has seen its Saturday-morning audience grow 23.5% during the past year. "The networks have gone to the same tired well too many times," argues Nickelodeon president Herb Scannell. "They don't care about kids, and kids are feeling that."

Well, not exactly. Nick isn't leaping ahead with the sort of innovative live-action fare it serves up in the evenings (The Secret World of Alex Mack) but rather with repeats of its weekday cartoons like the clever Rugrats, as well as reruns of older Saturday-morning shows that were canceled by the major networks years ago. "When Nickelodeon is able to beat broadcast networks with repeats of Muppet Babies and Beetlejuice," notes Jamie Kellner. head of the WB, "it suggests the matter goes far beyond programming."

Indeed, part of the networks' strategy to lure back Saturday-morning viewers focuses on copying a big secret of Nickelodeon's success: promotion, promotion, promotion. Fox, for example, has tripled the marketing and promotion budget, in part to advertise its kids' fare on cable and radio stations. ABC is now using its prime-time Friday-night block, which includes youth-oriented series like Clueless, to aggressively promote shows airing the next morning.

Other efforts are being made as well. Part of the WB's immediate strategy has been to target older kids, 6 to 11 years old, early in the morning when the other networks are catering to younger viewers. CBS--struggling also to fulfill upcoming FCC requirements forcing networks to provide three hours of educational TV weekly--has signed a deal with Children's Television Workshop, creators of Sesame Street, to produce and develop three new series. Fox is upping the orders for its most popular programs, including an additional 25 installments of Big Bad BeetleBorgs--and hoping kids will be hip to the fact that Fox isn't airing reruns as frequently as its rivals. Parents are probably hoping their kids get hip to none of it.

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles