Television's Second Season

Here's where the TV season gets interesting. It used to be that the networks rolled out all their new shows in the fall and then just sat back and waited for the big ratings to come in. When some new series or other didn't do very well, the programmers would just look around and shove in one they'd rejected earlier.

Not anymore. Mid-season is now the time when the television industry — not just the networks, but PBS and cable as well — does its darnedest to liven things up, to woo back viewers disenchanted with the fall offerings; it's the time when television takes its biggest creative chances.

The second season, with its go-for-broke risks and its shrewd fine-tuning, has thus become as important as the one in the fall, and sometimes livelier. Articulating the current approach, ABC entertainment president Robert Iger says, ''In mid-season, you can discover where your needs are, where your opportunities are, what are the best shows you really have.'' The big winners of recent mid-seasons include The Wonder Years, Twin Peaks, The Simpsons — in short, some of TV's most interesting programming.

What will be the breakthrough shows this time around? Family Dog? Davis Rules? Make your educated guess after reading Entertainment Weekly's guide to TV's newest hopefuls.

CBS
This season, CBS' audience has gotten larger and younger — the two most prized words in the network lexicon. After years of programming disasters and management shake-ups, newly hired network entertainment chief Jeff Sagansky began to turn CBS around last fall with a number of modest successes, including Evening Shade, The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, and The Flash. But the prime-time lineup still needs a comedy blockbuster for CBS to have a shot at first place, and this spring, its hopes are resting on a dynamic duo who never stop bickering, a cranky New York doctor trapped in Alaska, and an unassuming dog with two powerful masters: Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton.

Good Sports
(Thursdays, 9:30-10 p.m.)
Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal use their real-life relationship as the subtext for this canny little sitcom. They play anchors for a cable sports network; whenever they're not feuding, they're flirting. Both are first-rate sitcom actors, understating their punch lines for the intimacy of the TV screen, yet neither is a typical one. That may actually work against the show — viewers may not be able to look past her glaring glamour or his desperate affability to laugh at their lines. Good Sports' greatest asset may be Lane Smith (The Final Days), playing a folksy but shrewd, grimly hearty cable-station owner. (A deft impersonator, Smith seems to have modeled his character less on Ted Turner than on Dan Rather.) Ultimately, though, the success of Good Sports depends on the way Farrah and Ryan settle into their roles and develop the onscreen romance scheduled to bloom in the weeks to come.

That may take some time; Fawcett has complained that the show's scripts don't flesh out her character until the ninth or tenth week. Until then, CBS (which has made an unusually large mid-season commitment to 22 episodes) is trying to increase the show's modest audience with a series of big-name guest stars from the sports arena, including Jim Brown, Bruce Jenner, George Foreman, and George Steinbrenner; John McEnroe's family ties (he's married to O'Neal's daughter, Tatum) appear to make him a natural, but so far, it isn't happening.

Guns of Paradise
(Fridays, 8-9 p.m.)
Having been a cross between Little House on the Prairie and Maverick when it debuted in 1988, this Lee Horsley Western, which returned to the schedule last month, is now trying for Prairie plus Young Riders. Horsley is still a tough, sexy guy who presides over a passel of nephews 'n' nieces, but now he's also a marshal (lots of gunfights) with a rootin'-tootin' hunk of a new costar, John Terlesky, in the role of a gambler. To signal the changes, the producers switched the title from Paradise to Guns of Paradise.

The decision to revamp Paradise may have saved its life: The two-year-old series was on the brink of being shot down last spring when CBS ordered eight new episodes for this season. Ratings for the first two, which aired against ABC's formidable Full House and Family Matters, have been respectable, and with the film Dances With Wolves spurring public curiosity about the Old West, CBS may decide that the newly armed Paradise has a future after all.

The Antagonists
(March or April)
Law shows are threatening to glut the spring schedule, but at least this one has a gimmick: The same two lawyers oppose each other all the time. The drama, which stars newcomers David Andrews as an earthy defense lawyer and Lauren Holly as a tightly wound prosecutor, was originally prepared as a pilot for last fall's schedule and rejected.

Sunday Dinner
Twenty years ago, producer Norman Lear was the comedic voice of CBS; All in the Family and its many spin-offs gave the network a house style. Sunday Dinner, planned for late spring, returns Lear to CBS with a comedy about a middle-aged bachelor whose life gets complicated when he marries a younger woman. Robert Loggia, the best thing about last year's Mancuso FBI, stars.

Northern Exposure
(March)
When it first popped up as a summer series last year, Northern Exposure was about a New York doctor (Rob Morrow) forced to practice in the wilds of Alaska; it was a well-done but standard fish-out-of-ice-water show. As the series progressed, however, it began focusing on the large supporting cast of Alaskan oddballs, such as the Eskimo student (Darren Burrows) who yearns to make cold, despairing movies in the manner of Ingmar Bergman. Viewers were charmed; the ratings rose. Expect more of these closely observed character studies — as well as further complications in the love-hate relationship between Morrow and costar Janine Turner — as the show gets its second mid-season exposure: another limited run of eight episodes.

More could follow, but negotiations to renew the series in the first place were said to be difficult; Northern Exposure was conceived as a relatively low-budget summer replacement, and when critics and audiences took to it, the producers (who have since moved on to sign a series deal with NBC) asked for a budget comparable to other prime-time series'. Reportedly, they got it, but not without a struggle. "We all loved the show," Turner says, "but waiting to see if we'd come back drove us crazy." Starting next month, they're back.

Family Dog
(March or April)
To be sure, this animated half-hour is getting on the air because of the success of The Simpsons, but Family Dog is no cheap rip-off. For one thing, it existed before Bart — the first adventure of Family Dog's mangy-mutt hero appeared on Steven Spielberg's flop 1985 anthology series Amazing Stories. For another, it was first-rate: Written and directed by Brad Bird, the segment told a funny if deeply cynical tale of an excitable dog that shook up the lives of a bored suburban family. Featuring the voices of Stan Freberg and Designing Women's Annie Potts (Martin Mull and Molly Cheek will take the roles in the series), Dog was cool, and if it maintains that quality, it could prove to be as big as The Simpsons.

CBS Late Night
CBS has taken to calling its latest attempt to combat The Tonight Show and Nightline ''Crime Time,'' an umbrella title for five new action-adventure series; so far, only two are really worth checking out. The junky stuff comes early in the week. Monday's Sweating Bullets stars Rob Stewart as a tropical-island detective. He's teamed with Carolyn Dunn, playing a former travel agent who uses her contacts to drum up new clients. The premise is dumb, the plots are dumb, and Stewart, with his smirk and his ponytail, is simply annoying.

Less annoying than pathetic is Tuesday's Fly By Night, starring former Playmate Shannon Tweed as Sally "Slick" Monroe, owner of an air charter service. She makes wan byplay with her pilot (David Elliott) while they solve crimes in the air and on the ground.

Wednesday's Scene of the Crime is an anthology suspense series overseen by producer-writer Stephen J. Cannell, who is also host of the show, in the tradition of Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock. Cannell is a clever man, and he wrote a nice, twisty-turny chiller for the show's debut. Anthologies, featuring a different cast each week, are always uneven, but if Cannell finds good writers to supplement his own efforts, this one could be worth investigating.

Thursday's The Exile stars Search for Tomorrow's Jeffrey Meek as double agent John Stone. CBS describes Stone as "a renegade with his own agenda." Apparently that agenda doesn't include sending review tapes to critics — at press time, we still hadn't seen this one.

Which brings us to the prime offering in ''Crime Time'': Friday's Dark Justice. It sounds just as goofy as the others — Ramy Zada (Funny About Love) is a judge hamstrung by liberal laws that let criminals go free, so at night he doffs his robes, hops on a motorcycle, and bashes those same criminals senseless. But Dark Justice is a real hoot, the TV version of an adult comic book. Zada's nighttime revenge squad consists of Dick O'Neill (Cagney's father on Cagney & Lacey) as an engaging grump; the excellently named Begona Plaza as Cat — day-care-center owner by day, crime fighter by night; and, perhaps best of all, Clayton Prince (Another World) as a special-effects expert whose incessant chatter is genuinely amusing. Dark Justice deserves to become a cult hit.

Promotions for the lineup have aired with the slogan "It's too hot to sleep," and according to the vice president for late-night programs, Rod Perth, who developed the five series, television's rules change after prime- time. "Our standards are adjusting to the fact that these shows are written specifically for 11:30. It's not an hour when we have to consider that kids are watching," he says. Instead, CBS is wooing a young-adult audience with material that is "action-oriented, adult, sexy but not sexist, and at times dark. Shows that work in late-night must have high male appeal, but they can't turn women off — a show with a race-car driver or a football player wouldn't work." Or a talk show host: Lest anyone forget, CBS' previous hope for late-night was Pat Sajak.

A FACE TO WATCH: Family Dog, Family Dog
Possessed of his own new series and a personal friendship with Steven Spielberg, the top dog in CBS' litter of spring shows is a celebrity who comes equipped with what seems a bad attitude: He growls, scratches himself in public, and doesn't give interviews to anyone. But before viewers start making comparisons to the Brat Pack, they might want to give Family Dog (yes, that's his real name) a long leash. ''He doesn't talk at all,'' explains executive producer Dennis Klein (Buffalo Bill) of his taciturn performer. ''He doesn't muse either, and there's no voice-over. He just is.'' Silence may be golden for this star-in-the-making: with his semi-detached nose and infinitely expressive eyebrows, he can already run circles around dozens of TV actors — and that's not just throwing him a bone.

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