She's Un-'Lucky'

TUBE TALK Despite scores of viewer complaints, the Federal Communications Commission ruled last week that ABC's ''Victoria's Secret Fashion Show'' lingerie special last November did not violate indecency standards. No word on whether viewer complaints about Gwyneth Paltrow or Uma Thurman's displays during the Oscars will prompt a similar FCC investigation.

James Bond has saved the world many times over, but he couldn't save ABC on Saturday nights. The network, which started airing a series of 12 Sean Connery and Roger Moore 007 films in January, has scrapped the series after eight screenings. The cause, more lethal than Blofeld or an improperly mixed martini: low ratings, averaging only 6 million viewers. Maybe ABC would have enjoyed higher ratings if it hadn't digitally airbrushed underwear onto the Bond girls, as it was caught doing in ''Diamonds Are Forever.'' Or maybe it should have digitally replaced them with Victoria's Secret lingerie models....

Perhaps taking a page from ABC, USA apparently cleaned up Adam Sandler's ''Big Daddy'' as well, despite advertising its March 17 airing of the PG-13 movie as ''uncut'' and ''in its original theatrical form.'' Visually, maybe, but not aurally. Variety reports the findings of an anonymous TV censorship expert who says that the basic cable channel substituted the word ''butt'' for ''ass'' six times and for ''balls'' once, twice used ''gosh damn'' in place of a more blasphemous epithet, and also found sh-- and f--- words edited out. No comment from USA, though maybe anyone who knows Adam Sandler movies well enough to know how many times the word ''ass'' should appear has too much time on his hands....

The battle between Fox News Channel and CNN over Paula Zahn was thrown out of court yesterday. On Monday, a New York State Supreme Court judge dismissed FNC's breach of contract lawsuit against Zahn's agent, a complaint that alleged he violated the terms of her Fox deal by shopping her to CNN last fall. (FNC fired her when it found out, and she promptly took a job at the rival network, beginning the wave of anchor-poaching that most recently resulted in Greta Van Susteren trading CNN for Fox News.) The judge argued that the suit had no merit because Zahn's contract stated that she was ''free to negotiate with rival networks at any time, so long as she gave Fox the opportunity to decide whether or not to match any offers.'' Fox plans to appeal....

Another anchor switch may find Louis Rukeyser, creator and host of PBS' ''Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser'' for 32 years, moving to CNBC. Maryland Public Television, which co-produces the show, announced last week that they would be bringing in a younger anchor, Fortune magazine editor Geoff Colvin, to share hosting duties with the sexagenarian Rukeyser. During Friday's broadcast, he grumbled that ''another weekly program with me as host and commentator will be on television.'' MPT decided not to make him wait and axed him over the weekend. Rukeyser says CNBC is just one of ''many potential producers and distributors'' he's in talks with. Good thing we have pay TV to pick up the slack and offer fare that youth- and ratings-mad public television doesn't.

PASSING NOTES Oscar-winning production designer Richard Sylbert, who influenced generations of movie artists with his work on 50 movies over 40 years, died Saturday of cancer at the Motion Picture & Television Home in Woodland Hills, Calif. Sylbert, 73, was known for bringing strong visual motifs to well-known films from ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (1962) to ''My Best Friend's Wedding'' (1997). He won Academy Awards for ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'' (1966) and the comic book-styled ''Dick Tracy'' (1990). For three years in the mid-1970s, he was chief of production at Paramount, where he greenlit movies from ''The Bad News Bears'' to ''Looking for Mr. Goodbar.'' He is survived by his identical twin brother Paul Sylbert, also a production designer, who won an Oscar for 1978's ''Heaven Can Wait.''