Don Johnson moves on

''There's no point in getting into that,'' Don Johnson insists, squinting coolly through a haze of cigarette smoke. ''It's just fodder for the gossip machine. I'd be opening Pandora's box. It's not an area that's appropriate to discuss.''

In other words, ixnay the questions about Melanie Griffithay.

As it happens, there's something else in Johnson's life to talk about these days, other than his double-ex-wife and her oh-so-public pawings with Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas. A decade after he nearly drove the hosiery industry into bankruptcy playing Florida's coolest cop on the seminal '80s crime drama Miami Vice, Johnson, 46, is returning to TV, as the executive producer and star of a new CBS detective series called Nash Bridges (premiering March 29). Set on the streets of San Francisco, chockful of trendy clothes and retro muscle cars, it may turn out to be just the thing Johnson needs to turn around a career that hasn't exactly been knocking people's socks off lately.

''But it's not like, 'Poor Don, he has to go back to TV,''' Johnson points out between takes on Nash's San Francisco set, his famously scratchy voice making Brenda Vaccaro sound like Farinelli. ''TV actors are bigger than movie actors these days. More people see them, more people recognize them; the salaries in TV are rivaling those in feature films.... I have a very healthy career.''

Well, at least it's got a pulse. After his hugely popular turn on Vice, Johnson's push for feature film fame was rather a disappointment, to put it mildly. While other '80s TV icons have gone on to bigger and better things — take a bow, Bruce Willis — Johnson's been churning out clinkers like Sweet Hearts Dance, Dead-Bang, The Hot Spot, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, Paradise, and Guilty as Sin. If it weren't for the tabloids slobbering over the details of his recent alcohol and marital problems, he might have vanished from public view altogether. Or worse — ended up doing psychic hotline infomercials like his old Vice pal Philip Michael Thomas.

As a comeback vehicle, Nash has much going for it — including Vice's old time slot (Fridays, 10 p.m.) and a fun supporting cast (Cheech Marin as his ex-partner, Annette O'Toole as one of two impossibly attractive ex-wives). But it was a bumpy ride getting it on the air. Originally called Off Duty, the show has been in and out of rewrite purgatory for almost two years. The initial pitch — cooked up by Johnson and his Aspen neighbor, acid author Hunter S. Thompson (who dropped out of the project early on) — had Johnson playing a Bay Area cop who spent his evenings moonlighting as a private eye. Network execs had big problems with it, starting with, When did this guy sleep?

''Nobody got it,'' Johnson says. ''No matter how well we laid it out, it was like, 'Huh? Is he a cop now or a private eye?' They thought it was confusing. But it's two different spins. You call the cops for one thing and a private eye for another. I still would have preferred that concept.''