FEDS VS. REDS

Remember all those reports that novelist Tom Clancy was displeased with the job Harrison Ford had done as Clancy's hero Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger? Evidently Ford, in interpreting his role, was too much of an independent thinker for Clancy. So now the author has gone out and gotten a much more malleable performer for his newest project. In the typically techno-heavy spy thriller Op Center (NBC, Feb. 26 and 27, 9-11 p.m. each night), L.A. Law's Harry Hamlin is the square-jawed protagonist. Tanned, his features immobile-a human Bit-O-Honey bar-Hamlin is a perfect Clancy figure as Paul Hood, the newly appointed director of the fictional National Crisis Management Center (NCMC). His first day on the job, he has to tackle an urgent problem: Renegade KGB guards in Ukraine have stolen three nuclear warheads. Hood, being new to NCMC, serves as our surrogate-we learn about the dangers of the bad guys selling the warheads to even badder guys, and we meet the motley NCMC team, which includes Carl Weathers, Lindsay Frost, John Savage, and always-welcome veteran character actor Bo Hopkins. This four-hour TV movie gets better as it goes along, after all the political and technical mumbo jumbo has been introduced and director Lewis Teague (The Jewel of the Nile) can mount a few exciting action sequences. Frost is particularly adept at her government-whiz role, and I'd watch a regular series built around Savage's sarcastic intelligence officer. Oh, yes: Rod Steiger shows up as a top-ranking ex-Soviet official, and his Russian accent is a heck of a lot better than his Cuban one in the recent Sylvester Stallone movie The Specialist. B