BUNGLE FEVER

William Devane and Nicollette Sheridan are back together again, and ROBIN COOK'S VIRUS (NBC, May 8, 9-11 p.m.) has got 'em. Devane and Sheridan, who used to fog up the TV screen with their romantic panting weekly on Knots Landing, star in a TV movie that bears no small resemblance to the current feature film Outbreak. (The '87 Cook novel on which Virus is based was called Outbreak, even though that wasn't the source of the theatrical film. Got that?)

Sheridan stars as a researcher at Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; she comes upon a conspiracy of evil bureaucrats who are responsible for an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus. She then turns to what the NBC press release calls ''her mentor and lover,'' played by Devane, for help. After being temporarily hijacked into sitcoms with last year's dud Phenom, Devane is back doing what he does best: looking great in a suit, flashing his gleaming choppers with a predatory grin, and all but drooling when he gets close to Sheridan.

That said, there's very little else that's engaging about Virus; instead of the grand paranoid scheme that Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo expose in Outbreak, Virus' most sinister subject is the proliferation of HMOs. Virus apes Outbreak's shots of screaming monkeys infected with the virus, but I'd rather have been watching more monkeyshines between Sheridan and Devane.

And as long as we're making Virus/Outbreak comparisons, doesn't it seem strange that the producers of both of these projects thought it was a good idea to bury appealing stars like Sheridan, Devane, Hoffman, and Russo in those big puffy plastic suits with what look like transparent upside-down garbage pails on their heads? C-

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