THE WEEK

Movies A serial killer also figures prominently in the surreal thriller Heads (Showtime, Jan. 29, 8-9:45 p.m.), with The Famous Teddy Z's Jon Cryer as a goateed, nerdishly obsessive reporter on the trail of a maniac decapitator. In a double shot of typecasting, Ed Asner costars as Cryer's temperamental editor, and Jennifer Tilly plays Cryer's low-rent, free-spirited love interest. Director Paul Shapiro is clearly a member of the (David) Lynch mob; as in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, the message of this movie is that beneath the happy plastic facade of a small town, things aren't what they seem. Pretty deep.

Documentaries You didn't think it was possible, but the Disney Channel has come up with a fourth installment of the series Martin and Lewis: Their Golden Age of Comedy. dean and Jerry at the Movies (Jan. 27, 9-10 p.m.) includes such gut-busting ) slapstick sequences as Jerry's Carmen Miranda routine from 1953's Scared Stiff and the French barbershop scene from 1955's You're Never Too Young (no wonder they love him so much over there). Lewis provides running commentary-Dino chose to sit this one out, the old sorehead-and, inexplicably, John Ritter offers his own inane observations: "I think Dean and Jerry are so funny today because today so many things aren't funny."

Judging from its title, The Secret Life of Chairman Mao (A&E, Jan. 28, 8-9:30 p.m), sounds like some sort of tabloid expose, but the juiciest information to be found in this BBC/A&E coproduction is that, according to his physician, the moonfaced Marxist despot thought "the best entertainment was to have intercourse with women." Then there's the story of how Mao once offended Nikita Khrushchev by greeting him poolside in swim trunks. In contrast to the unsecret life of the Chairman-torture, mass murder, palling around with Stalin-this stuff seems tame, no?

Choice Reruns The late-'60s equivalent of guesting on Larry Sanders or The Simpsons was doing a cameo on Batman or, better yet, on Mel Brooks' madcap spook spoof Get Smart (Nick at Nite, weeknights, 8:30-9 p.m.). A trio of celeb-laden 1968 episodes begins on Jan. 26 with "The Hot Line," featuring high-strung chatterbox Regis Philbin (then Joey Bishop's sidekick). "The Reluctant Redhead" (Jan. 27) casts the recently deceased joker Cesar Romero as KAOS mole Kinsey Krispin, and Robert Culp (now seen on the big screen as the daft prez in The Pelican Brief) sends up his I Spy role in the Jan. 28 Smart, "Die, Spy."