THE WEEK

5 FRIDAY I'LL FLY AWAY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.) In the series' final scheduled episode, Nathan (Jeremy London) wants to attend a state college with his friends, but his father (Sam Waterston) takes him to the University of Virginia for an interview.

6 SATURDAY

ALMOST HOME (NBC, 8-8:30 p.m.) In as pure an illustration of network cynicism as you could never want to see, last season's quiet, charming little sitcom The Torkelsons, a victim of low ratings, has been revived as a brassy, vulgar new sitcom called Almost Home. The reworked series now finds the Oklahoma clan-single-mom Millicent Tor-kelson (Connie Ray) and her three innocent children (Olivia Burnette, Lee Norris, and Rachel Duncan) moving to Seattle. Millicent has a new job as nanny to the two teenage kids (Brittany Murphy and Jason Marsden) of Brian Morgan, a widowed lawyer played by Perry King (Kaleidoscope). What made The Torkelsons distinctive was its suggestion, rare for television, that children have a certain amount of naivete that's worth preserving. Almost Home promotes the opposite: Brian's children are incessantly sarcastic brats who ridicule the Torkelsons' closeness, champion media sav-vy and wisecracks as high values, and deliver the lamest punch lines. I don't care that there's a ''positive message'' embedded in each episode, that King is perfectly likable, that Ray is as skilled as ever, and that Burnette's Dorothy Jane remains the best teenager on TV: I want my old Torkelsons back. D

GREAT TELEVISION MOMENTS: WHAT WE WATCHED (ABC, 8-10 p.m.) Richard Chamberlain, Candice Bergen, Marlo Thomas, Barbara Walters, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and the Diggstown duo of James Woods and Louis Gossett Jr. are hosts of this TV retrospective organized by New York City's Museum of Television and Radio.

A COUNTRY MUSIC CELEBRATION (CBS, 9-11 p.m.) Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Emmylou Harris, and many others gather at Nash- ville's Grand Ole Opry House for this ceremony honoring the Country Music Association's 35th anniversary.

7 SUNDAY

MOVIE: I YABBA-DABBD DO! (ABC, 7-9 p.m.) Witness the prehistoric joining of the Flintstone and Rubble families as Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm tie the knot after 30 years of animated foreplay.

SKYLARK (CBS, 9-11 p.m.) This Hallmark Hall of Fame sequel to the enormously popular Sarah, Plain and Tall is beautifully filmed and delicately acted, but I'd be surprised if it didn't disappoint viewers who liked the first production. Skylark picks up where Sarah left off. Glenn Close's Sarah is now happily married to Jacob Witting, the stoic Kansas homesteader played by Chris-topher Walken; his children, Anna and Caleb (Lexi Randall and Christopher Bell), adore their loving stepmother. But natural forces intervene in the form of a lengthy drought that ruins crops, makes drinking water scarce, and sparks a fire that destroys the barn Jacob built. Jacob decides that his children aren't safe and insists that Sarah and the kids go to live with Sarah's loving, jolly relatives in lush, dewy Maine until the drought is over. Directed by Joseph Sargent (Miss Rose White) and written by Patricia MacLachlan, author of the novel Sarah, Plain and Tall, Skylark has little dramatic momentum. Instead, it's a series of set pieces that might have been labeled Happy Farm Life, Unhappy Farm Life, The Maine Idyll, Rain. The farm family's separation seems like a small sacrifice-we know that as soon as the clouds burst over the Kansas crops, the Wittings will be reunited. In the first movie, Close was shot as if she were an angel sent down to rescue Jacob from despair-and in a sense, she was, so the adoration of Sarah seemed appropriate. Here, the scenes of Sarah's beatific smiles, her face framed in a golden glow, verge on the absurd-Sarah's warmth and wiseness are so exaggerated as to seem superhuman. Be forewarned: Skylark-the name derives ^ from the nickname Sarah's father gave her as a child-is a fairy tale in which Glenn Close is a frontier fairy godmother. B-