Queen of Sweeps

Valerie Bertinelli's got the round, clear face of Maybelline, the long, shiny hair of Prell, the white, bright smile of Crest. She's every young mother in stretch leggings and a denim overshirt who sometimes feels dumpy and sometimes feels blue and sometimes feels stressed when her hubby's on the road and her baby son wakes her at 6 a.m. every day.

She's every ripe-shaped, girl-faced woman who loves football, hates dieting, listens to rock, and feels she ought to go back to work, although really she'd be happy to stay at home and play with her kid and let her husband support her. She could be your daughter, your sister, your girlfriend, that cute young wife down the block who looks so hot when she dolls herself up. She looks closer to 21 than 31. She's clean-sexy, perky-determined, open-pretty. She's Redbook meets Rolling Stone. She's light beer in a Flintstones tumbler. Valerie Bertinelli is Made in the USA. She's the soul of mall America.

This is a compliment. For 16 years, ever since she was 15 and slid, with just a couple of TV commercials on her credit sheet, into the role of Barbara Cooper, Bonnie Franklin's keen-teen daughter on CBS' One Day at a Time as easily as a high school girl scoots into a pair of Levi's, Bertinelli has prevailed as one of America's sturdiest actresses on network TV — the medium of malls and moms. In fact, she is the prevailing made-for-TV actress at work today. As a result, America feels comfy with Valerie — our Mouseketeer, our homegirl, our family-hour fantasy who grew up before our eyes and married that nice rock star, Eddie Van Halen, and braved a thousand tabloid headlines (marital battles! weight battles!) to get where she is today. As a result, she has drummed up a booming little specialty for herself in made-for-network-TV movies, starring in nearly one a year beginning with Young Love, First Love in 1979. As a result, she is a rich young woman.

This, too, reflects all-American savvy — the savvy of Bertinelli, her advisers, and CBS, which has been the Bertinelli network year after year, showcasing her in the satisfyingly pulpy stories of kidnapped children and rapists' sisters-in-law and straying nuns that traditionally feed the maw of sweeps weeks. Bertinelli's most recent miniseries was last November's In a Child's Name, about a husband who murders his wife and the battle fought by the dead woman's sister to adopt the couple's son (''based on a true story''); the second of its two parts was tops for the week, beating even Roseanne and 60 Minutes.

Now, in a switch, it's NBC that is counting on Val, pitting her on Feb. 23 against the closing Olympics events on her old home network. Her vehicle this time is a two-hour TV movie, What She Doesn't Know, about a cop's daughter with a fancy law degree whose investigation into police corruption leads her home, and it costars George Dzundza, late of Law & Order, who wears a new badge as her pop.