THE WEEK

1 FRIDAY MOVIE: THE HOUSE ON SYCAMORE STREET (CBS, 9-11 p.m.) Dick Van Dyke reprises his role as the crime-solving Dr. Mark Sloan in this sequel to the TV movie Diagnosis of Murder (broadcast earlier this season). With Cynthia Gibb and George Hamilton.

WALDO SALT: A SCREENWRITER'S JOURNEY (PBS, 9-10 p.m.) This American Masters production profiles Waldo Salt, who found fame in middle age and won two Oscars as the screenwriter of Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home. As this documentary emphasizes, his accomplishments are even more impressive when you consider that Salt had been blacklisted in Hollywood for 15 years, a victim of the '50s Communist witch-hunts. A screenwriter's Journey was directed by Eugene Corr and Robert Hillman, students in the screenwriting course. Salt taught at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in the years before his death in 1987. Corr and Hillman have clearly intended this hour to be a salute to a man they admired, but while their sentiments are laudable, the result is a rather overwrought, stilted piece of work. Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) are among the luminaries interviewed. They and others speak at length about Salt's wisdom and strength, and there's a lot of talk about what a ''truth seeker'' he was. It all gets very high-flown and abstract, when what we want to know are more facts: How committed was Salt to the American Communist Party? How did this blacklisted writer go about reentering the film industry? (Journey tells us that one day, after years of struggle in New York, Salt started writing Hollywood scripts again under a pseudonym-well, why didn't he do it sooner?) Salt's daughter Jennifer, an actress, refers in passing to her father as an alcoholic, but no one talks about how that may have affected his work. A screenwriter's Journey is a polite, heartfelt work, but it's not very illuminating.

3 SUNDAY MOVIE: DAYO (NBC, 7-9 p.m.) Delta Burke puts aside the tough-talking, shrewd comic character she played on Designing Women to star as a neurotic flibbertigibbet in this flimsy Walt Disney Television production. She plays Grace DeGeorgio, an unhappy woman who feels she has never been loved by her father (Cape Fear's Fred Dalton Thompson) and is jealous of her dad's favorite, her younger brother (My Talk Show's David Packer). Grace is so miserable and lonely that her only confident is her imaginary friend from childhood, a boy named Dayo, played by Elijah Wood (Radio Flyer, Paradise). Dayo, written by Bruce Franklin Singer and directed by Michael Schultz (Car Wash), is supposed to be a comedy, but its central idea-grown woman talks to invisible child friend-is sort of pathetic. So is Grace's relationship with the father-she wants to please him so much, she becomes paralyzed in his presence. This character doesn't need a sweet imaginary friend; she needs a quick course in assertiveness training. D

MINISERIES: TRIAL: THE PRICE OF PASSION (NBC, 9-11 p.m.; concludes May 4, 9-11 p.m.) Like the title of the miniseries itself, Trial: The Price of Passion is overstated malarkey. Based on Clifford Irving's more calmly titled 1990 novel Trial, this TV movie features Peter Strauss as Warren Blackburn, a wealthy, esteemed Houston lawyer who is suspended for two years for unethical conduct by a tough judge, played by Jill Clayburgh. (With her cartoonish blond bouffant hairdo, her dowdy half-glasses, and perpetual scowl, Clayburgh's character looks like a cross between Joan Rivers and Lou Grant actress Nancy Marchand). Blackburn's law practice is ruined by the suspension, as is his marriage to a cold, ambitious woman (Laila Robins of Gabriel's Fire). Then he gets a case that can put him back on top: defending a popular local nightclub owner (Beverly D'Angelo) against a murder charge. You can be sure that D'Angelo's Johnnie Faye Boudreau, always attired in the tightest and smallest of dresses, makes a play for Blackburn, and D'Angelo has winking fun with lines like ''A sad song don't care whose heart it breaks.'' But this miniseries don't care whose eyes it closes: Sleepily directed by the usually efficient Paul Wendkos (Blind Faith), Trial is slow, obvious, and hokey. The best performance is given by Ned Beatty, as a charmingly vulgar, corrupt attorney; when his character dies unexpectedly midway through, so does Trial. C-