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29 FRIDAY THE SECRET WORLD OF BATS (CBS, 8-9 p.m.) Everything you always wanted to know about the flying mammals-their mating habits, dietary patterns, sleeping arrangements-but were too terrified to ask. Stacy Keach narrates.
30 SATURDAY
JULIE (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.) This new sitcom has an amusing premise: Julie Andrews plays Julie Carlyle, a famous actress and singer. Carlyle hosts a successful New York based TV variety show, but she has decided to move to Sioux City, Iowa. Why? Because that's where the man of her dreams lives-a nice veterinarian played by TV veteran James Farentino. Carlyle and Dr. Sam McGuire get married in this pilot episode. Carlyle's TV contract requires her to continue her weekly show, which means that part of each edition of Julie concerns the efforts of this major star to put on a network variety series in a city not famous for its concentration of big-name entertainers. The rest of the time, Julie follows Julie's comic efforts to adjust to her new Midwestern life with her new husband and her new stepchildren-two adolescent youths from Sam's previous marriage (Rider Strong and Hayley Tyrie). With a talent as versatile as Andrews' behind it, Julie might have been fun; instead, it's a cliched show that reduces its star to a standard-issue sitcom stepmom. The kids are wisecracking brats; Farentino's character is warm, fuzzy (he's grown a trim little beard), and dull. The subplot about her Sioux City TV show surrounds Andrews with supposedly colorful characters that are actually just dull rip-offs. (Kevin Scannell, for example, plays a local- newsman-turned-talk-show-announcer who is just another variation on The Mary Tyler Moore Show's Ted Baxter.) One of the executive producers of Julie is Andrews' husband, film director Blake Edwards. To launch the series, Edwards directed this first episode, but it's a measure of Julie's triteness that not a nanosecond of the slapsticky wit that characterized Edwards films like The Pink Panther and 10 is evident here. Andrews is charming, but Julie is a drag. C-
31 SUNDAY
THE 46TH ANNUAL TONY AWARDS (CBS, 9-11 p.m.) Glenn Close is host for the Oscars of Broadway, honoring the year's best shows. Appearances by Danny Glover, Sigourney Weaver, and Carol Channing.
2 TUESDAY
FRONTLINE:CHINA AFTER TIANAMEN (PBS, 8-9:30 p.m.) Veteran TV producer Irv Drasnin, who used to make solid news documentaries for CBS (Misunderstanding China) in the days when the commercial networks valued solid news, oversees this fascinating Frontline about the social and political aftermath of the 1989 massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. PBS says that Drasnin's Frontline crew is the first U.S. film team to be granted widespread access since the event, and Drasnin makes the most of it, finding both barely suppressed dissidence and flagrant cultural revolution. Whether he's bringing his cameras into a recently opened modeling school- China's first-where women learn slinky runway moves to the beat of Michael Jackson, or interviewing Beijing University students who cite Beethoven and Michael Jordan as their heroes, Drasnin demonstrates that there is, as he puts / it in his narration, ''a credibility gap between what people are told and what they think and do.'' While the government's brutal put-down of 1989's democratic movement forced citizens to continue parroting the party line of socialism-and-Marxism-forever, according to this documentary, it's clear that what Chinese officials contemptuously refer to here as ''bourgeois liberalism'' is flourishing. As an old-school journalist, Drasnin refrains from drawing an obvious conclusion-that China is an example of a nation transformed, made better, by American pop culture. The real message behind the engrossing footage of China After Tiananmen is that Jackson and Madonna have probably done more to persuade young Chinese people of the virtues of capitalism than any revolutionary theorist or American statesman. A-
