THE WEEK

29 SATURDAY THE REN & STIMPY SHOW (Nickelodeon, 9-9:30 p.m.) Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi has single-handedly reversed the direction of television animation. All recent cartoon shows have given words-plot, dialogue, verbal jokes-greater importance than the art, the animation itself. The primary reason for this is economics: Keep the pictures simple, the animated movements minimal, and the production costs are much cheaper. But it's also because cartoons, with the exception of The Simpsons, had become pious pap-under attack for containing violent images, the cartoon industry opted for static pictures of bland characters mouthing ''positive'' messages. Ren & Stimpy-tales of a tiny neurotic dog and a big dumb cat-does the exact op-posite of all that. This cult sensation, now in its second season, is at once beautiful and mind-blowing to look at; it's no wonder teens and adults like the show at least as much as kids-at last, a cartoon in which there's so much going on, your eyes and brain can barely ab-sorb everything. The plots and dialogue are minimal-R&S join the army; R&S spoof TV nature shows-but the visuals are gorgeously elaborate. And gross, really gross. Kricfalusi's primary mediums are mucus and saliva; in the surreal world in which he's trapped his characters, noses are always dripping and drool flows like lava. A cruel army sergeant's pink tongue flashes out of his mouth and wraps itself around Ren, yanking the dog up to the soldier's mouth, so that he can yell right into Ren's ear. You can tick off Kricfalusi's influences as you watch-George Herriman's Krazy Kat, 55-year- old cartoons by Tex Avery, the brutal punk style of Gary Panter. But the new batch of Ren & Stimpys fulfills Kricfalusi's promise: he has created the first work of avant-garde abstraction to attract a large TV audience. I don't even find R&S particularly funny, but that doesn't mean I don't think it's great. A -Ken Tucker

30 SUNDAY

SECRET SERVICE in the Secret Service, and NBC is counting on their case files to provide the producers of this new reality series with at least five seasons' worth of tense dramatizations. Don't bet on it. There's a built-in limitation to the Secret Service's greatest hits, and it makes for rather monotonous drama: They're the government's professional Almost Squad. Remember that time an assassin almost took down the President, a deranged computer genius almost caused a huge blackout, a master counterfeiter almost got away with distributing funny money? The Secret Service made sure it didn't happen, and odds are, you'll guess the endings of these half-hour reenactments (two per show) more often than not. The first two segments of Secret Service, with host Steven Ford (son of Gerald, alumnus of The Young and the Restless and veteran of Service protection), were fairly compelling, with a welcome supply of weird gadgetry and arcane forensic detail. But because the show uses no recurring characters, the agents themselves-our nominal heroes-remain types rather than people, a new set of stoic Joe Fridays every week who get stuck with the show's worst lines (''He's here-I can feel it,'' ''Your partner's singing like a jaybird,'' and so on). As a result, Secret Service is an odd hybrid, not as illuminating as a documentary, and not as much fun as what it clearly aspires to be-a high-tech cop show. C -MH