THE WEEK

6 FRIDAY REAL LIFE WITH JANE PAULEY (NBC, 8-8:30 p.m.) Season premiere: Up-close and personal with chat queen Oprah Winfrey.

8 SUNDAY

TO SAVE A CHILD (ABC, 9-11 p.m.) A new TV movie about a young mother (Marita Geraghty) who discovers that her seemingly perfect husband (Pete Kowanko) is actually a baby-stealing devil worshiper.

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN (Fox, 9-9:30 p.m.) The show's sixth-season premiere: A pregnant Peg announces that another Bundy is on the way.

DREAM ON (HBO, 10:15-10:45 p.m.) Judith discovers that Martin had a one-night fling back when they were married.

HERMAN'S HEAD (Fox, 9:30-10 p.m.) Sometimes you wonder how these things get past the drawing-board stage. Here we have a new sitcom about an ordinary Joe named Herman (William Ragsdale) and four aspects of his personality: Animal (Ken Hudson Campbell), who represents lust and general John Belushi-like behavior; Genius (Peter Mackenzie), who is Herman's intellect; Angel (Molly Hagan), who stands for compassion; and Wimp (Rick Lawless), who personifies anxiety. They all stroll around in what is supposed to be the inside of-you got it-Herman's head. You can guess every obvious joke in this series debut. Upon meeting an attractive woman, Animal urges Herman to jump her bones, Wimp leads him to think she hates him, Angel wants him to consider the woman's feelings, and Genius is ashamed to be having carnal thoughts in the first place. The show is a claustrophobic disaster. Because they are confined to the inside of Herman's head, the actors stalk around their little set as if trapped in a nightmare play that crosses Our Town with Waiting for Godot. And because he is essentially just a vessel for a quartet of wildly conflicting reactions, Ragsdale's Herman is little more than a quivering lump of indecision. What a bad idea for a show. D- -KT

9 MONDAY

FINAL VERDICT (TNT, 8-10 p.m.) Final Verdict is just good enough, and just frustrating enough, to make you think that the book upon which it's based might be really good. Adela Rogers St. Johns, the famous society columnist, screenwriter, and novelist, wrote this semiautobiographical story about a young girl's entrancement with her father's work. Set in pre-World War I California, Final Verdict stars Treat Williams as colorful criminal lawyer Earl Rogers. Olivia Burnette (NBC's new sitcom The Torkelsons) plays his daughter, Nora, who is so fascinated by the law that Rogers allows her to tag along when he visits prisons to interview accused murderers. Williams here gets to play the sort of intelligent, principled lawyer that he couldn't be in his recent shouting match of a series, Eddie Dodd. He manages to convey both Rogers' shrewd toughness as a defense attorney and his tender adoration of his daughter. The relationship between Earl and Nora is at once sweet and bold-director Jack Fisk (Raggedy Man, Violets Are Blue), overseeing his first TV movie, convinces us that Earl raised Nora to become the proto-feminist that Adela Rogers St. Johns was in real life. But the rest of the movie is structurally unsound. There are subplots about Earl's drinking problem, his troubled relationship with his father (Glenn Ford, in a solid but wasted performance), and his wife's jealousy of Nora; these themes are shoved randomly in between tales of Rogers' courtroom triumphs. The movie's okay, but I'm going to hunt down the book. C+ -KT