Past Due

''The Rerun Show'' (NBC) A cast of comic actors takes actual scripts from shows like ''Different Strokes'' and ''The Facts of Life'' and performs them, verbatim. The idea is that, heard now, these already-junky old sitcoms will be even more ludicrous, funny, and yet somehow heartwarming (harking back to a more innocent time, perhaps?). But in practice, ''The Rerun Show'' is too jaded in its tone; casting mostly-male actors in the mostly-female ''Facts of Life'' show, for example, just makes cross-dressing into a joke that runs out of steam fast, and the actors exaggerate lines that weren't knee-slappers the first time around, rendering them even less amusing.

''The Twilight Zone'' (UPN) Forrest Whitaker (''Bird'') replaces the late Rod Serling in another attempt to revive this classic suspense anthology (there have been attempts at starting it up again in '85 and '87, with poor results). As always, the key to ''Zone'' isn't so much the acting as the writing -- are there enough imaginative, hungry young writers out there ready to try a scare the pants off us, or to disturb us as Serling did with some of his peerless mini-parables of morality and mortality?

''Family Affair'' (The WB) Tim Curry is going to take Sebastian Cabot's role as the fussy manservant to a rich bachelor gent (Gary Cole, in for the late Brian Keith) whose mischievous nieces and nephew come to live with him. The theme music is the same as the 1966-71 series, but will a new generation buy into the gentle, kids-being-naughty, Curry-being-exasperated humor? Hey, the same network's assiduously old-fashioned ''7th Heaven'' is stil going strong, isn't it?

Finally, NBC has announced it's going to do a new version of the '60s comedy-music show ''The Monkees,'' in which singers and actors who hadn't met previously were cast as a Beatles-ish pop group to great success. The new version is going to add elements of ''American Idol'' and ''The Real World'' to the mix, by showing us the casting process, and the group living together. My question is, is anybody going to write these youngsters a song as catchy as ''Pleasant Valley Sunday''?