TELEVISION: Network Scramble

As the Big Three frantically strategize their new schedules for the fall, they've neglected one thing: good shows

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A choice time period is the only reason why NBC's Madman of the People, starring Dabney Coleman as a dyspeptic magazine columnist, has been widely tapped as the season's most likely new hit. Coleman's misanthropic TV persona has not proved very successful in prime time (Buffalo Bill and The "Slap" Maxwell Story both flopped), and his show is undergoing last-minute retooling, which means critics are supposed to keep mum until the mediocre pilot episode is revamped. Still, the sitcom is a good bet for success because it has been awarded the time slot after Seinfeld that was vacated by Frasier.

Coleman is just one of several established stars who have been coaxed into sitcoms this fall. NBC has rounded up Gene Wilder to headline his first TV show, Something Wilder, in which he plays the father of preschool twins. But his frazzled good humor doesn't compensate for a thoroughly ordinary comedy. Dudley Moore is equally ill served in CBS's Daddy's Girls, about a newly divorced businessman whose three grown daughters pester him while he tries to resuscitate his sex life. Only Martin Short seems to have taken control of his TV fate. His NBC sitcom The Martin Short Show casts him essentially as himself, the star of a TV comedy show. This allows him to sneak in some of his familiar characters and other comedy bits (Ed Grimley in a parody of the movie Dave). With the late addition of SCTV veteran Andrea Martin and Saturday Night Live's Jan Hooks to the cast (Short's is another pilot being revamped), the series promises more fun than any other new comedy this fall.

No fun at all are most of the other new family sitcoms. Parents -- and particularly mothers -- seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate. Stand-up comic Steve Harvey plays a widowed father of three in ABC's sappy Me and the Boys. In On Our Own, seven orphaned children fend for themselves while trying to keep social workers from sending them into foster homes ("I don't even know the Fosters," cracks one tyke). Fox's Party of Five has virtually the same premise: five San Francisco youngsters cope after their parents are killed in an auto accident. Though scarcely more plausible than On Our Own, this brood is at least responsible enough to worry about the mortgage payments. Kids, don't try this at home, but as a fantasy of family togetherness in extremis, Party of Five turns out to be oddly engaging.

Togetherness ad absurdum seems to be the idea behind Friends, a phony-to- the-core twentysomething sitcom on NBC. The show revolves around half a dozen postcollegiate pals (equally divided between the sexually bumbling and the sexually insatiable) who apparently have unlimited time to hang out at the local coffee bar and an unlimited capacity for sharing intimate sexual experiences with the entire group. This earnestly flaky show from the creators of Dream On runs the gamut from '30s romantic farce to Seinfeldian trivia -- the premiere show opens with a runaway bride and ends with two characters bonding over an Oreo cookie -- without being believable for a moment. ABC's All-American Girl is less of a confection but little more appetizing. Korean- American stand-up comic Margaret Cho stars as a hang-loose college student living with immigrant parents who chide her constantly to have respect for the "old traditions." Cho has some Valley-girl charm, but the show plays too much like an after-school special on cultural assimilation.

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