The Blackboard Jumble

By JAY COCKS

Networks start the new season by going back to school

It is that sunny, uncertain time of year on the offshore islands of network television. The new season has just been launched, and the vice presidents of programming are watching the skies. The winds can blow balmy in these weeks or the weather can turn cruel. The season is young enough for any new show even a thrice-cloned knock-off from an already enervated formula, to have a shot at success. At the same time, the season is far enough along--and computers, demographics and ratings systems so sophisticated--that storm clouds filled with cancellations are already gathering on the horizon.

As this year's line-up unfolds (the last of the new shows, depending on the duration of the World Series, may not appear until late October), certain patterns have already emerged. One cornerstone show is Ripley's Believe It or Not!, starring Jack Palance as a sort of host-narrator who guides the gullible down shadowy byways of history, folklore, sociology and pseudo science. Palance, who has the congeniality of Robert Louis Stevenson's body snatcher, goes in for twisted smiles of irony, as if he were trying to bite open a marble. He is the only presiding television host who actually seems to pronounce ellipses. When he says, "Witness the death rites of a Balinese prince in a fiery ceremony designed to release his soul for reincarnation," each dot of the ellipsis seems to detonate on the soundtrack like a small grenade.

The show (ABC, Sunday, 7-8 p.m. E.D.T.) is thoughtful enough to provide identifying labels for those viewers who may be getting their diploma through a matchbook correspondence course: Isadora Duncan is described as "the controversial dancer," Balzac and Proust, in no uncertain terms, as "French novelists," and Thus Spake Zarathustra as "the famous composition by Richard Strauss."

Ripley's signals a small trend among new shows to package a little educational value and, indeed, to use school as a significant backdrop. Voyagers!--exclamation marks appear to be a la mode this year-even ends with a plug to send the youngsters out to the library, where they can get the full scoop on some of the history the show has skimmed. A sort of hybrid of You Are There and the film Time Bandits, Voyagers! (NBC, Sunday, 7-8 p.m.) features Jon-Erik Hexum as a pilgrim from the future who crash-lands in the apartment of a lonely city boy (Meeno Peluce). Hexum, who is rigged out in knee boots, tight trou and leather jerkin, looks to have lost his way en route to a community-theater production of The Pirates of Penzance, but convinces the incredulous Peluce of his credentials by whisking him off to Egypt, 1450 B.C., where they discover Moses in the bulrushes; France, 1918, where they frolic during World War Iand Dayton, where they peek in on a couple of querulous Wright brothers and help get them flying. The youngster, of course knows all about history, while the oft-addled time traveler ("Smokin' bats-breath! This isn't 1492!") makes up in grit what he lacks in gray matter.

Peluce's character is so precocious, in fact, that he might skip a few grades and go right into the senior class at Crestridge High, where the calendar reads "Autumn 1982" but all available evidence indicates a stopover in the late 1950s. Crestridge is the sort of happy-go-lucky institution where Shelley Fabares ought to be the homecoming queen and Beaver Cleaver the hall monitor. It serves, however, as the unlikely temple of learning for Matthew Star, who is, literally, a space case. Matt (Peter Barton) is, as the opening narration informs, "a typical American teen-ager." It's just that he also happens to hail from Quadris, a distant planet racked by civil war. He has come to earth to hone his telepathic powers in preparation for the day that he and his guardian (the splendid Louis Gossett Jr.) will return home, unseat the usurpers and restore rightful rule to Quadris.

Matt's telepathic powers are useful for getting him out of all sorts of scrapes, including fitful pursuit by the dark forces from Quadris. One of this legion actually enrolls in Crestridge and shows her otherworldly qualities by unnatural rigidity of posture, persistent dilation of the pupils and a refusal to use contractions when speaking Earth talk. For all his telekinetic talents, though, the weirdest thing about The Powers of Matthew Star (NBC, Friday, 8-9 p.m. E.D.T.) is its portrait of adolescent America, all milk snacks and malt shops and homecoming games. Barton is so reminiscent of Donny Osmond that the viewer keeps waiting for him to levitate a can of Hawaiian Punch while whistling God Bless America. These shows may be aimed primarily at teens and preteens, but it is only from the canny nonsense of Square Pegs (CBS, Monday, 8-8:30 p.m.) that such viewers are likely to get a buzz of recognition. Weemawee High, happily, is not in the same time warp as Crestridge; in fact, it might pass for any local school where the students have actually heard of New Wave and use "punks" to mean musicians, not young criminals. Weemawee is a cockeyed canvas of persuasively contemporary adolescence across which Producer Anne Beatts (a former Saturday Night Live writer) and a talented team, including Director Kim Friedman, scrawl assorted sassy jokes, some shrewd send-ups and a few cultural graffiti.

Their heroines are two earnest outcasts, victims of the teen-age uglies (Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Linker), who devote most of their time to unsuccessful assaults on the In crowd. "You know," says the school New Waver admiringly, "I really like you two. You've got no style.

It's a totally different head." The girls grapple with such peers as Muffy Tepperman, the perennially earnest go-getter who organizes a dance so the class can adopt a starving Guatemalan child; Jennifer DeNuccio, a prototypical Valley Girl ("Like ... pass me out the door"); and a drama teacher who wants to stage a show called A Cafeteria Line and exhorts his aspiring actors to "share a trauma with me." Beatts, Friedman and their writers pack solid laughs, a little sentiment and sidelong satire of such youth-oriented enterprises as Grease and Fame all into a fleet half-hour. So far, Square Pegs is the sweetest surprise of the season. --By Jay Cocks

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