Lunks, Hunks and Arkifacts

By JAY COCKS

A couple of unlikely private eyes top the new fall season

On their way to tacking together television's new season, the networks have at least cleared up one mystery. Raiders of the Lost Ark, fans will recall, ended inside a huge warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with wooden cartons marked "Top Secret." The networks have sneaked onto those premises, crowbarred off the lids and let the world see what was in the packing boxes: knockoffs.

Audiences, who are far more tolerant in front of a tube than a theater screen, may wring a reasonable amount of fun from Bring 'Em Back Alive (CBS, Tuesdays, 8 p.m. E.S.T.), which appropriates the dashing slogan, cut-to-measure mythos and even the name of the 1930s animal hunter Frank Buck. Mounted like an old Republic serial, the slap-happy adventure show boasts a congenial leading man in Bruce Boxleitner. He is required to trap all manner of jungle animals without doing them physical harm and, not incidentally, battle Nazis, Asian warlords and assorted jetsam that floats past Malaya.

Elsewhere in the South Seas of the '30s, TV viewers will come upon Jake Cutter, mainstay of the Tales of the Gold Monkey (ABC, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.S.T.), who is not as burly as Buck, and is subject to occasional bouts of malaria besides. A hard-times flyboy with a beat-up leather jacket and a Terry and the Pirates cap, Cutter finds himself enmeshed, often to his considerable chagrin, in a variety of exotic adventures having to do with lost treasures and old legends. Cutter, attractively played by Stephen Collins, darts around in a wreck of a seaplane and tends to have rather more extravagant adventures than Frank Buck, although the show's budget is frequently hard pressed to match the inventions of its writers.

These two shows share a certain fitful buoyancy of spirit that, on a good night, can make for a quiet laugh and an easy hour. And they may even suggest that television is doing better imitating the movies than cannibalizing itself. Police shows, a usually reliable network staple, have pretty much come a cropper--or, under the circumstances, anything but a copper. Brian Devlin (Rock Hudson) on The Devlin Connection (NBC, Saturdays, 10 p.m. E.S.T.) is head of a huge culture complex in Los Angeles who does some investigating with his son on the side. As played by Robert Urich, Gavilan (NBC, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) is a crime-busting oceanographer more at ease in a wet suit than a trench coat. And the Tuckers (Tim Matheson, Catherine Ricks) on Tucker's Witch (CBS, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.S.T), although carrying P.I. credentials, have to rely for investigative inspiration on Ms. Tucker's erratic supernatural skills. All of them are in serious need of some vocational guidance.

Matt Houston (ABC, Sundays, 8 p.m. E.S.T.) is a megarich Texan who seems to have gone into the crime-busting business because he saw too much television. As played, with some finesse, by Lee Horsley, Houston looks a little like Tom Selleck, sounds a lot like James Garner and apparently borrows his wardrobe from J.R. Ewing. Houston has all sorts of technological niceties at his fingertips, from a computer to a whirlybird. At least he has the good taste to not get caught up in the futuristic excesses of Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff), who, in Knight Rider (NBC, Fridays, 9 p.m. E.S.T), plays second banana to a talking black supercar.

Knight Rider may demonstrate a certain brazen, even desperate, retooling of stock elements that have already become television cliches. Remington Steele (NBC, Fridays, 10 p.m. E.S.T.), on the face of it, hardly seems more promising. But on prolonged acquaintance, it shows every sign of being the brightest, freshest television caper since Columbo. Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist) is an ambitious, adventure-hungry private eye whose phone never rang until she invented a partner who was, naturally, male (she got his name from marrying an electric shaver to a football team) and who would nominally solve all her cases. Clients flocked. Then an incessantly self-admiring bunko artist figured out Laura's canny fraud and threatened to expose her unless she let him become Steele, with appropriate office space and elaborate perks.

The new Steele (Pierce Brosnan) is a scorcher for looks but a bit of a dim bulb in the brains department. Of course, he learns fast, usually while blundering through the most delicate stages of Laura's investigations. Of course, Steele takes credit for solving every crime. And of course, contrary to all her best instincts, Laura starts to get hung up for real on her own fantasy.

This is another show from MTM Enterprises and has many of the house hallmarks: askew humor, good pace that is not in too much of a hurry for character, smart acting, quirky scripts. One recent show, written by Lee Zlotoff and directed by Jeff Bleckner, borrowed, with shrewd and subtle acknowledgment, not only a plot device but a character from Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and did its source no dishonor. That is playing in the big leagues. But with the blithe charms of Zimbalist and Brosnan, Remington Steele is shaping up as championship stuff. --By Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.