Arts Gratia Arfis

TV's candidates for the fall

The Oscars are more glamorous, but in Hollywood there is another spring competition that is just as closely watched: the contest that determines which of the TV pilots will be chosen by the networks for their fall schedules. Right now executives on both coasts are looking at exactly 100 candidates, and from that number perhaps 20 will be chosen. What does next season hold in store? Jocks, cops, flicks and garbage.

According to a survey by Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, Inc., a Manhattan ad agency, just about every sport except tiddlywinks has a shot at a fall spot. Two pilots center on football, one each on baseball and boxing. NBC even has one called Drivel--make that Dribble--to-basketball fans. (CBS, of course, is already jumping for the hoops with The White Shadow.) Eight pilots are based on movies. Among them: Breaking Away, Foul Play, The Goodbye Girl, Between the Lines and Freebie and the Bean. The flick series include Semi-Tough, The Main Event (also in the sport grouping) and Flamingo Road, which is taken from a steamy 1949 Joan Crawford melodrama.

That fashionable subject of sexual role reversal gets some attention. In a series ABC is considering, Once Upon a Spy, a woman plays a James Bond-like character, while her cowardly male partner wants to stay home and play chess. To match the soft-core female pornography of Charlie's Angels, ABC is also looking at a spin-off called Charlie's Devils, with three macho males chasing the baddies. Dancer Fitzgerald does not say what those sexy devils will be wearing, but it probably will be as little as possible. In CBS's Kops, California marshals patrol the coast in shorts and T shirts. Moral: What's saucy for the gander is gravy for the goose.

Blue-collar workers may also get their time on TV. One comedy, Hole 22, goes on below ground, where construction workers are building a subway, and two shows deal with the hilarious goings-on around the garbage truck. Garbage Is My Life may turn up on ABC, and Garbage may air on NBC. Many viewers may have an unhappy sense of dej`a vu. The Silverman network also has a fondness for dogs. Here's Boomer, the saga of the world's smartest mutt, is already on the schedule, and next year it may be frolicking with the world's three smartest Dobermans, the detective stars of--yes--The Dobermans. Arfs gratia arfis.

CBS also wants a room in TV's animal house, and executives there have been watching Ethel Is an Elephant. She is indeed, and she shares a loft with a young Manhattan photographer, who has to fight both the city and his landlord to keep her there. Once he--or the show's writer--finds out about New York's new antilitter pooper-scooper law, he may not fight so hard. But perhaps he is thinking of asking the garbagemen at ABC and NBC to come and help him out.

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