American Notes TELEVISION

The formats will be familiar: game shows, music videos, news programs. But the source will be a shock: live from Moscow. When the 14 million customers of the Discovery Channel (TDC) cable system turn to their TV sets this week, they can tune in broadcasts of Soviet television, decoded from satellite transmissions. The network, based in Landover, Md., is carrying 66 hours of Soviet programming, most of it untranslated but with explanatory textual crawls. Only the nightly news show Vremya (Time) will be delayed, subtitled and shown during the U.S. evening hours.

By no coincidence, the programming will overlap the ABC-TV mini-series Amerika, which portrays a Soviet takeover of the U.S. But Moscow's participation in TDC broadcasts was limited to waiving the copyright restrictions.