MANNIX LIVES!

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

MAC SWIFT IS THE KIND OF COP who doesn't have to worry about pockmarks. Unlike the physically imperfect lawmen who now populate prime-time TV--the Dennis Franzes and Jerry Orbachs--Mac's skin is invincibly smooth. Nothing, it seems, can scar him as he dodges punches and pummels bat-wielding thugs with an assured agility that seems to say, "Hey, I'd look even better toppling Christy Turlington on a sandbar in Maui." Happily for Mac, his appearance isn't all he has going for him. Smart enough to have developed an immensely profitable software program, this New York City police officer lives not in some aluminum-sided row house in Queens but rather in a vast SoHo loft replete with abstract paintings and expensive sheets. Sure, he has problems--like a stiff, play-by-the-rules police chief--but they're never anything that a blond and a good Merlot can't help him solve.

Swift (Jack McCaffrey), the hero of the new drama Swift Justice (UPN, Wednesdays, 9 p.m. est), belongs to another television era, a time before cop shows like NYPD Blue, Homicide and Law & Order grounded the genre in reality with unglamorously complex characters and somber portrayals of urban life. But to all good things must come a backlash. And so Swift Justice harks back to a period of frequent car chases, poorly staged punch-outs and cartoonishly evil bad guys.

Mac is not the only retro, Mannix-style lawman to pop up on the midseason schedule spouting lines like, "You want to kill me, huh? Kill me. Show me how stupid you are." Last week also marked the arrival of Nash Bridges, centerpiece of an eponymously titled series (CBS, Fridays, 10 p.m. est) about a San Francisco police inspector who races around in a 1970 Barracuda and combats the bad guys with tough talk ("I don't give a damn about you boys--but this guy, his ass is mine"), swift kicks and an occasional disabling spritz of WD-40 right to the eye. In a priceless nod to nostalgia, Bridges is played by TV's best-known exemplar of rose-tinted crime fighting--yes, Don Johnson.

Nash Bridges. Mac Swift. Like Thomas Magnum and Tony Baretta, these names imply a benighted sense of macho can do-ness. Not surprisingly, perhaps, both shows wallow in an anachronistic treatment of women. For the most part they are portrayed as victims-either of Bridges' noncommittal ways or of nasty evildoers from whom they need Y-chromosome-enhanced protection. Prostitutes in danger turn up on both shows, looking not at all as they do on the streets of the grittiest precincts in urban America, or even as they do on NYPD Blue. Waifish and fresh-faced, they resemble well-educated publishing assistants saving up for a smart twin set.

Not much better in this regard is High Incident, a recently launched ABC police series (Mondays, 9 p.m. est). Fortunately, no character is named High or Incident. But despite a high-class pedigree--the show is produced by the Dreamworks team of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, with creative guidance from monologist Eric Bogosian--High Incident maintains an embarrassingly CHiPs-like feel as its cast of eight Ray-Ban-wearing patrol-car cops meander about a fictional Los Angeles suburb responding to wacky calls.

This is an ensemble series, but first among equals is Sergeant Jim Marsh (David Keith), a square-jawed, militaristic type who pulls people over for picking their noses. Like Nash Bridges, he has a bevy of ex-wives. In the first episode we find him groping a female colleague after a night of drunken carousing. His view of women is hardly modern, and neither is the writers'. For instance, Marsh has little tolerance for the mishaps of another female colleague, Gayle Van Camp (Catherine Kellner), who is so desperate to be one of the boys that she seems teleported from a pre--Cagney & Lacey universe. Her greatest trauma in life, we learn, is that she failed the physical-strength test that would have made her a Marine.

Catering to male fantasy is seemingly the point of these regressive new police dramas. All three series are vastly more violent than any other cop shows currently on network television, where the trend has been to keep the killing and maiming offscreen. In one episode of Swift Justice, we see more than a half-dozen people get shot to death, blown up and, in one scene, deliberately hit by golf balls. Sad but true. Justice was created by Dick Wolf, the producer responsible for the far more sophisticated Law & Order. "There are guys out there, 18-to-34-year-olds, who want car chases, gunfire and action," says Wolf. "They are an audience who weren't being served." So now they'll have more to enjoy than just reruns of Starsky and Hutch on TNT.