RESOLVED: SOME NO-NOS FOR THE NETWORKS IN ’85

The new year promises exciting horizons and soaring achievements. This is no time for skeptics. So onward and upward! Uh . . . there are, however, a few things that I could do without in 1985. Please. . . :

--No more Wheaties commercials starring Mary Lou (You Know Who). In fact, no more of anything starring Mary Lou Retton, the Madison Avenue and media Olympic heroine who is piling up a slew of lucrative commercial endorsements.

She is surely a very nice girl. Any teen-ager who doesn’t have green hair is all right with me. But enough is enough.

That freeze-dried smile is just begging to be decorated with a painted mustache. If I see it one more time. . . .

There is a blurry line separating image makers and overkill artists. The smoothies in charge of transforming Retton into a national institution are in the latter group. Remove the gloss and she is merely a talented gymnast whose greatest visible assets--teeth and exuberance--wear thin after multiple showings. Her TV exposure will increase, and she’ll make a bundle, for sure. But she’s on her way to getting a bad case of overexposure and mediaburn.

Retton and Edwin Moses were on the cover of Sports Illustrated as that magazine’s sportswoman and sportsman of 1984. You can make a good case for Moses, the great Olympian who has compiled an astounding record in track.

But Retton, who won only one gold medal? Why not Valerie Brisco-Hooks, who won three gold medals in track. Or Martina Navratilova, whose present domination of women’s tennis may never be matched?

Why not? Because neither is the fresh-scrubbed all-American media doll that Retton is. She is being celebrated chiefly for her popularity. Or perhaps she merely reflects TV’s current chic: small people. Haven’t you noticed? People on TV are getting smaller and smaller.

I’ve got an idea for a wonderful new sitcom:

Mary Lou Retton, Gary Coleman, Danny DeVito, Clara Peller, Emmanuel Lewis, Miss Piggy, Herve Villechaize and Dr. Ruth Westheimer are adopted by a couple played by Boy George and Brooke Shields. Are you ready? “Diff’rent Blokes.”

Meanwhile, getting back to 1985 no-nos:

--No more TV hype of Doug Flutie. Flutie, the terrific Boston College quarterback, won the 1984 Heisman Trophy. Bravo! Well deserved. Seems to be a nice man. If only it would stop there. If only sportscasters wouldn’t go on and on. But no way.

Flutie may be a great athlete, but he is not Alexander the Great, as Lindsey Nelson (who was probably reading a script written by someone else) made him sound like on CBS at the opening of Tuesday’s Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

Until then, the most overblown description of an athlete I’d encountered was a Minneapolis paper’s headline over a baseball story describing a winning hit by then-Minnesota Twin Cesar Tovar: “Cesar Came . . . Cesar Saw . . . Cesar Conquered.”

But that was nothing compared with Flutie’s buildup on CBS. Here is an excerpt: “The Heisman Trophy would be his . . . as would a city . . . as would a nation.” Only a nation? Why not all humanity? Why not the universe?

All this for a guy named . . . Flutie?

--No more talk about an automatic fall season prime-time ratings explosion for the network that wins the rights to telecast the Summer Olympics. The Olympics may have done wonders for Mary Lou Retton, but the final accounting was grim for ABC’s prime time.

The Games are supposed to be a golden time for promotion. But remember those irritating promos for its new fall series that ABC repeatedly ran during the Games, trying to exploit the massive audience tuned into for the Olympics?

Almost all of its new series have gone down the drain.

--No more Michael Jackson. Enough said.

--No more post-season junk bowls on TV. The TV money is a big incentive for bowl organizers and universities, so big an incentive that there are now more bowls than quality teams to fill them. When even Army plays in a televised bowl game, you know it’s time to cut back.

--No more series starring machines. We’ve had crime-fighting computerized cars, choppers, motorcycles and even “Automan.” What’s next? “The Battle of the Network Machines?” A soap opera about a rich family of oil derricks in Dallas? Two big white machines adopting a little black machine? Well, close.

One of the syndicated series now being pitched to stations across the nation is a comedy about a family that adopts a little girl who is a . . . a . . . robot.

We seem to be nearing a time when the biggest threat facing TV characters is rust.

--No more unimaginative series. Let’s have some creativity here. Once again, I’m going to give network programmers some help. But this is the last time, understand!

The premise: A deeply religious Jewish couple are crushed when their free-spirited son converts to Catholicism. The title: “Goy George.”