WHY CAN’T TV BE MORE LIKE COKE?

The really encouraging thing about the Coca-Cola company’s decision to bring back the original Coke formula, after storms of anguished protest, is that a big fat company has come right out and, essentially, admitted having made a big fat mistake. Coke heard the shrieking voice of public opinion and acted accordingly.

Now if we could only get television networks to behave that way. It’s time they admitted they have made dreadful blunders, that often the programs they cancel are the ones they should keep on, and vice versa.

Actually, a television network beat Coke to the self-punch. CBS admitted in March, 1984, that it had acted hastily and harshly in canceling “Cagney & Lacey,” the four-fisted, two-woman cop show, and returned it to the airwaves after, as a CBS spokesman said, “intense public demand.”

In the TV season just concluded, “Cagney & Lacey” averaged a 16.9 rating and 28 share--good, solid numbers that prove the viewers were right and CBS was wrong to have canceled the show in the first place.

In general, networks do not comport themselves with this kind of civility. NBC turned a callous, deaf ear to those who protested the cancellation of “NBC News Overnight” in December, 1982, after a brief 1 1/2-year run. Linda Ellerbee and her refreshingly smart-alecky wee-hour newscast had become habitual necessities for thousands of night-dwellers and insomniacs. But NBC, on a cost-cutting bender, threw the show overboard.

About the same time it canceled “Overnight,” NBC jettisoned “SCTV Comedy Network,” a late-Friday-night series starring the best and brightest satirical troupe since Sid Caesar’s reign: the SCTV players. They could lampoon everything from talk shows to Japanese monster movies to Sandler & Young.

NBC killed “SCTV” and replaced it with “Friday Night Videos,” a duplication of about 526 other music video shows already on the air. Gets better ratings. Has no soul. NBC will never live down the shame. Indeed, some people still haven’t forgiven NBC for canceling “Star Trek” in 1969, the bums.

ABC is the champ of networks when it comes to premature cancellation. Now third-rated in prime time, ABC earned that status the old-fashioned way: It screwed up. Certainly it can’t help that every time a promising comedy show turns up on ABC, ABC executives begin plotting its demise.

Most unkindly cut of all was the brilliantly silly “Police Squad!” a mere six episodes of which aired in early 1982. Fashioned out of cop show cliches of the ‘50s and ‘60s by the madhouse team that wrote and directed the first “Airplane!” movie, “Police Squad!” starred Leslie Nielsen and Alan North in that year’s funniest, looniest comedy.

Now those original episodes of “Police Squad!” are available on Paramount Home Video cassettes. People can rent them and laugh, and then cry that ABC was so cruel.

ABC also killed the delightful comedy series “The Associates,” starring Martin Short, in 1979, and later gave walking papers to “Bosom Buddies,” after two very funny seasons, in 1982. “Buddies” can be seen in reruns on many independent stations this summer. One of the two nimble cut-ups who starred in it, Tom Hanks, has gone on to become a hot property at the movie box office.

Networks, as we all know, are run by mean and vicious philistines who sit in swank offices all day reading numbers off charts, drinking dry martinis and laughing fiendishly, like Snidely Whiplash. (Come to think of it, two networks canceled “The Bullwinkle Show”!) Maybe they are just stupid, rather than mean.

Either way, what Coke has done has made it easier for all companies, networks included, to say they’re sorry.

But don’t hold your breath.