ABC’S STOCKING-CAP CAPERS WEAR THIN

This is TV history: the first time that two series premiering on consecutive nights on the same network each have a major character who wears a black stocking cap.

Are ABC’s “Spenser: For Hire” (10 tonight) and “Hollywood Beat” (8 Saturday night) the beginning of a major fashion trend?

Will ABC’s shrewd stocking-cap strategy work against the Friday night clothes horses on NBC’s smash “Miami Vice?”

Will Robert Wagner--whose “Lime Street” series premieres at 9:30 Saturday night on ABC, but was unavailable for preview--also wear a stocking cap?

Drawn from Robert B. Parker’s detective novels, the hero of tonight’s two-hour, six-shooting, three-slugging, four-corpse premiere of “Spenser: For Hire” is a stocking-capped renaissance sleuth, a smug, arrogant, pedantic, condescending Boston private eye for all seasons and no earthly reasons.

He’s an insufferable bore who knows everyone on the streets and everyone in high places. Why? Because he’s . . . Spenser!

He cooks. He boxes. He reads. He knows everything. Why? Because he’s . . . Spenser! . He doesn’t talk; he pontificates, pouring out a continuous gurgle of truisms. He would never say, “You’re old.” That would be too simple. He says, “Some people grow old, but they never seem to grow up.” He would never say, “You understand?” He says, “Put down the playbook and read the defense.” He would never say, “You’re too zealous.” He says, “Zeal distorts people. It makes them . . . loveless and finally monsters.”

And every time he opens his mouth, you want to put a pillow over his face. Why? Because he’s . . . Spenser!

Spenser is played by Robert Urich, a capable actor who you always feel should be doing something better than he’s doing, but he never does. The show is shot in Boston and has a nice cinematic look. But the writing is so bad and the role so camp that you could substitute Bill Murray for Urich and not miss a beat.

Spenser is tough, but sensitive. He buys a flower, but does he stick it in his stocking cap? No. He puts it in the vendor’s hair and says, “To me, this flower can give thoughts too deep for tears.”

Pleeeeeeze, ABC, give us a break.

Tonight’s story has Spenser being hired to find the runaway wife of a seemingly wealthy businessman. To make a very, very, very long story mercifully short, he finds her, takes her to his place, cooks her a meal and shows her his books. She makes a pass at him because he’s Spenser, but he turns her down because he knows that her zeal can distort her and turn her into a loveless monster. Well it can .

Meanwhile, the police (Richard Jaeckel plays the latest in TV’s long line of schnook cops) naturally arrive too late to do anything but wonder at Spenser’s brilliance.

Bottom line, though, “Spenser: For Hire” is yet another series about a self-styled vigilante who operates outside an establishment portrayed as incapable of meeting society’s needs. On the one hand, Spencer abhors violence. On the other hand, he engages in it.

You wouldn’t want to say that this is a bad series, only that there can be no profit in a mockery that mouths the word and obstructs every effort on the part of an honest people to establish television for the welfare of the people.

Spenser would appreciate that.

“Hollywood Beat” is coppertainment: goofy, off-the-wall, wacko undercover cops who sling more wisecracks than lead.

But this series is no joke.

It bows in with a 90-minute, three-shooting, two explosion, one-slugging, two corpse pilot that reeks of gratuitous violence, slime and mixed messages. Is that the ticket for an 8 p.m. time slot available to kids?

Subsequent hour episodes will emphasize more humor and less violence, according to the producers, but the general tone is not significantly affected, judging by a future episode made available for preview.

Jack Rado and Nick McCarren (he’s the one in the stocking cap) are two more of TV’s renegade cops, working the Hollywood strip, a vile world of hookers, girlie joints and other varieties of sleaze. NBC has “Miami Vice” and ABC has Hollywood Lice.

Rado and McCarren break the law to maintain the law. In the course of investigating the murders of street people, they destroy private property, drive on sidewalks, run red lights, crash through gates and park on the wrong sides of the streets.

And McCarren must be sweltering in his stocking cap.

Playing Rado is Jay Acovone, a good actor who is short and unshaven. Playing McCarren is Jack Scalia, a so-so actor who is tall and handsome. Together they’re Starsky and Hunk.

A later episode of “Hollywood Beat” is indeed less violent and more lighthearted in telling the story of a private eye who gets involved in a diamond theft. But it is just as obnoxious, with a view of life that is just as ugly as that of the premiere. There are so many squealing car chases you get the impression that half the show’s budget went for tires.

The show plays it cute, suggesting violence, while keeping actual violence at a minimum. There is shooting with no deaths, and at one point, Rado, McCarren and the private eye go off a bridge in their open convertible without getting even scratched.

“Hollywood Beat” is from producer Aaron Spelling, who became a successful TV showman by offering the public solid, harmless, middle-brow escapist entertainment. With a show like this, though, he is far afield. And with a show like this, ABC deserves to occupy the sewer it is showing on the screen.