‘LIME STREET’ TO DEBUT ON A SAD NOTE

“Lime Street,” the new ABC series starring Robert Wagner, premieres tonight on a note of sadness--the loss of one of its young co-stars, Samantha Smith. She died in an Aug. 25 plane crash in Maine that also claimed the lives of her father and six others.

The 13-year-old schoolgirl, who played one of Wagner’s two daughters (Maia Brewton, 7, plays the other), is featured in tonight’s 90-minute premiere. She had filmed four other episodes before her death.

Those also will be broadcast, says one of the show’s three executive producers, Linda Bloodworth, adding that she and all of Smith’s colleagues still mourn the child’s death.

ABC spokesmen, faced with the inevitable questions about how the show’s story line will deal with her death, or whether the role she played will be filled by another young actress, have consistently said they don’t know yet.

“We’ll probably sit down and discuss it next week,” Bloodworth said when asked these questions in a telephone interview. The most likely course, she said, will be to hire another actress to play the role.

“We haven’t seen anybody,” she said referring to holding auditions, but recasting the part “probably would seem the way to go.”

“I can’t imagine writing it (the role) out, because Samantha created it,” she added, calling her an untypical girl who had beautifully portrayed a typical 13-year-old.

Smith first achieved national fame two years ago when she wrote then-Soviet President Yuri V. Andropov, expressing her concern for world peace and asking him, “Why do you want to conquer the whole world, or at least our country?”

Andropov denied this and invited her on an all-expenses-paid visit to the Soviet Union. She and her family accepted. She never met him, but received a much-publicized tour of a kind normally reserved for high-ranking diplomats.

Upon her return to the United States, she appeared on talk shows, hosted a 90-minute special for the Disney Channel and later made her acting debut on an episode of CBS’ “Charles in Charge.”

She was signed as a regular on “Lime Street,” in which Wagner plays a single parent who lives with his two daughters on a farm in Virginia and works as an investigator for a large, London-based insurance company.