1ST-PLACE NBC: THERE’LL BE SOME CHANGES MADE

NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, vowing that NBC will not rest on its prime-time ratings laurels, says three new sitcoms will join its roster in March and that its “Sunday Night at the Movies” will take eight weeks off, starting March 2.

He also said that because of letters from a USC student and other fans of “Miami Vice,” closer attention is being paid to that series to remedy their gripes that it has gone downhill lately--and has emphasized style over substance.

And he said that he probably erred in appearing in a season-opening “Saturday Night Live” spoof of urine tests to detect drug use by professional baseball players. (The skit was perceived negatively by many critics and viewers; it will be cut from the show’s rerun in March).

He said all this Monday in a 65-minute session with out-of-town TV writers at the Century Plaza Hotel, where the three networks and PBS are taking turns displaying their stars, executives and new shows through Jan. 17.

Tartikoff, whose network is basking in its current first-place standing in prime-time ratings, said the new comedies star series veterans: NBC sportscaster Merlin Olsen, Jack Klugman and Valerie Harper.

Olsen’s new show is “Fathers and Sons,” a family comedy. Harper’s effort bears the title “Valerie,” while Klugman’s new venture, based on a British series called “Home to Roost,” is untitled.

Tartikoff, who also announced that “Late Night With David Letterman” has been renewed through January, 1987, appeared relaxed and confident in his meet-the-press session.

Still, he seemed to be engaging in a bit of ambiguity no doubt intended to keep CBS--currently second in the nightly Nielsen ratings--guessing about what NBC will do after February’s ratings “sweeps” period.

He didn’t announce specific premiere dates for the new comedies, nor did he specify on which night Stephen J. Cannell’s new “The Last Precinct” will start its weekly run after its Jan. 26 premiere following NBC’s Super Bowl telecast.

All that still is under consideration, he said. So is a new time period for “Remington Steele,” which he said remains a “very vital show” and will have a new home in March. That series is being displaced in its current Tuesday slot by NBC News’ “American Almanac” on March 4.

The Sunday movie time slot being vacated for two months will be used to test audience reaction to episodes of new and current series, Tartikoff said. But he didn’t say if movies will be back (a spokesman later said “current plans” call for their return).

There was nothing ambiguous about those “Miami Vice” letters. They showed that viewer letters do matter sometimes, at least judging from Tartikoff’s frank admission that some “Vice” episodes this season had strayed from such basics as telling a good story.

The letters probably filled “a couple of duffel bags,” he said, and they complained “that the stories had become illiterate” and that there was “too much reliance on style and not enough on substance.”

He couldn’t recall the name of the USC student who wrote a particularly “cogent letter” about the neon-lit cop show. But all the letters were shared with the series’ executive producer, Michael Mann, he said, and efforts are being made to bring the show back to its former luster.

Mann had been away from the show for several months, filming a theatrical movie, but is back overseeing its quality control, Tartikoff said.

He blamed the problems cited by viewers on a tight shooting schedule and on “some miscommunication” caused by the fact the show is a bicoastal effort, with its production unit in Miami and its supervisory staff in Los Angeles.

Although scripts “making sense” had been dispatched from Los Angeles, he said, some people--he didn’t name them--on the “Vice” unit in Miami “were shooting stuff and not putting it into the final picture, or deciding there on the spot to change some things.”

Script changes on location aren’t unusual, he said, but after the complaints, “we tried to reinforce . . . the need for telling a story to go with all of the colors and the glitz and the style.”

Now, about Tartikoff’s “Saturday Night Live” turn.

He said that producer Lorne Michaels asked him to fill in after he couldn’t get Chevy Chase or Bill Murray--two noted “Saturday Night” alumni--to guest-host the start of the series’ 11th season last fall.

Tartikoff said he agreed to be the guest host, and while he thought that his drug-test skit skirted “certain grounds of good taste,” he considered it in the rowdy spirit of the original show.

Not a wise idea, he wryly conceded to the visiting critics: “I realized from your reactions and other reactions . . . that there was probably some error in that judgment.”

NBC’s press tour concluded on Tuesday, with third-place ABC starting its three-day turn today when Brandon Stoddard, ABC’s new programs chief, meets the press.

Save for Stoddard’s scheduled appearance, ABC’s interview lineup is notable for its lack of top executives from ABC or Capital Cities Communications Inc., which bought the network for $3.5 billion last year. The Cap Cities takeover became official last week, and the merged companies are now known as Capital Cities/ABC Inc.