WHIMSY AND DARING IN ‘THE WIZARD’

We’re off to see the wizard.

” . . . In your imagination--that’s the best place to play,” says Simon McKay, who has dreams in his eyes. Nice thought. Nice wizard. So far, nice series.

“The Wizard” is the first of the 1986-87 season’s new network series to debut, an hour adventure arriving at 8 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8). Simon (David Rappaport) is no Oz-like wizard hiding behind a facade and faking omnipotence to keep his subjects in line. He’s a dwarf scientist/toy-maker who uses his remarkable skills and powers of concentration to please kids and help friends out of scrapes. In fact, Simon is so valuable that the government has assigned agent Alex Jagger (Doug Barr) to be his companion. Uh oh.

Alex is strait-laced and logical, Simon fun-loving and impulsive, hence the potential for TV’s favorite banality--clashing opposites--looms enormously. Based on an initial sampling, though, “The Wizard” will yield far more pleasures than cliches.

Tonight’s premiere has Simon repelling would-be kidnapers while traveling afar to seek help for a little boy dying of leukemia. Man and boy establish a tender kinship based on honesty, the dwarf noting his own smallness, the child wondering about an early death. “We’ve all got something in common,” says Simon. “We’re all different.”

As for the little boy’s fate, you should know right off that this series is no downer and that Simon is a miracle-making wizard of happy endings.

In another episode, he goes to Hong Kong (actually a sound stage) to bail out his friend Tillie Russell (Fran Ryan), who thereafter becomes his housekeeper. To save her, though, he has to outsmart an evil genius plotting to cause an earthquake.

“The Wizard” has pleasing tints and tones, partly because of some delightful lines that executive producers/writers Michael Berk and Douglas Schwartz have given Simon, but largely because of the Cockney Rappaport (“Time Bandits”), an appealing actor who gives the character a sense of whimsy and daring. Whatta wiz.

Rappaport is a pioneer, probably the first little person to have the lead in a dramatic series. The smaller set’s TV presence in adult roles has been sporadic, ranging from the late, brilliant Michael Dunn as Robert Conrad’s Moriarty in “The Wild Wild West” to Herve Villechaize in “Fantasy Island,” with not much in between. Rappaport may have gone further than anyone in liberating little persons from TV’s size ghetto.

There are few miracles in TV, though. So “The Wizard,” despite its virtues, is not nearly as good as it could be. There are a few too many short jokes, and even as it attempts to celebrate the power of imagination, its biggest flaw is lack of imagination. Its dreams are small, its special effects slight.

Tonight’s story does feature perhaps TV’s first good-guys-pursued-by-bad-guys-pursued-by-good-guys’-remote-control-toy-car chase. And in a coming episode, Simon invokes “Grunt,” a toy ball housing a miniature Hercules who bends back cell bars and frees the wizard and his friends.

All of this is very pleasing, but not very ingenious or thrilling or Simonizing. Remember: “ . . . In your imagination--that’s the best place to play.”