NO SECRET: JESS MARLOW TO RETURN TO CHANNEL 4

It’s Jess Marlow “who’s coming home” to KNBC Channel 4 Nov. 24.

KNBC has launched a mystery ad campaign to promote the return of the calm, reasoned Marlow to Channel 4 as a commentator on its 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts to succeed Jack Perkins. Newspaper ads show the facial outline of an unidentified man beneath the headline: “Guess Who’s Coming Home?”

According to knowledgeable sources, Channel 4 can’t identify Marlow or announce his signing because of a technicality in his contract with KCBS Channel 2, which doesn’t expire until Nov. 22.

So the door continues to revolve. Marlow was a top anchorman at Channel 4 for 14 years before defecting to Channel 2 in 1980. He left Channel 2 this year after rejecting a large cut in his reported $700,000 annual salary, but his contract continued to remain in force. He also objected to the station’s new fragmented, softer news format that would have trimmed his air time.

Neither Marlow nor Channel 4 management would comment on the prospects of Marlow rejoining KNBC. He’s scheduled to arrive at the station, however, in time to catch the end of the important November ratings period.

It remains to be seen if, in purely commercial terms, Channel 2 did the right thing in giving Marlow incentive to leave. It’s also uncertain whether he can command the same respect as a commentator that he did as an anchorman.

All that aside, it’s nice to have him back.

WHO’S SHOW? TV’s funniest, most inventive, most everything you’ve-ever-wanted-in-a-sitcom sitcom--and one that NBC rejected--ends its six-episode run on Showtime cable with a half-hour that will have you wheezing. A word of caution: If you have asthma, do not watch “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.”

Here’s better news.

Showtime has ordered another dozen episodes of Shandling’s show, which airs at 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays. It will go into reruns after tonight’s episode, with the new segments scheduled to begin in mid-January.

There’s nothing else on TV remotely like this wonderful nonsense.

Starring the bachelor Shandling as himself in a fictional setting that’s supposed to be his home, his show is a sitcom within a sitcom within a sitcom. It’s like one of those boxes that hides a series of smaller boxes.

A stand-up comic and former comedy writer, Shandling is a match for David Letterman in mastering the exquisitely absurd. With loosey-goosey, self-effacing wit, he uses the entire studio, on both sides of the camera, to act out whimsical fantasies about his uphill attempts to cope with life. He’s vulnerable, but no schnook, fighting adversity to a draw.

It’s hard to describe Shandling’s expression, either a smiling frown or a frowning smile.

Best of all, his show is unpredictable, the product of brilliantly scripted spontaneity that has you believing that he could pack up and do the same show in your living room. He’s apt to stop at any time and speak to the camera, crew or studio audience.

Taking more and more chances, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” just gets funnier and funnier, and even its few failures are interesting.

Shandling and producer Alan Zweibel wrote last week’s episode, a parody of “The Graduate” that put away yours truly. It seemed that the hot-blooded mother of Garry’s girlfriend, Elaine, was named Mrs. Robertson a la Mrs. Robinson. The episode included a send-up of Mike Nichols’ famous between-Mrs.-Robinson’s-legs shot, and Norman Fell attempted to convince Garry that he played the landlord in “The Graduate” as well as the original landlord on “Three’s Company.”

Written by Janis Hirsch, tonight’s episode is even more creative and eclectic and almost as hilarious. It’s built around Jodi Jones, a real-life employee of a Texarkana, Tex., cable company who won a Showtime affiliate contest to appear on Shandling’s show. Really, she’s legit.

She appears on the show as herself, introduced by Shandling and obviously terrified in front of the cameras as part of an ingeniously banal plot about Garry’s infatuation with an oversexed woman (not Jodi). You just have to see it.

Shandling’s good supporting cast includes Geoffrey Blake, Molly Cheek, Scott Nemes and Michael Tucci. Other key behind-the-scenes people besides Sweibel include executive producers Brad Grey and Bernie Brillstein (“Buffalo Bill”), co-producer Vic Kaplan and director Alan Rafkin.

Above all, though, it’s Garry Shandling’s show.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: There were reports that last season would be the last for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” No such luck. It continues to be TV’s longest-running ghoul, mummified, ghastly and trancelike, somehow surviving even in death.

Saturday’s season premiere--featuring guest host Sigourney Weaver and the inevitable new cast members with impressive comedy credits--was about as bad as TV could get and as funny as Weaver’s “Alien” movies.

“Saturday Night Live” XII is more evidence that a cast is no better than its script and that, after a dozen years, it’s time to embalm this sucker and bury it once and for all.

NOODLE NEWS: All but one Los Angeles station foolishly decided that Sunday’s biggest news was the failure of the nuclear arms-control summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.

The holdout was KABC-TV Channel 7, which shrewdly saw through the hype and realized that President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev were making only small talk about humanity’s future.

So the station led its 11 p.m. newscast with something far more critical, lengthy coverage of Sunday’s Angels-Red Sox and Mets-Astros baseball championship games. Maybe if Channel 7 had sent Ted Dawson to Reykjavik. . .

GOING . . . GOING . . . GONE: Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola are a good announcing team. However, NBC Sports will have a tough act to follow Saturday when it starts telecasting the World Series.

That act is ABC Sports, whose coverage of the American and National League championship series has approached perfection. Give producers Chuck Howard and Peter Lasser and directors Chet Forte and Craig Janoff a lot of the credit.

Oh, most of the games have been exciting, and that’s a big help. And ABC has overdone the uneventful obligatory shots of managers’ and players’ wives.

Yet ABC’s on-field camera angles and execution have been almost flawless, its replays expanding the small screen to give viewers a greater sense of the game.

Typical were Sunday’s spectacular replays of Red Sox center fielder Dave Henderson inadvertently knocking a ball over the fence for a home run. One angle showed that the ball, if untouched by Henderson, would have hit the fence and stayed in the park.

Equally outstanding have been the announcing teams: Al Michaels and Jim Palmer on the Red Sox-Angels and Keith Jackson and Tim McCarver on the Mets-Astros.

Michaels has already established himself as a sportscaster deluxe. With Michaels, everything flows naturally, and he seems more spontaneous than the baseballcaster he’s most compared to, Scully. Palmer, the underwear pitchman and former Baltimore pitching great, remains astute and refreshingly candid and unslick.

Jackson is one of those unspectacular-but-dependable mikemen who’s seldom bad. Best-of-show, though, goes to McCarver, the former major league catcher who’s become an outstanding color commentator. He’s precise in a profession that breeds ambiguity and seems to approach each play from a novel perspective. That’s no light task in a sport easily defined in cliches.

Many sportscasters are Wiffle Balls, which makes you all the more appreciative of these four from ABC.