DON’T ASK : Typically, Viewers Saw the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

What kind of TV year was 1986? Rather typical, a year of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Good: KABC-TV Channel 7 setting up a scholarship fund--and kicking in the first $5,000--for Jamaal Brown, the teen-ager whose family and girlfriend died recently in a freeway collision with a wrong-way driver.

Bad: Vanna White mania. The United States has many heroes and heroines. Yet Americans have chosen to worship a woman whose biggest achievement has been to raise irrelevance to art while flipping letter cards on “Wheel of Fortune.” What a P.R. creation. Her coming autobiography should be a blockbuster.

Ugly: The brown lips on everyone who turns up in those old black-and-white movies colorized by Ted Turner.

Good: “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show!,” the inventive, gloriously whimsical and outright hilarious Showtime series that was the best comedy to premiere--anywhere--last fall.

Bad: Grant Tinker resigning his job as NBC chairman. Who would have thought that one man could make such a difference and be able to flip-flop a network’s fortunes? But Tinker did just that, turning a toad into a prince, enriching stockholders as well as viewers.

Ugly: New NBC President Robert C. Wright’s goofy memo suggesting that the network may form a political action committee to which all NBC employees--including those in the news division--would contribute money, lest “their dedication to the company” be questioned. NBC News President Larry Grossman was correct in telling Wright that the news division would not participate.

Good: TV coverage of last February’s Philippines elections that led to the ouster of Ferdinand E. Marcos and emergence of Corazon Aquino as the nation’s leader. TV cameras at polling places at once provided a living record of election fraud by Marcos forces and enabled Americans to watch the death of a corrupt regime.

Bad: Liberty Week/Weekend. This was real Statue of Liberty nuttiness on TV, everything you didn’t want to know about Lady Liberty and her 100th birthday--and then some--swollen by commercialism and hyperbole.

Ugly: Two doses of Geraldo Rivera, America’s video commando, first searching for nonexistent booty in Al Capone’s vaults and then playing Junior G-Man by beaming an orgy of live-TV drug busts into our homes. What luck! Some of those arrested even turned out to be guilty.

Good: “The Vanishing Family--Crisis in Black America,” Bill Moyers’ brilliant, incisive, provocative CBS documentary that was as controversial as it was illuminating.

Bad: Pamela’s dream that “Dallas” concocted to account for the return of Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) to Ewingdom. The dream device allowed “Dallas” to erase the previous season’s story lines, including Bobby’s death. Forget about who shot J.R. In the fall of 1986, who wanted to shoot the producers?

Ugly: The attempt of Los Angeles-based Harmony Gold to hide the participation of state-run South African TV in the production of “Shaka Zulu,” a syndicated miniseries whose blacks-against-blacks historical focus may have given a distorted impression of today’s South Africa. Of course, “Shaka Zulu” did take place in the 19th Century, which is exactly where South Africa’s white-minority government would like to keep the nation’s black majority.

Good: The broadcast work of Al Michaels and Tim McCarver during ABC’s coverage of the American League Championship Series.

Bad: College basketball’s new three-point shot, a 19-9 cheapie that alters the game and thereby detracts from basketball telecasts. Move it out to 23 feet. That’s an order!

Ugly: The fiscally motivated media hype of Chicago Bear William (The Refrigerator) Perry and overexposure of CBS Sports commentator/commercial spokesman/you-name-it-on-TV-and-he-does-it John Madden. As a TV personality, the 300-pound-plus “refrigerator” is finally in deep freeze, but Madden lives on . . . and on . . . and on.

Good: “Promise,” a scintillating CBS production with magnificent performances by James Woods and James Garner as two flawed brothers, one a pitiful schizophrenic and the other trying to honor his vow to look after his afflicted brother.

Bad: “Harem,” an ABC movie memorable for its rewriting of Turkish history and casting of big, burly Yaphet Kotto as a eunuch.

Ugly: Lynne Cheney, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, withholding the last installment of grant money for a controversial PBS series titled “The Africans” because she didn’t like some of the things it said.

Good: “A Year in the Life,” NBC’s simply grand, irresistible miniseries about a family’s eclectic, tumultuous year in Seattle. A possible future series--superbly written, directed and performed. Wow!

Bad: The deployment of a studio audience as a sort of living laugh-hoot-and-howl track in “NFL 86,” NBC’s Sunday pregame show hosted by Bob Costas.

Ugly: PBS announcing plans for an internal review of its programming after 53 members of Congress demanded a “content analysis” of PBS programming, charging it with liberal bias. PBS should not have bowed to the pressure. And the Congressional 53 should not have exerted pressure. Charge them with a bias toward censorship.

Good: Risk-taking commercial TV. The elite includes ABC’s “Moonlighting,” NBC’s “St. Elsewhere” and the late “Joe Bash,” Danny Arnold’s unique comed . . . uh, dram . . . uh (well, whatever it was) that lasted about as long as it takes to read this sentence. ABC took a quick whiff, then canceled this outrageously different series about a sour cop wonderfully played by Peter Boyle.

Bad: “The Next Generation of Local News” on KCBS Channel 2. Softer than soft and dumber than dumb, this short-lived newsbloc-that-wasn’t-a-newsbloc was created by desperate, since-departed men who believed that what the public really wanted was a program that gummed the news.

Ugly: Those sweeps creeps KNBC Channel 4 and KABC Channel 7, whose unholy use of news programs as puffy tie-ins with network entertainment programs in November was aimed at ratings, not at imparting information.

Good: Cable News Network and NBC pictures of the explosion of Challenger at Cape Canaveral, and TV coverage of the moving service for the astronauts who died in the fiery tragedy. A stirring video memorial.

Bad: The continued overpopulation of post-season college football telecasts featuring mediocre teams with as many as five losses.

Ugly: Political commercials that were unfair or dirty. That covered about 75% of them, in one of the grubbiest national election campaigns within memory.

Good: Marlo Thomas’ performance in CBS’ “Nobody’s Child” as Marie Balter, who went on to get a master’s degree from Harvard after spending nearly 20 years in a mental institution.

Bad: “Sword of Gideon,” a fictional HBO movie about Israeli vengeance for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The movie had a curious message, that Israeli terrorists are noble and Arab terrorists bad.

Ugly: Channel 7 sportscaster Rick Lozano for encouraging viewers to call Kansas City Royals manager Dick Howser at his hotel after the American League All-Star game and protest Howser’s underuse of California Angles rookie Wally Joyner.

Good: Tom Snyder, whose likable, free-wheeling talk/phone-in show on Channel 7 may not have been the perfect spot for Bigger-Than-Big Tom, but was still fun viewing--until being replaced by “Oprah Winfrey.”

Bad: The episode of Snyder’s show on which he and Channel 7 commentator Bill Press unfairly ganged up on Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Media.

Ugly: Doug Clark of the fundamentalist Trinity Broadcasting Network for finding “satanic” anti-Christian seeds in media coverage of the Iran arms/ contras scandal that has caused problems for President Reagan.

Good: “The Cavanaughs,” a refreshing new CBS sitcom that is good even when it’s not all that good, which is seldom.

Bad: “Mr. Bill’s Real Life Adventures” on Showtime. The pitiful clay figure you’d love to squash a sitcom character a la Dagwood Bumstead? Oh . . . yessssssss .

Ugly: Yours truly, for making two especially horrific mistakes because of sloppiness in not checking facts. First, in slamming NBC for interviewing Abul Abbas, head of the radical Palestine Liberation Front, I incorrectly wrote that the interview was conducted by Tom Brokaw.

No. 2 was just as bad, misidentifying Ted Dawson as the Channel 7 sportscaster who urged viewers to call Royals manager Dick Howser.

How could a TV critic be such a slug? Don’t ask.