EXORCISING ‘VALERIE’S’ GHOST AT NBC

The party was supposed to promote the premiere of NBC’s revamped, recast and retitled sitcom, “Valerie’s Family,” but what the news media wanted to talk about was its predecessor, “Valerie.”

At an affair for the press Thursday at Spago, neither the network, the series’ producers nor its cast could escape the persistent questions about why and under what circumstances the show’s star and namesake, Valerie Harper, had been replaced by Sandy Duncan.

In recent weeks, Harper has been eager to tell her side of the story--that after threatening to leave the show unless financial and creative concerns were met, she finally agreed to return to the set Aug. 3 with an understanding that the problems had been resolved. She worked for several days and then, she has said, was fired.

Tom Miller and Bob Boyett, the executive producers of the series, said Thursday that Harper’s statements portraying herself as an innocent victim are simply not true, and that her recent “media events” have probably been staged for the purpose of the breach-of-contract suit that she has threatened to file.

“We were doing a show called ‘Valerie,’ ” Boyett said. “If Valerie Harper had really wanted to do the show, we would have been thrilled to continue. She did come back to work after the holdout. But she didn’t demonstrate to us in action, deeds, words or behavior that she wanted to do the show. She was a very unhappy, distraught woman.”

Because of the potential suit, neither Miller nor Boyett would elaborate on the specifics that led to Harper’s leaving the show for good. They said only that just before she returned to work, Lorimar presented her with an “improved arrangement,” including a salary increase and concessions about the minimum number of episodes that would focus strictly on Harper’s character, Valerie Hogan. Harper never signed a new contract, Boyett said, but apparently believed mistakenly that other concerns (the nature of which he would not disclose) had been settled to her satisfaction.

When she arrived on the set and found otherwise, he said, she was furious. “It was all rather ugly, and that Sunday (Aug. 9), Valerie Harper and Lorimar decided to part company,” Boyett added. “Now she’s changed her mind and said she was fired.”

Both Boyett and Miller offered effusive volleys of praise and admiration for their former star. However, they suggested that, from the beginning, Harper, a four-time Emmy winner, simply did not want to play a character reduced to dispensing maternal advice on such topics as sex, dating, loyalty and justice to teen-age boys during the second half of every episode.

With Harper out, NBC could have simply canceled the series. But Brandon Tartikoff, president of the network’s entertainment division, had Sandy Duncan under contract waiting to get on the air with a show of her own, and he decided to take a chance.

“It’s so hard to get a successful television show,” Tartikoff explained Thursday. “And this was a show that was just beginning to peak. Just like ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Cheers,’ you could sense the groundswell within the audience. And over the summer it grew into a Top 10 show.”

Tartikoff was also influenced by the critical acclaim the series had received for seriously tackling such issues as teen-age sex and birth control, and he said that he did not want to dismantle a “talented and successful” writing and production staff simply because the star walked off the show.

“It was the wrong message to send to other actors--that they could dismantle an entire show,” Tartikoff said. “I was certainly not going to send that signal out into the acting community, and I was convinced that the show would not only survive but thrive.”

So, with Lorimar’s blessing, Tartikoff asked Duncan to join the cast of “Valerie,” and he changed the name of the show only slightly so that, he said, he wouldn’t have to explain to his 5-year-old daughter “that ‘Valerie’ was now called ‘At Home with the Hogans’ with a new lady” handing out advice from the kitchen.

After only a one-week delay, Duncan was introducing herself to the live studio audience as the sister of Valerie’s husband (Josh Taylor), ready, willing and able to take care of the three children after the mother’s sudden death (which will be explained in the first show of the season, Monday at 8:30 p.m.).

“I’m not a replacement for Valerie Harper,” Duncan said Thursday, “but a new character. At first I was nervous. I didn’t know the tone of the cast and crew or what had really gone on. But there have been no comparisons, no competition, no divided loyalties. I’m just doing a job and I’d like to keep doing it for about another six years.”