Suzanne Pleshette will portray a police captain...

Suzanne Pleshette will portray a police captain assigned to a rough precinct in “Command in Hell,” a TV movie for CBS. Frank Converse is cast as her husband. Others on hand include Priscilla Lopez, Danny Aiello, Joe Morton and Georg Stanford Brown.

Nick Mancuso, Rip Torn and Sela Ward are starring in “The King of Love,” a TV movie for ABC about a magazine publisher who espouses “free love, honesty and emancipation.” Billed by the network as “a modern-day fable,” it is scheduled to be aired Nov. 19.

The battles of the November ratings “sweeps” are shaping up already. Nov. 1 will bring a showdown between NBC’s movie about “The Billionaire Boys Club” (with Judd Nelson as convicted murderer Joe Hunt) and CBS’ fictional drama about international terrorism, “Terrorist on Trial: The United States of America vs. Salim Ajami,” starring Sam Waterston, Ron Leibman and Robert Davi.

Waterston will be seen later this season in another major TV movie, “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln,” playing Abraham Lincoln from his inauguration as the 16th President in January, 1861, through his assassination in 1865. Mary Tyler Moore has been cast as Mary Lincoln in the four-hour drama for NBC.

People: Dick Van Patten, the former star of “Eight Is Enough,” will be a guest star on NBC’s “Rags to Riches” Oct. 23. . . . The “Matlock” episode set to air on NBC Oct. 27 will feature Ralph Bellamy, Robert Culp, Nancy Dussault and George Gaynes. . . . Uta Hagen will appear in “Seasonal Differences,” the Dec. 2 offering on the “ABC Afterschool Specials,” which deals with anti-Semitism against a Christmas-Hanukkah holiday backdrop.

What would you do if you thought your husband might be a serial killer? That’s the question Margot Kidder gets to explore in “Body of Evidence,” a TV movie for CBS. She portrays a nurse whose husband, played by Barry Bostwick, is a police pathologist investigating the crime, and who she believes may be the guilty party. Tony Lo Bianco plays another police detective.

The Soviet policy of glasnost, or openness, has now extended to kidvid. Famed children’s host Fred Rogers recently visited the Soviet Union to look in on a preschoolers’ program there, “Good Night, Little Ones.” The host of that show, Tatiana Vedeneeva, will pay a reciprocal visit to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in November. Both occasions will be turned into segments for episodes of Rogers’ PBS series next March.