Lions, Tigers and Crises--Oh, My

Prime time now has its first zoo opera.

There are almost as many crises as animals in “Peaceable Kingdom,” the new CBS series that stars Lindsay Wagner as a besieged zoo director in Los Angeles. It premieres at 8 tonight (on Channels 2 and 8), an evening that also introduces two other series, “The Young Riders” on ABC and “The Nutt House” on NBC.

Rebecca Cafferty (Wagner) must balance her job as recently hired head of the underfinanced, understaffed Los Angeles County Zoo with her job as a single mother of three. If that weren’t enough, she must mediate a feud between her brother, idealistic curator of mammals Dr. Jed McFadden (Tom Wopat), and arrogant research director Dr. Bartholomew Langley (David Ackroyd).

And she has to do all this tonight while facing the tragedy of a lion’s death, lobbying a hopelessly resistant budget director for funds and racing against an impossible deadline for opening a new gorilla exhibit that she desperately needs to increase zoo attendance. But when a rainstorm destroys part of the new gorilla habitat the night before it’s to open before a VIP crowd from China, what to do?

Not to worry, for by hour’s end all problems disappear and those rivals, McFadden and Langley, are joining hands in a spirit of cooperation that moves you to tears. Well, almost.

Give “Peaceable Kingdom” credit for cherishing wild animals and advocating their preservation. But Art Monterastelli’s script is pretty sappy stuff, and Cafferty at times seems less zoo director than camp director. And, yikes!, a zoo professional who not only keeps a sea lion (misidentified in the series as a seal) as a roaming house pet, but also dresses it in a white collar and bow tie for the gorilla exhibit opening? Stop, already!

“Peaceable Kingdom” has a cast capable of something better. It could have been an important series instead of merely lightweight melodrama. It could have been the first prime-time series to intelligently explore the increasing conflict between humans and animals and the issue of whether even the best-run zoos properly serve the species they keep in captivity.

This series is about other things, however. Next week’s extremely static episode offers the twin perils of a female gorilla giving birth and Cafferty being hospitalized with a deadly snake bite (she can’t die, because she’s needed for the rest of the series). And that’s not all, for later, her youngest son disappears. But her sea lion doesn’t.

The success of last season’s “Lonesome Dove”--the CBS miniseries powered by Robert Duval’s heroic performance as an aging former Texas Ranger on his last adventure--has spurred talk of renovating the TV Western. But there isn’t much worth renovating, for Westerns and the small screen have rarely been compatible.

Although not without charm, such series as “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke” and “Rawhide” viewed the frontier through the wrong end of a telescope. A really good Western parches your throat, makes you feel the dust and has you thinking of sandstorms, rattlesnakes and scorpions. It requires more than a good story: It demands a panoramic stage, and TV is too small to capture the brawn and size. You might as well try squeezing Texas into Tarzana. On TV, “Red River” is Red Stream, John Wayne is 5-foot-8, cattle drives span 24 inches and the Great Plains resemble your back yard.

“Lonesome Dove” was the exception. “The Young Riders”--an ABC series loping in at 8:30 p.m. (on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42)--is not.

“The Young Riders,” which returns in its regular time slot at 9 p.m. Thursday, is set in the early 1860s. “Boys,” Teaspoon Hunter (Anthony Zerbe) says to the six orphans he’s breaking in as Pony Express riders to carry the mail westward, “I’m here t’learn ya my bag a tricks.”

The young riders consist of a sensitive, idealistic loner known as the Kid (Ty Miller); that deadeye marksman, young William Cody (Stephen Baldwin); impetuous James Hickok (Josh Brolin); the gentle, non-speaking Ike McSwain (Travis Fine); half-breed Buck Cross (Gregg Rainwater); and Lou McCloud (Yvonne Suhor), the girl who pretends to be a guy and no one suspects is a girl even though she looks exactly like a girl. Obviously, Teaspoon and his colleagues are not very swift.

Nor (except for the grizzled Teaspoon himself) very interesting.

For one thing, writer-supervising producer Ed Spielman’s young riders are mostly predictable stock characters. More than just courageous, they’re noble and stout-hearted beneath their machismo, blazing heroes who overcome inexperience by instinctively doing the right thing at the right time. And Teaspoon, sisterly pioneer woman Emma Shannon (Melissa Leo) and indestructible Marshall Sam Cain (Brett Cullen) hang around for inspiration.

For another thing, it’s hard re-creating the Old West when a couple of the riders look like they should be teasing hair on Melrose instead of galloping cross country and battling exhaustion, weather, Indians and bandits--like the scar-faced killer who shoots Lou and steals her/his mail out on the trail.

And finally, “The Young Riders” tonight captures neither the rigors of the Pony Express (everyone always seems to be back in time for dinner) nor, despite John Toll’s excellent photography, the grand sweep of the land. It doesn’t help either that John Debney’s musical score is so like “Chariots of Fire” that you half expect Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams to sprint across the screen carrying mail pouches.

Those marvelous farceurs Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman almost seem to sprint across the screen in “The Nutt House,” the NBC comedy premiering at 9 tonight (on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

There are moments in this hour debut of a half-hour series (whose regular time slot will be Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m.) that are knee-slapping funny. Nevertheless, the script by executive producers Mel Brooks and Alan Spencer is an example of a few great jokes going a short way.

The target of their spoof seems to be “Hotel,” Aaron Spelling’s former ABC series about an elegant hotel oozing tradition and featuring regal service by a caring, impeccably trained staff. In contrast, Nutt House is a hotel oozing sight gags, including a guest who spends half the hour tonight locked inside a phone booth with no one paying attention to her desperate screams for help.

Nutt House, as campy Robin Leach notes in kicking off the premiere, is a hotel “where people who check in without reservations check out with plenty.” The main reasons are snide, contemptuous manager Reginald J. Tarkington (Korman) and Mrs. Frick (Leachman), the hotel’s Prussian-like head “housekeeper from hell” who lusts for Tarkington’s body. Not terrific either is the rest of the staff, including an elevator operator (Mark Blankfield) who is nearly blind (“Fifth floor . . . I think”).

Tucked away in seclusion on the hotel’s top floor is eccentric owner Edwina Nutt (also Leachman), a musty, chalky, powdery 100-year-old who is fiercely proud of being a Nutt and determined tonight to stave off a takeover bid by a J. R. Ewing-like Texan (David Huddleston). Her playboy grandson Charles Nutt III (Brian McNamara) proves little help.

Korman and Leachman are a riot. In their hands, absurdity was never better.

Yet even they can’t sustain lumpy material that ranges from exquisite nastiness to excruciating slapstick, with much more of the latter. An hour of this broad, uneven comedy is too long. Unfortunately, a half hour may be, too.