New Fall Series: Good Taste Is in Bad Trouble : Television: An informal survey of pilots for the fall season shows that the networks have plunged deeper into sexual innuendo and foul language.

Taste.

You remember taste. Webster defines it as appreciating things that are “beautiful, appropriate or harmonious.”

I’ve spent much of this week watching 15 pilots of the networks’ new, fall TV series.

Don’t laugh. What’s taste got to do with it, right? TV has created a nation of cynics.

But now comes an even further, stomach-turning plunge--clues that there is no limit to TV’s ability to cheapen our lives with bad taste from bankrupt imaginations.

You may or may not, for instance, like a new ABC sitcom called “Married People,” about three couples who live in a New York brownstone.

But what could possibly have possessed those in charge to end a harmless episode by having the woman landlord tell her amiable husband, “You’re a lying son of a bitch, but I love you”?

It’s a long way until the fall premiere, and maybe this totally pointless prime-time shock treatment won’t wind up on the air. Believe me, the show wouldn’t lose anything without it.

We’re not talking censorship here. Let ABC put it on if it wishes. It’ll only expose the lack of creative juices--and all the networks’ increasingly visible reliance on casual, gratuitous, foul language as they desperately try to match new TV alternatives.

Is there any point besides titillation, one may ask, when a detective in NBC’s new “Law and Order” series makes a wisecrack about male genitals?

Freedom of expression, of course, makes it imperative to defend the rights of creators of even the most obnoxious and inappropriate material.

But we also have the right to tell the worst offenders that we’re wise to what they’re up to--and that we know the difference between the slime they’re offering us and the legitimately frank language and subjects presented on such shows as “L.A. Law” and “thirtysomething.”

NBC is showing some tawdry clips of a new musical comedy series called “Hull St. High,” which include a female student asking a boy to photograph her nude. The series is scheduled for the 7-8 p.m. Sunday slot that supposedly is reserved for family programs such as ABC’s “Life Goes On” and public service shows like “60 Minutes.”

This is all tricky territory. We’re at a moment when censorship has been attempted against the rap group 2 Live Crew and the Cincinnati photographic exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe, which depicted nudity and sex. And professional watchdogs like the Rev. Donald Wildmon are on the prowl.

But it’s just dead wrong to let TV con artists--and their trash--ride the coattails of hard-earned freedom of expression into our living rooms without at least letting them know that we’re not buying.

In 1979, a phenomenal documentary called “Scared Straight” showed real New Jersey convicts using a torrent of the strongest four-letter words--in prime time--to frighten visiting wayward youngsters about the horrors of prison life.

The program made history on KTLA Channel 5 and around the nation, the language was perfectly justified for the circumstances and the public recognized that fact and agreed. Remarkably, hardly anyone complained.

In 1980, another Los Angeles station, KCOP Channel 13, also broke ground by presenting, unedited and in prime time, the film “The Deer Hunter”--with all its four-letter dialogue. Again, an increasingly sophisticated public, aware of new freedoms in the arts, made relatively little fuss about this TV benchmark.

In 1986, the premiere episode of “L.A. Law” illustrated network breakthroughs as well when an investigator, describing a cheating husband and his woman companion, said they were “engaged in a sex act usually described in a two-digit number.”

Dialogue like that, on a major and respected drama, helped open the door to TV’s low-rent writers and producers. Encouraged by networks panicky about shrinking audiences, they now have flooded prime time with non-stop, snickering, skin-crawling sexual innuendo.

And when a series like Fox’s raucously low-brow and innuendo-prone “Married . . . With Children” ranks No. 4 among all shows in America, as it did last week, the floodgates open wider.

You have to wonder, for instance, why, in this age of dangerous gay-bashing, NBC’s pilot for a family sitcom called “The Fanelli Boys” has one of the principal characters tossing around the derogatory term “queers.”

It’s socially offensive, and it’s a matter of taste.

Over on Fox, there’s “Babes,” a half-hour sitcom that deals with three heavyweight sisters and is devoted to the premise that fat is beautiful. It might well be a hit, and yet the absorption with bedroom innuendo--low-brow and not sophisticated enough to be genuinely bawdy--is again lacking in taste.

“Babes” is also on during the 8-9 p.m. period aimed at kids. And while kids know all about the words and innuendo already--probably more than parents think they do--the various new series targeted at them in this key time slot figure to get close critical attention.

At least one CBS sitcom, “Uncle Buck,” already is being revamped after reports that it was extremely racy for an 8 p.m. kids’ show, a network spokesman confirms. A CBS statement acknowledged that “some changes were being made,” but declined to specify what they were.

Scheduling wholesome 8 p.m. shows is a nightmare for programmers in the age of MTV, pay-TV films and VCRs--all of which are available at the same time and have basically destroyed the notion of what an 8 p.m. network series should be.

Thus the reason for networks trying to spice up their shows to keep up with the sexuality of MTV videos and the rest of the competition.

The new world actually moved in on TV a long time ago--”Laugh-In” was an 8 p.m. series as far back as 1968, tackling social values with a brilliant comedy concept. And after-hours series such as “Saturday Night Live,” “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman” opened the door to today’s franker TV outlook even more.

All those years of fighting the good fight for more adult TV were finally paying off. But then came the arbitrary and pointless excesses. One’s head turned, for instance, when the word “bastard” popped up a few years ago in CBS’ comic miniseries, “Fresno.” It’s not such an uncommon word in prime time anymore.

It was not so long ago that Arsenio Hall used the expression “Kiss my a--” on his syndicated show. Now and then, the term “p----- off” is heard as one zaps along. One needn’t be a prude to conclude that this is not raising the level of television or its viewers, especially young ones.

As a friend of ours says, “There are standards.” And if there aren’t, then we’re in trouble.

With a new fall season coming up, the networks would do well to watch their language, to be less promiscuous with innuendo as kids sit down for their nightly fix of television.

There’s a lot at stake: the cheapening of America.