CBS Figures It Only Has One Way to Go: Up : Television: In discussing its fall promotion campaign, the third-place network presents itself with incredible underhype.

CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer was in much better spirits Monday than a year ago when he faced an assemblage of TV critics at the Century Plaza.

“Last year I was morose, and it went downhill from there,” he quipped. But this year, with a new man in charge of entertainment programming and a fall schedule that will feature the baseball playoffs and the World Series, the CBS staff is full of energy and enthusiasm and, Stringer said, he was feeling positively cheerful.

“I feel that something’s going on,” Stringer said, referring to a sense of momentum that eventually might lead the third-place network to higher prime-time ground.

He quickly cautioned, however, that “it isn’t going to happen in two years. It may take three or four years. Nirvana isn’t around the corner.”

That was typical of the enormous modesty and even gallows humor that CBS executives displayed during their three days of meetings with the visiting reporters, who are in Los Angeles to preview the fall TV season.

In discussing the fall promotion campaign, for example--using the slogan “Get Ready” and featuring flashes of 80 network stars singing and dancing about to the old hit of the same name by the Temptations, one network executive said that someone suggested that CBS might well also have considered another Temptations gold song: “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

The once dominant network, fallen on bad ratings, presented itself with incredible underhype. At least for the moment, it is the network of humility.

The soft tone was set by Jeff Sagansky, who took over as president of CBS Entertainment in January.

He acknowledged that his first meeting with critics found him “flushed with optimism” and said that he has been surprised by the difficulty of getting the right producers to work for him: “You gotta go out and bang on the doors and it takes a long time to get these people sometimes.”

He was asked about the future.

“I’ll tell ya,” he told the 140-or-so reporters, “the only thing I’ll say is that after 30 weeks is over (the length of the “official” TV season) and the smoke clears, that we’ll be much closer to NBC than we were at the end of 30 weeks this year.”

He said he would like to accomplish two things: “One, even if we have the same rating, I’d love to just make sure that that rating has some younger circulation (viewers), some family audience, watching us. You know, some of those viewers that watch ‘Murphy Brown’ and ‘Designing Women.’ I would love to have more of those people watching NB . . . uh, CBS.” Sagansky formerly worked at NBC.

“The other thing that I would like to do is come out of this year with a couple of signature (pivotal) shows, shows that we can point to proudly and say, ‘That’s what we’re about and that’s where we’re going.’ ”

George Schweitzer, senior vice president for communications, said with some tongue in cheek that the “Get Ready” campaign is “a reprise from last year. We’re selling anticipation. Last year we got the anticipation part right. . . .”

With CBS most anxious to get younger viewers and broaden its demographic appeal, “we have to reposition CBS--the image, the feel, the approach. . . . The target audience is baby boomers and their kids, families, something that ABC and NBC both have been extremely successful getting but have been a foreign land for CBS.”

He recalled the snide aside by Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, that CBS loses a lot of its viewers through death.

Stringer, meanwhile, defended CBS against criticism that some of its new 8-9 p.m. shows seemed too spicy for a family audience. He said that he wanted the word to get out to producers to be more innovative and aggressive, because CBS has so often been accused of being bland. Last year’s schedule was “risk free,” he noted, and CBS not only wound up finishing third again but also suffering a decline in audience from the previous season.

CBS will continue to maintain “tough standards,” he said. And if it goes too far, the audience will let it know.