Entering the Hitchcock Zone

It isn’t easy to work up a lot of sympathy for the victims on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. They usually deserve what they get, whether it’s death by leg of lamb or poisonous snake, or just a wicked dose of irony.

If comedy-rich Nick at Nite is going to add some ghoulish crimes, Hitchcock is the perfect one to be perpetrating them. (His victims even include the sponsors, at whom he frequently takes stabs.)

It’s also fitting that some of the Nick at Nite regulars--Elizabeth Montgomery, Carl Betz and Dick York--appear on some of the episodes in a special four-hour “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” Sitcom Zone Sunday from 8 p.m. to midnight on Nickelodeon.

The eight-show special also includes one Hitchcock-directed episode, “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” (9:30 p.m.) and “The Glass Eye” (11:30 p.m.), a 1957 segment that won an Emmy for director Robert Stevens.

“Alfred Hitchcock Presents” began in 1955. It was expanded to an hour in 1962 (the name was changed to “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour”) and ran until 1965.