TV REVIEWS : NBC Plays Hardball, Sends Up Danielle Steel

For viewers who don’t like watching big men spitting on the ground and scratching themselves, even if they’re in nice uniforms pressed for the World Series, NBC is counterprogramming this week with five hours of Danielle Steel stories.

This is mostly for the womenfolk, since Steel, a high-volume Guinness writer (at least one book on the New York Times bestseller list for 381 consecutive weeks!), wallows in female fantasies.

NBC serves up the 2-hour “Kaleidoscope” at 9 tonight, hoping to hook viewers for the 3-hour “Fine Things” on Tuesday at 8 (Channels 4, 36 and 39), which in most of the country will compete directly with the first game of the World Series.

The first one has some bounce to it, with some mystery twists. An investigator (Perry King) is hired by a wealthy, dying businessman to find three sisters whom the man had had to shuffle off to foster care and to whom he now wants to make amends. The most troubled sister is played by Jaclyn Smith, who is radiant through thick and thin, with good hair.

But “Fine Things” is very slooooooow going. It’s about a department store executive (D. W. Moffett) who falls in love (Tracy Pollan) and suffers through her cancer death and then has to fight against his stepdaughter’s vicious real father. And so forth and so on. There’s a lot of huggies and kissies and a lot of mushy dialogue that sounds suspiciously like Hallmark cards neatly pasted together.