Delayed ‘Under Cover’ Episode to Be Shown Saturday on ABC

ABC on Saturday will broadcast the terrorist episode of “Under Cover” that was postponed last week because of war-related concerns.

The program, titled “War Game” and scheduled to air at 9 p.m., focuses on an international terrorist with pro-Palestinian sympathies who kidnaps the director of the National Intelligence Agency--the show’s fictional equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency. At two points in the story, the brutalized director, played by veteran actor G. W. Bailey, is shown in videocassettes reading the terrorist’s demands.

ABC said that it had pulled the episode because of similarities with the then-fresh news of American POWs in Iraq, but now felt entertainment schedules had returned close enough to normal to go ahead with it. However, another episode of the series that had been postponed the week before has not yet been rescheduled. That was the second hour of a two-part story about the attempt by Iraq to fire missiles armed with biological warheads at Israel.

“Under Cover” creator and executive producer William Broyles Jr., who had been critical of the postponements, praised the network for rescheduling “War Game”: “They’ve had the courage and commitment to do a show that reflects in some of its episodes what’s happening in the world, and they now have shown the courage to put that show on the air when it’s topical.”