Today’s News, Tomorrow’s Television : ABC Comedy Series With Tough Guy Ray Sharkey is Set for Mid-Season

Production has begun on “When You’re Smiling,” a new ABC mid-season comedy series about a vagabond Brooklyn-born Italian-American who promises his dying father he’ll run the family grocery store. Ray Sharkey of “Wiseguy” stars with Julie Bovasso, Anne De Salvo and Joe Cortese.

Premiere date will be announced at a later time.

Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Rip Torn and Joan Severance are in Austin, Texas, filming the CBS movie “Another Pair of Aces: Three Of Kind,” for broadcast at a later date. Nelson, Kristofferson and Torn reprise the roles they created last season in the CBS movie “Pair of Aces.”

The always wonderful Albert Finney stars as an alcoholic owner of a country inn who is visited by malevolent 17th-Century apparitions in the A&E;/BBC production “The Green Man,” premiering April 21 at 5 p.m. on A&E.;

Robert Stack, who played G-man Eliot Ness on “The Untouchables,” profiles one of the real Ness’ biggest nemesis--a serial murderer known as “The Butcher of Kingsbury Run”--on the Feb. 20 edition of NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Fox Broadcasting’s new reality series “Yearbook,” which chronicles the lives of real teen-agers during their senior year of high school, will debut Thursday, March 7 at 8:30 p.m. The series will move to its regular time period, Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., on March 9.

Peter Falk is back as Columbo in a new two-hour thriller, “Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health,” airing Feb. 20 on ABC. This time around the rumpled detective matches wits with an arrogant, and extremely tan, host of a top-rated, reality-based crime show who has committed murder (George Hamilton).

Kevin & Bene, the morning drive team on L.A.’s KROQ-FM radio, will join E! Entertainment Television, beginning Wednesday, as co-hosts for the 24-hour cable network.

Former “L.A. Law” producer William M. Finkelstein is developing “Civil Wars,” a new one-hour series for ABC about two divorce lawyers. The series will be set in New York and will be produced under the Steven Bochco Productions banner. Production date will be announced later.

Earl Rose has joined ABC’s “All My Children” as the composer of the daytime series. A four-time Emmy award nominee, Rose recently served as composer for NBC’s “Another World.” Before that, he was the composer for the former ABC drama “Ryan’s Hope.”