Madison Ave. Rates New Season : Television: Media buyers looking for fresh wares from the networks find many stale and perishable items for fall.

Fox is bold. ABC is going for laughs. NBC and CBS are playing it safe.

That was the consensus of a sampling of media buyers who assembled last week in New York to hear the networks pitch their new shows for the fall TV season.

“The networks I’m bullish about are ABC and Fox,” said Gene DeWitt of DeWitt Media in New York. “CBS and NBC just haven’t done enough.”

Based on early clips and presentations by stars, producers and network executives, the advertisers interviewed didn’t detect the fresh new look that the networks were promising. (CBS hasn’t held its presentation for them yet, so the advertisers could only respond to what the network put out on paper.) Instead, what they largely found was a stable of steady, familiar faces guiding the networks through the new season.

“I think what all three (major) networks are trying to do is give a comfort-zone feeling to their schedules,” said Jack McQueen, senior vice president of FCB/Telecom.

On NBC, for example, the reliable James Garner will play a con artist in the comedy series “Man of the People,” and Mark Harmon is cast as a police investigator in the drama “Reasonable Doubt.” CBS finds Connie Sellecca in Palm Springs in a witness-protection program in “P.S. I Luv U.” For ABC, Suzanne Somers and Patrick Duffy co-star as a widowed mom and divorced dad with three kids each in “Step by Step.”

“It’s a familiar television landscape,” McQueen said.

The venerable Carol Burnett even managed to stay on the schedule. CBS picked up the comedienne in a new hourlong variety show after NBC let her go because there was no room on its schedule to expand her half-hour “Carol & Company” into an hour, as she requested.

“CBS did right,” DeWitt said. “Variety is going to come back some day. They’re cheaper to produce than dramas. And certainly she’s the queen of variety. If anyone can make it work, she can.”

In other programming moves, ABC, which has been nipping at the heels of last season’s ratings leader NBC, added four new sitcoms and plans to turn Wednesday night into a rare three-hour comedy block. In addition, it shuffled around such established hits as “Full House,” “Family Matters” and “Who’s the Boss?” to lead in to new nights of comedy programming.

“ABC should stand for Always Buy Comedies,” said Louis Schultz, executive vice president of Lintas: USA. “In terms of what they’ve got in programming fare, it’s a lot like the Comedy Channel. They’ve made an investment in comedies. Comedies are young, and comedies are safe.”

ABC’s new Friday-night comedy lineup is programmed almost entirely by the producing team of Tom Miller and Bob Boyett, with “Family Matters,” “Step By Step” and “Perfect Strangers.” “Miller-Boyett owns a huge chunk of ABC,” said Joel Segal, executive vice president of national broadcasting for McCann-Erickson. “They are to comedy on ABC what Aaron Spelling was to drama a decade ago. That’s what happens when you become dependent upon these routine suppliers.”

What’s unusual is that ABC has programmed two of its new sitcoms in the 10-11 p.m. hour on Wednesday, a tough time slot traditionally reserved for one-hour dramas. Wednesday starts young at 8 p.m. with the mid-season hit “Dinosaurs,” “The Wonder Years” and “Doogie Howser, M.D.” But the evening grows up fast at 9:30 p.m. with “Anything but Love” followed by the new “Grownups,” about three 40ish sisters, and “Good and Evil,” about two 40ish sisters.

“The 10-11 p.m. time slot last season represented the lowest three-network share point totals of the entire week,” said Betsy Frank, senior vice president of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising. “So it’s a time period where it’s worth taking a chance and doing something different, because there’s obviously a lot of audience support up for grabs.”

CBS will try to counter ABC early Wednesday night with Redd Foxx and Della Reese in “The Royal Family,” followed by “Teech,” a comedy about a young black teacher at an all-white school. “There you have two black shows against ABC’s lineup of lily-white sitcoms. That’s not bad counter-programming,” DeWitt said.

Fox’s brightest comic star may be Dabney Coleman in the sitcom “Shut Up, Kids.” The film and TV star (“Buffalo Bill”) plays an ex-con who is convicted of tax evasion and forced to teach fourth grade. “You have a W.C. Fields type forced to teach kids,” Segal said. “The kids on the show will be one-upping him all the time, and the young people who love watching Fox will love it.”

Advertisers noted that “Shut Up, Kids” has a choice time slot, and could fill in the dead space on Thursday nights--now occupied by the canceled “Babes”--between “The Simpsons” and the teen drama “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

In a controversial call, ABC bounced the sentimental favorites “China Beach” and “thirtysomething,” two shows rich in young-adult demographics. “The most talked about subject (at the ABC meeting) was the cancellation of ‘thirtysomething,’ ” said Stacey Lippman, senior vice president at Chiat/Day Advertising. Quite frankly, I think they did it at the right time, rather than lock up the valuable time period with a show losing its producers and audience.”

Not all advertisers though were convinced that “thirtysomething’s” replacement, the one-hour period drama “Homefront,” was a wise choice. “I don’t see how ‘Homefront’ is going to get that younger audience,” Schultz said. “A drama about World War II veterans in the 1940s? It’s a little ‘The Waltons.’ It’s like dredging up that old prejudice stuff. It’s out of sync with the times and the mentality today.”

In its zest for youth, NBC--the same network that picked up James Garner--temporarily shelved Andy Griffith in “Matlock” and replaced him with Sam Waterston (“The Killing Fields”) in “I’ll Fly Away,” a drama about a prosecuting attorney in a small Southern city in the 1950s. “I was surprised by that, because I thought Tuesday was a night that did not need tinkering,” said Paul Schulman of the Schulman Co. “It’s true ‘Matlock’ had an older audience, but not all seven nights of the week have to be scheduled for (viewers) 18 to 49.”

Despite the changes at the Big Three networks, it was Fox, the newest player in the annual network sweepstakes, that stole the show in New York when the fledgling network cooly panned the notion of a traditional fall season in favor of year-round series premieres for its five new series. Fox executives said that will allow them to concentrate all their promotional efforts into one new show at a time.

“That’s been an almost universal rallying cry of (advertisers) for years: Why do you throw everything in front of the people at once?” Segal said. “The airwaves are just too cluttered in the fall season. Around-the-year premieres are not going to change how the medium is bought and sold. But they will mean original episodes and potentially bigger audiences into the spring and summer months when there’s more audience erosion.”

Fox also promised increased orders--from 22 to 30 episodes--for such hit shows as “Married . . . With Children” and “In Living Color,” the way TV used to do before economics began programming networks. “There’s nothing better for television viewers or advertisers, who advertise 52 weeks a year, not just in the ratings race,” Schulman said. “Viewing habits can change and Fox can pick up audiences. You’d be surprised how many people would clamor to their TV set in the summer if there were original episodes of ‘L.A. Law.’ ”

In another surprise move, Fox said that in January it will bail out of Friday night after having expanded there just last season. It plans to move its Friday-night programming to Monday.

“Friday night is a bad night for television because nobody watches,” Schultz said. “If things keep going the way they are, I predict one of the other networks will dump a Friday or Saturday, just like Fox did. It’s inevitable. The question is what year will it happen? It’s a 2 1/2-network economy there now. You can’t do $1 million worth of programming and get 10 and 12 audience shares.”

To save on costs, Fox also continued its tradition of low-cost programming with “The Ultimate Challenge,” from the producers of the syndicated “The American Gladiators.” “That’s bad, that obvious trend toward cheaper programming, regardless of how they want to cloak it,” said Douglas Seay, senior vice president of national broadcast for Hal Riney & Partners.

“What do they call it, reality programming? It’s unnerving to see that emphasized so much this season,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘We’re paying the guys in our factory half as much and we’re going to make this car a whole lot cheaper, but it will still drive you to the airport.’ They’re trying to hype the show because it’s cheap. That’s a little antithetical to the sales pitch, isn’t it?”

On the other hand, advertisers do understand the reality of reality-based programming. ABC’s new “FBI: The Untold Story” is up against NBC’s “Cheers,” the No. 1 show of last season. “ABC gets killed anyway Thursday night at 9 p.m. Why not put a cheap show in there? The networks are starting to look more like Fox all the time,” Schultz said.

One reality-based series that advertisers are watching with interest, however, is NBC’s early Sunday-night entry “The Adventures of Mark and Brian,” starring Los Angeles deejays Mark Phelps and Brian Thompson, which is followed by the half-hour horror spoof “Eerie, Indiana.” Both shows go head-to-head with CBS’ powerhouse “60 Minutes.”

“ ‘Mark and Brian,’ it’s all that zany stuff,” Schultz said. “It kind of fits the ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ mold. These guys can literally take that kind of audience, which is proven to be there on Sunday nights, and run with it. If people watch ‘Mark and Brian’ at 7 p.m., and switch to ‘Home Videos’ at 8 p.m., they can ‘Candid Camera’ themselves out of their minds.”