Networks Jockey for Position : Television: The best drama of the new season is watching the strategies being used to regain viewers. ‘The networks this year have to say “Please notice me,” ’ says the head of Paramount TV.

Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment, calls it “the biggest risk anybody has taken” in the new TV season that now is unfolding.

What Littlefield has done is yank “Matlock,” a successful series with Andy Griffith as a lawyer, and replace it with “I’ll Fly Away,” a Southern family drama that will debut in October and is set during the start of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

With NBC trying to hold on to its narrow first-place ratings edge amid ongoing rumors and denials of the network being for sale, “Matlock” has given a solid lead-in to the series “In the Heat of the Night” and “Law & Order” in the Tuesday prime-time lineup.

“Matlock” producer Fred Silverman thinks that dropping “Matlock” is foolish and could have a “profound effect” on NBC’s entire ratings showing in the neck-and-neck race. Littlefield counters that “Matlock” will return as a replacement series, that Silverman wanted its time slot changed anyway and that “I’ll Fly Away” will attract younger viewers and “deserves a chance.”

Differences between networks and producers are not new. But with ABC, CBS and NBC perilously losing viewers as their corporate owners assess their economic worth, the best drama of the new television season, in many ways, is the strategies that the networks are using to regain their lost audience.

No fewer than 52 half-hour comedies are on the schedules of the Big Three and Fox TV, more than half of them between 8 and 9 p.m., in an attempt to hook young viewers and lock up audiences for the remainder of the night. The comedies also have added value because they sell better than dramas as reruns for syndication.

There are also more than a dozen reality series on the Big Three and Fox. They may not be major players as reruns, but, like the comedies, they are cheaper to produce than dramas.

The buzzwords on the new TV season are boring , cautious and traditional following a year of experimentation with such shows as “Twin Peaks” and “Cop Rock.” But whether the networks are right or wrong, there seems to be a method to their madness as they try to regroup by falling back on economy and execution rather than innovation.

Writer-producer James L. Brooks (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Simpsons”) “told me that you start with an idea that’s good, not an idea that’s necessarily different,” says Robert Iger, president of ABC Entertainment.

And although the networks have taken plenty of up-front battering about their new series, there are a reasonable number that have drawn interest about their potential.

Industry attention has focused on such shows as ABC’s “Home Improvement,” a sitcom with Tim Allen as the host of a fix-it program on cable TV; Fox’s “Roc,” a comedy with Charles Dutton as a garbage man; CBS’ “Brooklyn Bridge,” a comedy about a 1950s Brooklyn family, and “I’ll Fly Away,” which has rough competition against “Full House” and “Rescue 911.”

Other new series drawing industry interest include:

CBS’ “Princesses,” a sitcom with Julie Hagerty, Twiggy and Fran Drescher sharing an apartment; NBC’s “Reasonable Doubts,” with Marlee Matlin as a deaf prosecutor and Mark Harmon as a cop; ABC’s “Homefront,” about GIs returning home from World War II; and Fox’s “Herman’s Head,” about an aspiring writer whose conflicting emotions are portrayed by other actors.

Also: NBC’s “Eerie, Indiana,” a kids’ fantasy about a weird town; “Sibs” and “Good & Evil,” two ABC sitcoms about sisters; CBS’ “The Royal Family,” a Redd Foxx comedy, and CBS’ “The Carol Burnett Show,” simply because of the star’s enduring appeal.

Almost every one of these series is a longshot. Joel Segal, a Madison Avenue buyer of TV time for various sponsors, predicts that only two new series--”Home Improvement,” and NBC’s “Nurses,” another sitcom--will be “clear successes.” Both will have lead-ins from established hits: “Home Improvement” follows “Full House,” and “Nurses” follows “Empty Nest.” Segal sees no smash hits among the new series.

Seemingly paralyzed by pressure from their corporate owners and television alternatives such as cable and VCRs, the networks have produced so few new hits in recent seasons that the top Emmy awards keep going, as they did again recently, to established shows such as “Cheers” and “L.A. Law.”

Yet it is always a mathematical certainty that most new TV shows fail, and thus it was no small triumph that “Northern Exposure,” “Twin Peaks” and “Cop Rock” at least were given a chance last season. The method in the networks’ madness this fall is far less exciting on the surface, for it is basically a strategy of economic survival, yet a clear attempt to provide solid, mainstream entertainment. If it succeeds, the networks may hold back the dawn.

Just as Fox’s “The Simpsons” neutralized NBC’s “The Cosby Show” last season, key matchups are pivotal to this fall’s shootout. “I’ll Fly Away” is certainly at the center of Tuesday’s big free-for-all.

Wednesdays are also a key with “The Royal Family” and another new CBS sitcom, “Teech,” tangling with NBC’s Gibraltar-like “Unsolved Mysteries” and ABC’s tandem of “Dinosaurs” and “The Wonder Years.”

Thursdays has a free-for-all of its own, with NBC’s entrenched “Cheers” and “Wings” now challenged by Fox’s surprising drama success, “Beverly Hills, 90210,” CBS’ “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” and two ABC reality shows, “FBI: The Real Stories” and “American Detectives.”

No one at CBS expects “Rosie O’Neill” to take the measure of “Cheers,” but the network does hope that the addition of Ed Asner--as a reactionary investigator--to a distinguished cast headed by Sharon Gless as a public defender will give the series some new ratings power. Asner joins the show tonight as it makes its season debut along with two other returning CBS series, “Top Cops” and “Knots Landing.”

On Fridays, CBS, the surprise comeback network of last season, is going for broke on a night where it once reigned with “Dallas” but now is virtually invisible. Against ABC’s dominant, kid-oriented sitcom lineup, it is blatantly seeking the middle-aged and older audience with “Princesses,” “Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Carol Burnett Show.”

The fact is that “Brooklyn Bridge”--perhaps the biggest question mark of the season in terms of how it will be received--also features young kids in producer Gary David Goldberg’s tale of growing up in Brooklyn. Peter Tortorici, executive vice president of CBS Entertainment, says:

“We were blown away by this show. We don’t know if it will play for people who don’t know Brooklyn or Jewish. But whether it works or not--and I think it will--the show makes us proud. Our idea for Fridays was let’s not fight ABC for the kids. We know we had an adult audience with ‘Dallas,’ and those viewers are looking for something to watch.”

And then there’s the Sunday matchup of old pros from 8 to 9 p.m.: Angela Lansbury and CBS’ “Murder, She Wrote” against two new NBC sitcoms with James Garner and Robert Guillaume. Garner is an ex-con man who becomes a city councilman in “Man of the People,” and Guillaume is a cop in “Pacific Station.”

Sunday nights, in fact, are one huge matchup. Also airing from 8 to 9 are ABC’s “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “America’s Funniest People.” And Fox, which moved “The Simpsons” out of Sunday, hopes it has the makings of another blockbuster lineup on this most-watched TV night of the week with “In Living Color,” “Roc,” “Married . . . With Children” and “Herman’s Head.”

“The networks this year have to say ‘Please notice me,’ ” says John Pike, president of Paramount’s network TV division, citing the new viewing alternatives. “Very little breaks out anymore. The networks must have something instantly noticeable or familiar to the viewer.”

Peter Chernin, president of the Fox Entertainment Group, adds, however, that there must be patience: “In my mind, ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ is the hit show of the past year in terms of demographics and incredible press coverage. Yet we couldn’t get ratings with it at first, but we believed in it and stood by it.”

“We can turn the ship,” Tortorici says of the networks’ crisis. Adds Littlefield: “I keep hearing that we haven’t been able to electrify the public, and I think that scares all of us. But I still believe that if we build it, they will come.”

This season will tell.