Mixed-Bag Torrent of New Series

After weeks of drizzles, the New Season begins arriving tonight in a downpour.

Given the tendency of networks to seek a competitive edge through giving their new prime-time series extra exposure via special premieres on evenings where they won’t normally air, tonight has to be considered almost historic.

It’s one of those rare times at the start of a new season when five newcomers--three that will ultimately air opposite each other--make their debuts on the same date and on the same night they will be shown during the rest of season.

However, here’s where it gets confusing.

CBS (Channels 2 and 8) has “Bob” premiering at 8:30, an hour earlier than its regular time slot. In addition, it has the normally hourlong “Picket Fences” opening with a two-hour episode at 9. Its regular time slot is 10.

And although NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39) does have “The Round Table” starting at its regular 9 p.m. time, the two-hour premiere is double the show’s normal size.

The matchups for tonight’s new seriesathon include “The Round Table” vs. “Picket Fences” and tonight’s fourth arrival, “Camp Wilder,” premiering at 9:30 on ABC (Channels 7, 3 and 10).

The easy choice: “Picket Fences.”

Next week, after some of the Friday evening dust has settled, “Camp Wilder” will have “Bob” to compete with in addition to the second half of “The Round Table” and the already premiered new Fox comedy “Likely Suspects.”

The choice is “Bob,” although “Likely Suspects” did open promisingly last week.

Meanwhile, tonight’s fifth newcomer is NBC’s “Final Appeal,” its double-sized hourlong premiere airing at 8 opposite the unpreviewed CBS quasi-newcomer “Golden Palace,” a reconstituted, Bea Arthur-less version of NBC’s “Golden Girls.”

First, the new comedies:

* “Bob.” His sitcom settings may change but, comedically speaking, Bob Newhart never roams far from home. Ever the grim-faced minimalist reacting to the behavior of the bizarre characters who invade his well-ordered life, Newhart this time is Bob McKay, a greeting-card artist who is initially elated when given the chance to revive Mad Dog, a failed comic-book super-hero that he created years ago.

But the company that offers him this new opportunity is run by an unseen electronic-snooping huckster with ideas of his own. He teams Bob with graphic novelist Harlan Stone (John Cygan), who is determined to transform the noble Mad Dog into a maniacal vigilante who slays his faithful companion, Buddy, to purge his “homoerotic desires.”

Predictably, Bob is outraged--in his muted fashion--and fights to maintain the creative integrity of his creation.

Harlan insists that it’s obvious to everyone that Mad Dog and Buddy “are in love.”

Bob is more outraged.

Although beginning slowly, “Bob” turns very funny once Newhart is given an officeful of amusingly over-the-top characters that he can respond to with his usual stammering disbelief. When another artist reveals a brilliant plan to draw characters with leeches on their faces, Bob’s response to the sketches is classic.

“And . . . and these would be the . . . uh . . . the leeches.”

The supporting cast, including Carlene Watkins as Bob’s tolerant wife, is very good. And seeing Newhart here evokes a mental road map of his other TV comedies, as the old and neo-Newhart appealingly merge on Friday nights.

* “Camp Wilder.” Speaking of leeches, just watching this comedy can suck the intelligence from your brain.

It’s not only her 6-year-old daughter, Sophie (Tina Majorino), but her 16-year-old brother, Brody (Jerry O’Connell), and 13-year-old sister, Melissa (Meghann Haldeman), whom Ricky Wilder (Mary Page Keller) must worry about when she moves into her parents’ home after their deaths in an accident.

And with Brody’s pals--including that omnipresent doofus Dorfman (Jay Mohr)--hanging out and causing havoc at the homestead, what’s a surrogate single parent to do? “I don’t have the answers,” Ricky confesses.

Neither do the writers of the laugh-proof first three episodes, which find Ricky, whose nursing job often requires her to work nights, tormented by guilt over her laid-back parenting. When she stiffens her spine tonight and forbids Brody to attend a beer party, he goes anyway. Then he feels guilty.

You can’t depend on “Camp Wilder” to be funny, but you can depend on its characters to ultimately do the right thing as part of an obligatory maudlin ending attached to each half hour.

In a coming episode, Melissa acquires a boyfriend whom she expects to give her her maiden kiss. The person this typically rebellious teen asks for advice--”Do you keep your eyes open or closed? . . . Where do you put your nose?”--is her 28-year-old sister, Ricky.

Reality check or comedy check, “Camp Wilder” fails.

The night’s new dramatic series:

* “Picket Fences.” The Tin Man in a small-town production of “The Wizard of Oz” is murdered. When Sheriff Jimmy Brock visits the morgue to view the body, the deceased is still wearing his false nose.

A rather bent sense of humor--woven into a nice little whodunit--is what lifts the flawed-but-engaging premiere of “Picket Fences” above the ordinary, raising expectations for the future.

The setting for this light drama is tiny Rome, Wis., where Brock (Tom Skerritt) has the moves of one of those small-town lawmen who ultimately nabs his criminal, but in his own time, while never being in too much of a rush. His wife, Jill (Kathy Baker), is a respected physician.

A tender back story romantically linking a visiting singer and Brock’s thickish deputy, Kenny Lacos (Costas Mandylor), quickly goes flat. Plus, some of the characters appear too urbanized for this environment, and one of the Brock sons, Justin, has a level of wisdom and sophistication out of sync with his young age. Moreover, Executive Producer David E. Kelley’s script delivers a hideous cliche of an ending that should have been left on the cutting-room floor.

Yet the Brocks are nothing if not comfortable to be with, a family you want to see more of as long as their lives continue to be ensnared in lighthearted mysteries that keep you guessing and chuckling. This one does.

News that schoolteacher Phil Banks (the Tin Man) has been slain--and something kinky may have been involved--becomes the talk of the community, putting pressure on Sheriff Jimmy to make an arrest. But the case against Rome’s notorious murderer isn’t built in a day, and Kelley deploys twist after twist before allowing the sheriff to discover the truth.

Meanwhile, we meet such off-the-wall characters as the sheriff’s gossipy switchboard operator and a shyster defense lawyer who is as humorous as he is unbelievable. All of this builds hopes for next week’s episode which--in a possible homage to David Lynch--begins with a young schoolboy bringing a severed hand to show and tell.

“Picket Fences” meets “Blue Velvet”? Hardly, but substantial fun just the same.

* “The Round Table.” This is producer Aaron Spelling presenting his usual suspects, the kind of young, interchangeable characters that have become his trademark in the 1990s. They hang out together, they party together, they play flag football together.

No wonder parts of “The Round Table” play like a beer commercial.

The title refers to a Georgetown bar frequented by the young protagonists--an FBI agent (Stacy Haiduk), a Secret Service agent (Pepper Sweeney), a uniformed cop (Erik King) and two government attorneys (Tom Breznahan and Roxann Biggs)--who populate this series set in Washington. Each has a history that we learn about in the artificially inflated two-hour premiere that introduces the characters and, in an orgy of script conveniences, throws them together so that they can immediately care about each other.

Tonight’s sappiest figure is the twangy Secret Service agent, whose brain is a match for his home state of Texas when it comes to dust and wide open spaces. The most interesting of the group is a newly appointed prosector for the U.S. attorney’s office (Biggs) who is ashamed of her bartender boyfriend (David Gail). Tonight she is stalked by some thugs who put her life in jeopardy.

Well, not too much jeopardy. She’s returning for the rest of “The Round Table.”

For the most part, this series is an emotional mesa whose characters act illogically and unbelievably. Yet its potential to be even mediocre makes “The Round Table” the most promising of the new season’s clutch of 20ish ensemble series.

“Final Appeal” is NBC’s spinoff from its “Unsolved Mysteries.” Both shows are hosted by stolid Robert Stack, the older one seeking to nail criminals, the newcomer seeking to undo the “potential injustice” done to some convicts.

Just why the producers chose the premiere to rehash the case of former Green Beret physician Jeffrey MacDonald is an unsolved mystery, given the numerous failed judicial appeals in MacDonald’s behalf, some reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. When it comes to television programs that second-guess MacDonald’s conviction, moreover, “Final Appeal” is no better than sloppy thirds, appearing to offer nothing significant beyond what was covered in an earlier “20/20” segment on the case and in a much more thorough BBC documentary, “False Witness,” that was syndicated in the United States. Although from a different perspective, even “Hard Copy” has weighed in on this story, using shoddy practices to journalistically victimize the convicted victimizer MacDonald.

Given the current popular opinion’s heavy tilt toward victims’ rights, there’s something especially attractive about a series that boldly goes against the grain in providing a forum for those who may have been wrongly convicted. Using the same reenactment/actual-footage techniques employed on “Unsolved Mysteries,” moreover, the spinoff tells a good story, and if nothing else, you feel compelled to watch these dramatizations giving clashing accounts of the 1969 murder of MacDonald’s wife and his two young daughters. Tonight, MacDonald again professes his innocence, and the program reports his claim that he “now has the evidence to prove it.”

This new “evidence” is not on the screen, however, and in fact the entire MacDonald segment has less going for it tonight than a much shorter piece reviewing seemingly unfair charges of mutiny made against 50 black seaman during World War II.