Shows Fusing Entertainment With Topicality of Riots : Television: Prime-time series are working the L.A. unrest into their story lines.

Prime time has begun revisiting the Los Angeles riots, stoking the fires of relevance in the name of entertainment.

“I watched the city burn once before,” a somber Leland McKenzie says on the season premiere of NBC’s “L.A. Law” next month. “I never thought I’d see it again.”

McKenzie is watching a television screen showing a neighborhood in flames. And somewhere out there, his pompous law partner, Douglas Brackman, has gotten trapped in the terrifying mayhem. He even is mistakenly arrested for looting.

One might argue that television series with riot-related plots are themselves ratings-driven plunderers, using their make-believe worlds to exploit and trivialize an epic tragedy that everyone from politicians and sociologists to ordinary citizens is still trying to comprehend fully.

A better-case scenario is that some television producers feel a social responsibility to use their characters to heed history as a means of imbuing prime time with the pertinence that many of its critics contend has been lacking.

Inevitably, though, a lack of skills often intervenes, with even the best-intentioned works undermined by an inability to fuse topicality and entertainment without creating a patchwork with visible stitch marks.

On July 13, Fox’s “Beverly Hills, 90210” became the first prime-time series to weave the riots into an episode. Next came Fox’s “Melrose Place,” and on Monday, NBC’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” checked in with a riot episode.

Ditto tonight for ABC’s “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” and Thursday for NBC’s “A Different World,” and Sunday for Fox’s “In Living Color,” which features Rodney G. King and Reginald Denny clones advising motorists never to get out of their cars. Next month, the riots touch “L.A. Law” and “Knots Landing” on CBS.

On “Doogie Howser, M.D.” (at 8:30 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), young Dr. Doogie (Neil Patrick Harris) has his social consciousness massaged when casualties from the riots--a fireman hit in the head by a brick, a day-care center operator with burns and so on--begin chaotically pouring into the Los Angeles hospital where he’s a trauma surgeon.

Although intended as a humorous sidebar, the half-hour’s centerpiece becomes Doogie’s earthy pal Vinnie Delpino (Max Casella) taking charge of a group of African-American kiddies whose day-care center was destroyed by fire. “What’s a riot?” one of them asks.

Vinnie ponders deeply. Should he start with Rodney G. King? Martin Luther King Jr.? No. “Once upon a time,” he begins, “there was this guy called Kunta Kinte, right, who came to America on Ed Asner’s slave ship.”

It’s an African-American hospital orderly--and ex-gangbanger--Ray Alexander (Markus Redmond) who gets the heaviest dialogue (“There’s the right way, and there’s the white way”). Most of it comes in an exchange with another African-American who is being treated in the emergency room for burns he received while looting.

Ray berates the looter, who replies: “Look, this was a long time comin’, man. If you beat people down long enough, they’re gonna fight back.” Ray: “You’re not fighting back. You’re just stealing.”

Although it has some moments that nicely define the Los Angeles event’s underlying ironies and social complexities, the episode is betrayed by its need for its characters to ultimately do the right thing so that Doogie and viewers can end the half hour optimistically.

“It’s not gonna be like this forever--it isn’t,” Nurse Spaulding promises her worried parents in Oregon. Meanwhile, the sensitive Doogie has learned a lesson from an experience whose images, one suspects, will not linger beyond tonight’s episode.

Yet Doogie Meets the Riots is spectacularly radiant compared with the silly/serious juggling attempted Monday by that rarely pensive sitcom, “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” which found the African-American, upscale Banks family returning with Will (Will Smith) to their old South-Central neighborhood to help with the post-riot cleanup. “Our roots are here,” Will’s Aunt Vivian (Janet Hubert-Whitten), observed gravely as the Bankses rummaged through the now-devastated apartment where they lived in their salad days.

Meanwhile, blustery Uncle Phil (James Avery) worried that Vivian was having an affair.

The episode defined, almost classically, how difficult it is to use catastrophe as a backdrop for comedy, especially when a series that relentlessly relies on broad humor suddenly alternates faces while attempting to remain true to its farcical characters.

The script did put some words of truth in the mouth of a South-Central youth who lectured Will about chic do-gooders versus long-term responsibility: “A few more months, everybody’s consciences will be clean and everything will be back to status quo.”

Actually, as far as “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” is concerned, it’s not even a few more months. By the end of Monday’s episode, the Bankses had gained emotional sustenance from their feel-good quickie in South-Central, with the memory of Phil’s guilty lament about selling out and not fulfilling his “commitment” to his old neighborhood vanishing in a flash. Roll credits.

If only the memory of last Wednesday’s “Melrose Place” would vanish as easily. The plot had white cabby Billy Campbell (Andrew Shue) getting robbed and having his cab bashed in by some bat-wielding, African-American gangbangers in South-Central. When Billy vowed not to drive “down there” again, his African-American friend, Rhonda Blair (Vanessa Williams), bristled: “Down there , Billy? To the jungle?”

Well, all of this baffled poor Billy, just as the middle-class Rhonda’s burst of ethnic consciousness must have puzzled viewers of a series that tends to homogenize rather than clearly define its characters. It seemed that Rhonda was feeling guilty because she was at once “outraged” by the Rodney G. King verdict and “horrified” by the aftermath. “But I didn’t do a damn thing.” Just what she felt guilty about not doing wasn’t made clear.

Nevertheless, no more Ms. Oreo for Rhonda. “They’re my people, my community,” she said. Yet given this series’ agenda, don’t count on Rhonda’s reborn consciousness resurfacing in future plots.

In the episode, everyone saw the light simultaneously. Feeling compassion for his attackers, Billy wasn’t going to prosecute the one he could identify until Rhonda--taking the high road--reminded him that “the law is the law.” The hour ended with Billy’s platonic roommate, Allison, coming upon Billy and Rhonda sitting at the side of the pool with their feet dangling in the water.

Billy: “The trick is you gotta be able to listen.”

Rhonda: “Yeah, we can change the world, one person at a time.”

Allison: “Sounds like a good plan to me.”

In prime time, they’re all good plans, as television continues to discover simple answers to society’s difficult problems.