Television’s Great Saturday Night Turnoff : Programming: With less than half of viewers tuned in during that prime-time period, networks struggle to find a winner.

Producer Marcy Carsey is a major TV player with such hits as “Roseanne” and “The Cosby Show.” But she didn’t complain when CBS canceled her newest sitcom, “Frannie’s Turn,” this week.

“Frannie’s Turn,” which starred Miriam Margolyes as a working mother seeking more respect, was yet another long-shot network attempt to fill TV’s black hole--the void that has become Saturday night programming. Everyone in the industry is aware of the problem.

“We loved the show,” says Carsey, “but CBS never prevaricated that it had mixed feelings about it going in.”

“It’s a graveyard,” Margolyes said of the Saturday night slot, “and we fell into it, and that’s it. I don’t think the show is off because we were lousy.”

Unhappy at the quick hook, she even phoned CBS Entertainment President Jeff Sagansky and protested in vain.

The flurry was the latest evidence of trouble on network TV’s fast-slipping night and the question that it poses:

Is Saturday night dead?

It’s certainly beginning to look like it.

Once the home of such hits as “The Golden Girls,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Love Boat,” Saturday night has become the loneliest night of the week for TV.

Only 49% of the nation’s viewers have tuned in regular Saturday prime-time programming on the Big Three networks this season--a new low for television’s least-watched night--says David Poltrack, CBS vice president for research and planning. That’s a 10% drop from last season, he adds.

As TV struggles to avoid even a partly lost weekend amid the increasing number of VCRs, the consensus is that older viewers are the primary Saturday network audience.

Which is one reason CBS stuck with Saturday’s highly praised “Brooklyn Bridge” series this week while canceling “Frannie’s Turn.” Produced by “Family Ties” creator Gary David Goldberg, “Brooklyn Bridge” stars Marion Ross as the determined matriarch of a 1950s Jewish family.

“It’s a program we all love,” Poltrack says. The network continues to look for a proper companion series that could help it grow into a ratings hit.

“They (CBS) truly like the show, which is great,” says Goldberg, adding that the warm comedy has tested well with focus groups who “didn’t see ethnic, urban, period--they just saw family. Minneapolis is our biggest city. But we can’t get people to come to the set Saturday night.

“CBS continues to get huge amounts of mail on the show. Those things matter. And there’s no problem with advertisers. If we didn’t get a little (ratings) printout on Monday morning, we’d think that we were a huge hit. But we need to deliver a larger audience or obviously we’re not going to stay on.”

For Goldberg, there’s no doubt that the focus of the series must stay on Ross as the matriarch Sophie Berger: “She’s the locomotive.”

CBS clearly wants to establish long-term creative relationships with Goldberg and the Carsey-Werner company by taking a risk on their shows. And despite the outcome of their current series, the simple principle of trying to put on better programs is the only way to beat the Saturday dead-end, say key executives.

Fred Silverman, a former network boss who now produces such shows as “Perry Mason,” “Matlock” and “In the Heat of the Night,” says that Saturday gets “the dregs” of the new series because of its smaller audience.

“When (the networks) program their fall shows, Saturday is last,” he says. “But ‘The Golden Girls’ proved that you can have (Saturday) shows in the Top 10 if you have the right shows. What it means is that Saturday has got to stop being the receptacle for all the marginal shows.”

Taking a slam at networks that program heavily for “youth, youth, youth,” Silverman says that “they’re dismissing a lot of older people.” As for network program executives who claim that their advertisers want only the under-50 audience, he adds: “That’s a sales problem. Maybe they need better salesmen.”

CBS, meanwhile, is vowing high priority for Saturdays, which is up for grabs in the ratings. In one quick strike this fall, CBS became a formidable force on Fridays by targeting the night with a lineup of “The Golden Palace,” “Major Dad,” “Designing Women,” “Bob” and “Picket Fences.”

Peter Tortorici, executive vice president of entertainment for resurgent ratings leader CBS, seconds the views of Silverman: “Viewers will come to good programming on any night. A lot of people say you can’t get a (ratings) number on Friday or Saturday night. You can’t get a number until you get it. You couldn’t beat ‘Magnum, P.I.’ until ‘The Cosby Show’ came along.”

The question, however, is whether it’s worth it for all the networks to keep programming on Saturdays if it remains a dark hole in a time of revolutionary upheaval in TV. One of the ideas being floated is that at least one network at some point may think of turning several hours on Saturdays back to its affiliate stations to program as they see fit.

“I don’t think anybody is looking to turn back prime time (to affiliates),” says NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield. However, although NBC has several fairly well-known shows on Saturdays, including “Empty Nest” and “Sisters,” Littlefield concedes that the over-50 audience is “grazing” on that night in search of programs.

As an eye-opening example, he points to the “dramatic increase in 50-plus adults” who have taken to watching “Cops” on the youth-oriented Fox Broadcasting Co. “There seems to be a fairly large number of older viewers who said, ‘Where do I go?’ ”

Random grazing, however, can’t save an entire network night. The “parceling out” of Saturday hours to affiliates could become a reality. Only a major commitment like the one CBS is promising can really hold an audience. Alternatives are everywhere. On HBO, for instance, there’s a terrific Saturday comedy tandem: “Dream On” and Garry Shandling’s “The Larry Sanders Show.”

“A tough night for the networks,” says Joel Segal of the McCann-Erickson ad agency. And ironically, the older-skewing series may turn out to be ratings saviors for networks such as ABC and NBC, which have made the 18-to-49 audience a prime target this season. NBC already has ordered a passel of “Perry Mason” films starting Oct. 30 to replace three failed Friday shows, including the twentysomething series “The Round Table.”

And ABC has a two-hour “Matlock” on tap Nov. 5, which Silverman thinks may presage a series return on Saturdays.

Cracks CBS’ Tortorici: “NBC and ABC have learned that being young means to be young at heart.”