‘Designing Women’ Producer Has New Motifs : Television: Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s show airs its last episode May 24, but she has other TV shows, a film and a play on the agenda.

Don’t expect Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, creator of “Designing Women,” “Evening Shade” and “Hearts Afire,” to go mouthing off about CBS’ cancellation of “Designing Women”--certainly not with the sharp one-liners the show’s smart, sassy Southern characters might have come up with.

And don’t anticipate Bloodworth-Thomason, who deflects such questions, confiding whether good friend Hillary Rodham Clinton might have had something to say about the administration of CBS Entertainment President Jeff Sagansky.

Indeed, the writer-producer’s best crack last week had nothing to do with “Designing Women” but came instead at a “Women and Power” symposium: “I told Hillary the other night she should change her name to Bambi Rodham Clinton, and half her problems would be over.”

The politically astute Bloodworth-Thomason, who also made “The Man From Hope” about good friend Bill Clinton for the Democratic National Convention, is putting a buck-stops-here face on the demise of “Designing Women,” about the lives and loves of four women and one man who run an Atlanta interior decorating firm.

The series, she said in an interview, “was my most rewarding creative experience, so it’s always sad to say goodby to something like that. Everybody who does a series comes to a point where it is almost impossible to maintain the original quality of it. The cast was certainly still delivering, but behind the scenes it had become a struggle to maintain the creative quality.”

Curled up in a chair in the spacious suite she shares at Columbia Television Studios with her husband and partner, Harry Thomason, who had just left for a few days at the White House, she said the cancellation did not come as any surprise “because we’ve been discussing it for a long time--Harry and I and Jeff Sagansky and Peter Tortorici (executive vice president of CBS Entertainment).

“You know, it’s not something you do easily,” she said, “but you don’t want to stay on the air until you’re dragged from the stage kicking and screaming.”

“Designing Women,” which since its 1986 debut tackled such issues as AIDS, breast cancer, pornography, women clergy and her clear favorite, the sexual-harassment battle between Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and law professor Anita Hill, had “run its course.” She felt its point, as a “showcase for very outspoken, man-loving feminists,” had been made.

The last “Designing Women,” an hour show in which the principals dress up in “Gone With the Wind” costumes, will air May 24 at 9 p.m.

The show has had a somewhat checkered history. Although critically acclaimed, it nearly went off the air in the spring of 1987 after being moved all over the schedule but was saved by strong viewer protest. Later there was a very public flap between the Thomasons and actress Delta Burke.

In 1991-92, airing Monday nights at 8:30, “Designing Women” ranked as the season’s No. 6 show. This season, with a less desirable Friday 9 p.m. berth, it ranked 68 among 140 prime-time series. Yet Bloodworth-Thomason didn’t refer to the time slot until she was asked. “Oh, yeah, moving to Friday night was a killer,” she said easily. “That is the Siberia of television right now.”

Didn’t she know it could cause a problem? “Yes, but I’m not president of a network. Friday night was traditionally a big night for CBS a decade ago, and they’re trying to get it back.”

So didn’t she protest? “Oh, I’m sure I did,” she said, laughing. “I protest any slot they give me that’s not a great one. But we’re realists. Look, if that had been my only show and I was going to stay with that show, then it wouldn’t have been moved. Candidly. I think after you’ve written 90 scripts you’ve made your statement.”

But her younger “babies,” the newer shows, demanded attention. Bloodworth-Thomason wrote 18 scripts this season for “Hearts Afire” and two for “Evening Shade,” which is completing its third season. She wrote only “three or four” for “Designing Women” and, in addition, had lost the services of the show’s longtime writer-producer Pamela Norris, who has a pilot script at CBS.

Meanwhile, Harry Thomason directed 20 of 22 “Hearts Afire,” a full plate for both of them, she insists, maintaining that the time they spent with the Clintons during and after the presidential campaign had not interfered with work.

Now she has other fish to fry. And not just in television.

* A new TV show that is expected to open in mid-season next year about a blue-collar family and will deal with current political issues.

* A potential new TV show about women in Washington. (That won’t constitute a second Washington series because next season she will move “Hearts Afire” away from its Capitol setting. “It was very unfocused in that the real franchise of this show is the relationship between John (Ritter) and Markie (Post), the home and the kids and the relationship with Billy Bob Thornton.”)

* A low-budget feature that she and Thomason hope to make next year starring young Clark Duke (who plays Elliott Hartman on “Hearts Afire”).

* A Broadway play that she’d like to write about women, featuring Dixie Carter.