Television Up Close: Wake Me for Test Pattern : Three months with the beckoning light are a nightmare. Network mediocrity is unrelenting, and news is a relief.

Flashback.

By the end of July, I had watched all or part of most of the 38 new, fall network TV series that were set to debut.

Within days, I was taken ill. The running gag among my wiseacre friends is that clearly there was a cause-and-effect relationship here. Well, you never know.

In any case, I spent most of the next three months recuperating--from a heart bypass operation in August and then a bleeding ulcer in September, both of which brought me face to face with the worst nightmare of all: being stuck in a hospital room with a TV set, sometimes alone.

Matters did not improve during the recovery period at home because TV is always beckoning, as all trapped recuperating patients know.

But I will not lie. Although escapism and light fare are what patients might be expected to seek out--just for relief--I often found it difficult to turn on entertainment shows, especially on the networks, because the level of off-putting mediocrity is so devastating and unrelenting.

*

I am, in short, here to tell you that the old myth about TV entertainment being a great boredom-killer when you have hours to fill is just that--a myth--and anyone who buys into it ought to get a life. If the cheapening of taste is TV’s greatest offense, the blanketing of all those channels with boredom is also right up there, along with violence.

Along with watching films, especially on cable’s American Movie Classics channel, I found myself--subconsciously, I guess--seeking out things that would give me a closer connection to the real world and sort of keep me plugged in. I devoured the daily newspaper. Now and then, a sports event on TV would grab me, especially UCLA and USC football. I even watched Wisconsin.

At home, I tuned almost automatically to the ESPN and Prime Ticket sports channels when things got slow elsewhere, even if it meant watching some obscure event. At least it was real. But I still can’t get interested in Toronto baseball; I rooted like hell for Philadelphia during the World Series.

News programs, almost any news programs, were invariably preferable to entertainment, almost any entertainment, especially on the networks. You look at things like “The Mommies” and “Cafe Americain” and just shake your head.

*

But C-SPAN can hook you for hours. The TV images of the fires of recent weeks were unforgettable. And I watched, with a suddenly intense personal interest, every minute of President Clinton’s major speech as he unveiled his national health plan. It was riveting, but the guy still needs to cut his big addresses by five or 10 minutes.

The hours imposed by the recuperation process made it even tougher for me to enjoy TV. The late-night and post-midnight shows, my favorite programs for viewing at my favorite time of viewing, were a logistic, personal no-no for the most part because rest and a good night’s sleep came first.

Occasionally, however, something weird and even wonderful occurred at these hours. Several times in the hospital, for instance, I awoke late at night, switched on TV and caught the Chevy Chase and Conan O’Brien talk shows early in their launchings. I now realize it may have been the best way to watch them because there was a fantasy quality to them, for surely nothing like this could really be on the air.

Suddenly, even in the age of the VCR, I felt confined to very standard, very bourgeois viewing hours. TV was really not high on my list of priorities given the other matters at hand, but what was most convenient to see was daytime programs, which I can barely watch except out of duty; the late-afternoon freakazoid talk shows, which are in the same category; and local news, which is not far behind.

The morning news-and-talk series such as “Today” certainly looked better by comparison. Then there was some new stuff in prime time that I liked: “Frasier,” “Grace Under Fire,” “The John Larroquette Show,” “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” and “NYPD Blue,” where I kept looking for all the terrible raunchiness it was accused of and could find nothing that really offended me as an adult.

All the advance fuss over “NYPD Blue” was, of course, a great big help in getting the series off to a strong ratings start--the modern equivalent of being banned in Boston.

Despite my added time for viewing, I made no particular effort to seek out such shows as “Geraldo” and “Hard Copy” and find a new appreciation for them. How many times do you have to stick your head in the oven to know what’s going to happen?

On the other hand, if you have the time, as I did, television’s hellish fascination can’t help but lure you into sizing up the people and programs and technology that insinuate themselves into our lives simply by surrounding us every day.

I watched CBS’ new anchor team of Dan Rather and Connie Chung, for instance, and I just don’t think that they’ll ever really click as a pair.

In addition, even with my earlier-to-bed regimen, I did manage to check out all those late-night hosts, and nothing hit me more squarely in the eyes than NBC’s disastrous misjudgment of David Letterman’s appeal, which he is displaying for his new employer, CBS.

Oh, NBC knew he had big appeal, but the question about Letterman was whether he had a kind of limited audience for the 11:35 p.m. slot that he wanted--too cultish, not diverse enough, too young, not enough women, and on and on.

That was a factor in NBC’s decision to go with Jay Leno rather than Letterman to replace Johnny Carson as host of “The Tonight Show.” But Letterman is quickly proving any doubts about him dead wrong, emerging quickly as a winner even though about one-quarter of CBS’ stations are still carrying him at a later hour--which means his ratings growth has large potential when these affiliates jump on the 11:35 bandwagon.

What NBC failed to understand about Letterman is that his audience was going to grow into the next audience of “The Tonight Show” as his viewers aged just a bit.

The less said about Chase and O’Brien, the better. As for Leno, he’s game, but Letterman is staking out the territory for the long run. Arsenio Hall, meanwhile, is an interesting case: Like him or not, he knows exactly what he’s doing and, despite his slide, looks highly professional compared to the new kids on the block. It’s too bad Fox doesn’t have him to replace the mercifully terminated Chase debacle.

Among the major programs I did watch all the way through, even though it ran three hours, was the Emmy Awards, and, frankly, I was happy that “Cheers” failed to pass “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as the most-honored series in TV history.

I also tuned in some reruns of “Twin Peaks” on the Bravo cable channel and reaffirmed my belief that the two-hour pilot of the series is among the best TV movies I’ve ever seen.

That started me thinking about some other personal bests. For me, “An Englishman Abroad,” with Alan Bates and Coral Browne, is the drama special I’d most like to see again. “My Name Is Barbra,” in which Barbra Streisand, then 24, let the world know that an immense star was born, was the best variety special.

Well, I had a lot of time on my hands. But what struck me most of all was the overwhelming fascination with interactive TV, the astronomical Viacom-QVC bidding war for Paramount and the ongoing volatile developments in the computer industry as things shake out in the interwoven multimedia revolution.

It all made me think of the traditional old networks, which now seem so quaint--because when the technology is more interesting than the programming, something’s wrong.