This Season’s Biggest New Hit Is ‘NFL 90210’

For breakfast on Sundays, try Fox and bagels.

Having just viewed the NFL on Fox TV for the first time, all I can say is, it won’t be the last. I miss CBS about as much as I miss leisure suits and pet rocks.

They’re running a strong program over there at Foxball.

So far, I sure do like what I see. I like the cute little scoreboard in the upper left-hand corner. I like Terry Bradshaw, the merry goofball of TV football. I like Jimmy Johnson, the old Cowpoke who now pokes fun at the Cowboys and himself. I like James Brown, who plays Larry Sanders to Bradshaw’s Hank Kingsley. I like Fox’s pregame show, halftime show and everything but the prime-time shows that follow these shows.

(OK, except “Married With Children,” which is still funnier than anything else on Fox, with the possible exception of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.)

Everybody who expressed horror when the Fox network snookered CBS out of its NFL rights should apologize profusely. Fox didn’t contaminate football; it improved it. Fox took CBS’s black eye and opened it.

For everyone who wanted to keep the old CBS announcers, Fox kept the old CBS announcers. If your idea of a good time is watching somebody pump gas into John Madden’s bus, so be it. If you find Pat Summerall’s voice as soothing as flute music to a cobra, OK by me.

I thought Fox would bring in some new voices, but guess I was wrong. People prefer familiar sounds. Summerall and Madden are a couple of comfortable old-timers--you know, like the Rolling Stones.

Others thought Fox would sizzle up the telecast with new innovations. I guess they expected Aaron Spelling to produce a pregame show with Heather Locklear and Daphne Zuniga arguing over which team was sexier, the 49ers or the Bears.

What I found on Fox was a fairly conventional NFL telecast. It had the usual elements--highlights, updates and Bradshaw bouncing up and down like he’d just drunk a quart of cappuccino.

Gotta tell ya, I love Terry to pieces. I’ll never forget chatting with him in New Orleans one day before Denver played San Francisco in a Super Bowl. Bradshaw had the audacity to predict that Denver might lose by as much as 55-3. Bradshaw was dead wrong about the Broncos. They lost, 55-10.

Terry Bradshaw is one of the five happiest human beings alive. Robin Williams. Dolly Parton. Beavis. Butthead. Bradshaw. That order.

I don’t normally watch much television on Sundays, because I go to the games in person. Alas, both my local teams were traveling, and both of them were doing so lousy, I didn’t feel like traveling with them.

So, I stayed home and watched TV. Same as a few million other Americans. I watched ESPN and NBC and Fox and everything they could throw at me. I didn’t even have to lower the volume on my remote control, because none of these shows involved Dan Dierdorf.

My morning began with the “Sports Reporters” on ESPN, the show that features the esteemed Dick Schaap with three media people. God, I love children’s programming.

Next, I watched some of ESPN’s pregame package. I thought the four most informed people on the air were Andrea Kremer, Robin Roberts, Shelley Smith and Lesley Visser. Can’t ESPN find a few good men?

Then I switched to Fox. In my town, Fox is on Channel 11. I like Channel 11 because it often features my favorite programming, like that guy who teaches Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford to love each other better, or that guy who makes Jayne Kennedy cry by looking into his psychic crystal ball, or that woman who tingles all over because some guy has just invented a great new mop. God, I love infomercials.

Anyway, after Channel 11 opened its sports programming Sunday with something called “Greatest Tackles of All-Time” (“Mike Stratton stops Keith Lincoln in 1964!” “Chuck Bednarik levels Frank Gifford!”) I then took a look at the Fox network’s “NFL Sunday,” partly because I wanted to watch it and partly because CBS was running “Face the Nation,” and, as you know, for more than 25 years in this nation, nobody has ever watched “Face the Nation.”

Well, Fox was fun. I particularly liked Jimmy Johnson, who is funnier than Mike Ditka, who is funnier than Buddy Ryan, who isn’t half as funny as he thinks he is, which still makes him twice as funny as Joe Gibbs.

Later came the game, Rams at Packers, my first actual Foxball experience. And guess what? Anytime I wanted to know the score, it was there. Or the time. I didn’t need to wait for a timeout. I didn’t need to wait for Marv Albert on NBC to get around to it. (During the Raider-Patriot game Sunday, I did The Times crossword puzzle between Marv’s score updates, and finished it.)

All in all, Fox was first-rate. Congratulations to everyone over at our fourth major network. I enjoyed Channel 11 so much Sunday, I almost skipped the Raider game entirely so I could stay tuned for “Three’s Company” re-runs and pro wrestling.