TELEVISION : Burnett Takes a Stroll Down Memory Lane

Didn’t she used to be Carol Burnett?

Tonight’s “Men, Movies & Carol” is for determined Burnett fans who will like anything she does. Watching this hour special, whiffing its strong essence of nostalgia, makes you feel as if you’re on some kind of archeological dig, unearthing bones from the Mesozoic age.

The antiquity is not Burnett or her guests: Scott Bakula, Barry Bostwick, Michael Jeter and Tony Bennett, the latter not only much admired by the older crowd but also enjoying an amazing renaissance among the young. Rather, it’s the style of sketch comedy that echoes earlier times, a smattering of low-burlesque movie spoofs--from “Double Indemnity” to “The Graduate”--that could have been plucked directly from Burnett’s series that ran on CBS from 1967 to 1978.

Except that they’re not funny.

In those days, no one was better than Burnett and her main sidekicks, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway and Vicki Lawrence, at performing amusingly written, pleasingly over-the-top takeoffs that turned movies inside out.

Burnett can still give her voice that trademark wobble and be as goofy as anyone in an oversized wig. At its very best, however, her latest satire is mediocre, with most of it failing to make any impression at all.

Mercifully, Bennett is there only to sing, doing a medley with Burnett that provides a welcome break from the rest of the hour, the best of which is a quasi-straight production number emulating the MGM musicals celebrated in “That’s Entertainment (1, 2 and 3).” Bakula, Bostwick and Jeter as Maurice Chevaliers? Better to rent the movies.

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MS. INTEGRITY: It was June 23, 1993, and Deborah Norville was a correspondent on CBS’ “Street Stories” when she used an appearance on NBC’s “Tonight Show” to aim a blistering attack on tabloid magazine shows.

“At the networks, we have standards that we try to adhere to,” Norville said during that conversation with host Jay Leno, which was printed last week in the New York Daily News. “And I think 98% of what you get is the truth on our shows. You can’t say that about the tabloids.”

Actually, with OJitus sweeping the media these days, you can’t say it about network magazine programs either. In any case, Norville related to Leno her awful experience interviewing a 10-year-old stalking victim and her family in Montana right after they had spoken to a tabloid show (which the Daily News identified as the syndicated “Inside Edition”).

“By the time I came in, this kid was so battered that she had taken all the animals, all of her dolls and had her mother lock them in the basement because they reminded her of this horrible tabloid reporter,” said Norville, adding that the child’s waitress mother was paid $1,500 by the tabloid to make her daughter available to its reporter.

“That’s not what these shows ought to be about,” said Norville, resolutely. “That’s just not what I, as a journalist, am going to do, and I don’t think that’s what we as reporters ought to be doing out there.”

What a difference 16 months make. Last Thursday, the syndicated “Inside Edition” announced a successor to departing anchor Bill O’Reilly. A familiar name? Yes.

CBS correspondent Deborah Norville.

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DEADLY DAYTIME: Jane Whitney’s low-brow, low-rated talk show is gone, replaced by “The Other Side,” whose topics, NBC says, are “incredibly relevant to today’s daytime audience.” On last Monday’s premiere, a man conversed with the dead.

Proving that “The Other Side” is a talk show that’s on the level, its host is Will Miller. Not just any old host, Miller is a psychotherapist, ordained minister and stand-up comic. He sounds like his own sitcom.

His opening act, a fast-talking medium named James Van Praagh, shared the stage with the parents of David, who had died when he was 20. The parents poured out facts about their son that they said Van Praagh could not have known.

Van Praagh listened as David communicated with him. “He’s got your son with him,” Van Praagh said to the father of another deceased person, Josh, who died at age 8. Josh’s father proposed a test. If Van Praagh was legit, he’d be able to learn from Josh the private nickname the father had given his son.

The medium accepted the challenge. It was a stream-of-consciousness chat. “Joshie, what did Dad call you? It’s hard to get stuff like this, but I’ll try. C’mon. C’mon. Doctor! ‘Daddy called me doctor.’ ”

“Yes,” the father said.

Van Praagh also shared his belief that whatever ails us in life gets repaired in the afterlife. “Even if you don’t have a leg,” he promised, “you will get that back.”

The next day found “The Other Side” welcoming healers, one of them Gene Egidio, who said he didn’t learn of his “gift” until age 50, when a woman he didn’t know knocked on his door and said, “I have herpes.” Instead of slamming the door, he healed her. He ticked off his other feats, including healing the hand of a man who had nearly severed his thumb in an accident with a knife. Egidio said that when he clasped the thumb and the rest of the hand, they fused, leaving only a red ring.

Egidio also said that he died of appendicitis when he was 14.

“The Other Side” is tailor-made for ridicule. Yet compared to Jane Whitney’s circus, this is the Smithsonian. Miller turns out be a competent interviewer and a pretty fair devil’s advocate. And most of his subjects, the ones claiming to have been touched by bizarre happenings, appear credible. These are not toothless hillbillies in bolo ties, but mostly articulate, solid-citizen types.

Take Friday’s show, during which a woman insisted she was visited two weeks ago by her long-dead stepfather. All right, you rolled your eyes. Yet on the same show was a couple who came across as persuasively sane and earnest while claiming that the spirit of their daughter--who died of breast cancer when she was 32--was playing mischievous tricks around the house. As evidence, they cited the track lighting that clicked on independently and wouldn’t go off, and the TV remote that inexplicably disappeared, then reappeared on the couch “right under our noses.”

Are they hallucinating? Is everyone here hallucinating? Who’s to know? If Van Praagh can really schmooze with the dead, however, why doesn’t he get in touch with murder victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman and ask them who did it?

* “Men, Movies & Carol” airs at 10 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8). “The Other Side” airs weekdays at 9 a.m. on NBC (Channels 4 and 36).