Rerun season, a bane to the regular viewer but a boon to the occasional one, is in full flower on the networks. Most of the weekly series now contract for only 26 new episodes a year, which leaves the other six months to be filled with repeats of segments shown earlier in the season or from years past. It's a happy time for those who love The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and baseball with equal fervor, less so for those who suspect that the episode they missed last fall wasn't worth watching in the first place. The best of this week's first-run shows and one worthy rerun:

Wednesday, May 12

ABC SCOPE (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.).*A profile of Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Robert M. Shelton, presiding over two Klan rallies and discussing the history and objectives of the Klan.

Friday, May 14

THE MAN WHO WALKED IN SPACE (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). NBC Moscow Correspondent Frank Bourgholtzer interviews Soviet Cosmonauts Leonov and Belyayev in a special that includes color film of Leonov floating in space.

FDR (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). "The Road to Rome" during the crucial year 1942, from the Casablanca Conference to the invasions of Sicily and Italy and the fall of Mussolini.

THE JACK PAAR SHOW (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Paar's guest list melds a rare and winsome threesome: Senator Everett M. Dirksen, Liberace and Bob Newhart.

Sunday, May 16

NBC CHILDREN'S THEATER (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Ed Begley narrates "Kristie," the story of two children and their love for a stubborn horse. Color.

THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). An unlikely blend of cult and culture features Rock 'n' Rollers Petula Clark and The Beach Boys, plus Ballet Stars Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.

Monday, May 17

CBS REPORTS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A repeat of the April 5 documentary "Abortion and the Law," which drew critical acclaim but was largely missed by viewers who watched the Academy Award presentations that night.

Tuesday, May 18

THE BEST ON RECORD (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A special program featuring some of the winners of the 1965 Grammy Awards: The Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Henry Mancini, Petula Clark and others.

THE MIDDLE AGES (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A News Special (socalled) on the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the discovery of America. Color.

THEATER On Broadway HALF A SIXPENCE is a kind of cut-rate cockney Hello, Dolly! Tommy Steele is an infectiously beamish entertainer, Onna White's dances burst forth like spring blossoms, and their style is to woo rather than wow.

THE ODD COUPLE. Art Carney and Walter Matthau are wonderfully droll as two recently dewived men. Neil Simon's lines and Mike Nichols' direction keep the play on the brink of gleeful absurdity.

LUV. Murray Schisgal takes three fashionably denuded psyches liberally sprinkled with self-indulgence and garnished with pseudo-Freudian jargon, then roasts them hilariously in a hot oven of satire.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. Flesh is flesh and spirit is spirit, and rarely the twain do meet. A nonintellectual prostitute (Diana Sands) and a musty book clerk (Alan Alda) make the attempt seem screamingly funny. She tries to improve her mind; he loses his.

TINY ALICE. The philosophical depths have left Edward Albee befuddled, but his gift for generating theatrical excitement makes this metaphysical mystery play provocative entertainment.

Off Broadway

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER REVISITED. The sly humors of a talented cast delightfully enhance the sophisticated wit and verve of lesser-known Porter tunes.

JUDITH. Rosemary Harris is superb as the beautiful Jewess who saved her people by killing an Assyrian conqueror. Jean Giraudoux's skeptical version of the apocryphal story reveals a Judith more womanly than saintly, driven not so much by piety as by a desire for personal glory.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. This early Arthur Miller play about the family of a Brooklyn longshoreman is informed with elements of Greek tragedy, and a splendid cast gives a moving performance.

Theater Recordings

HENRY IV, PART I & HENRY IV, PART II (Caedmon). There are those who believe that Falstaff is the greatest comic character in English literature, and these recordings will not disappoint them. Anthony Quayle's voice combines the tavern-soaked grossness of "fat Jack" with the agile wit and arrogant flair of Sir John. Michael Redgrave as Hotspur seems at times to get only false teeth into the part.

CAESAR & CLEOPATRA (Caedmon) is more than a little like Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. For the tyrannical pedant of phonetics, Henry Higgins, Shaw substitutes the philosopher-king of Rome. In place of the forlorn flower girl who must be passed off as a lady, the play offers an adolescent Egyptian minx who must be tutored in regality. The playwright's purposes are somewhat thwarted by this recording. Max Adrian is little better than a fashionably tailored verbal dandy, and an overagitated Claire Bloom is more often short of breath than breathless.

KING LEAR (Caedmon) is a regal fool who topples into the abyss of unreason to discover the naked truth of the human condition. Paul Scofield is a cool, knowledgeable, self-contained actor who would not dream of venturing past the proscenium arch. In consequence, the recording neither sears nor scars; it might be a useful high school text.

HUGHIE (Columbia). "In a really dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Eugene O'Neill unfolded one of those nocturnal dialogues, ostensibly between a small-time gambler and a hotel night clerk, but actually between a man and his shattered-mirror images of himself. Jason Robards lays his life on each jagged line.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR (London). Into the quicksands of death march the mind-forsaken legions of Joan Littlewood's bitter, brittle, bizarre, tragicomic descant on the asininity and hapless gallantry of World War I. The show's sentimental ballads and parade-ground tempos are coated with steely irony; the weapons are not Krupp's but Brecht's.

LUV (Columbia). Even minus the diversionary bounce of Mike Nichols' sight gags, Murray Schisgal's comedy packs a satirically impressive bite.

THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES (Columbia). Winner of this year's New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the sleeper hit by New Playwright Frank D. Gilroy is written with precision, warmth, acute observation and unfailing honesty. The superb ensemble playing of Jack Albertson as the father, Irene Dailey as the mother, and Martin Sheen as their son is admirably recaptured in this album.

CINEMA

NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE. With improvised action and dialogue, Writer-Director Don Owen, a gifted young Canadian, mounts a spontaneous, surprisingly poetic essay about two affluent delinquents (Peter Kastner and Julie Biggs) swimming against the stream of life in suburban Toronto.

THE ROUNDERS. This amiable western spoof is enlivened by Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford as a team of shiftless bronco-busters trapped in a love-hate relationship with an obstreperous horse.

THE PAWNBROKER. Recalling the terrors of the Nazi death camps amid the squalor of Spanish Harlem, Rod Steiger, in the title role, makes one of the year's grimmest movies something to see.

IN HARM'S WAY. Director Otto Preminger remembers Pearl Harbor just long enough to launch John Wayne, Patricia Neal and other heroic types into some exciting tales of World War II.

THE OVERCOAT. A shy office clerk (Roland Bykov) trades his rags for the mantle of tragedy in this exquisite Russian version of Gogol's classic.

A BOY TEN FEET TALL Huck Finn charm mingles with Hemingwayish ruggedness when a runaway British lad (Fergus McClelland) and a grizzled old diamond poacher (Edward G. Robinson) cross paths in brightest Africa.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Julie Andrews founds the Trapp Family Singers and triumphs over Nazis, the Tyrolean Alps, seven adorable moppets and a schmalzy Rodgers and Hammerstein score.

DAIRY OF A CHAMBERMAID. Sex and sadism among the bourgeoisie of provincial France, with Jeanne Moreau as the Parisian maid who studies evil through a cool, clear glass.

RED DESERT. Color infuses plot and theme and provides the principal fascination of Director Michelangelo Antonioni's drama about a neurotic young wife (Monica Vitti) who searches her soul against a dispiriting industrial cityscape.

ZORBA THE GREEK. Strong red wine distilled from Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, with Anthony Quinn as Zorba, Oscar Winner Lila Kedrova as the pathetic old jade who is drinking her final toast to life.

THE TRAIN. A battle of the rails pits Burt Lancaster against Nazi Officer Paul Scofield, who tries to whisk a trainload of French art treasures off to Germany during the last days of the occupation.

BOOKS

Best Reading

DREISER, by W. A. Swanberg. A crude, naive natural writer. Dreiser was the founder and embodiment of the realistic school of writing that shocked the country in the first decades of this century. His life, like his work, was stubborn, untidy and wayward. Biographer Swanberg (Citizen Hearst) has made the most of it.

THE GIANT DWARFS, by Gisela Eisner. A bitterly effective indictment of the Nazi era and the new materialistic society that succeeded it. Through the eyes of a brilliant child, this young German novelist depicts a family's joyless, all-consuming pursuit of money and respectability at the cost of human feeling.

BACK TO CHINA, by Leslie Fiedler. The hero is a guilt collector who enmeshes himself in the misdeeds of others, while fastidiously ignoring his gaping lapses of conscience. A good satire on the portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-dirty-dog school.

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, by Samuel Eliot Morison. The historian-admiral draws heavily on his earlier works to present the sweep of the American story. His perspective on recent history is naturally personal, but the book is solidly readable and laced with many of its author's valuable insights.

I WILL TRY, by Legson Kayira. A youthful African from the Malawi Republic (formerly Nyasaland), the author decided in 1958 to "walk" from his home to the U.S. to find freedom and an education. Nearly two years later, he made it to a junior college in Washington State. He tells of his odyssey with warmth and a sense of wonder that many more practiced writers would be hard put to match.

SAM WARD, "KING OF THE LOBBY," by Lately Thomas. The story of the first real congressional lobbyist to flourish in post-Civil War Washington is a valuable history of the moneyed side of 19th century America. There were few great houses that did not welcome Sam--or his favors.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week)

2. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (2)

3. Hotel, Hailey (4)

4. Don't Stop the Carnival, Wouk (3)

5. Funeral in Berlin, Deighton (6)

6. The Ambassador, West (7)

7. Hurry Sundown, Gilden (8)

8. The Man, Wallace (5)

9. The Flight of the Falcon, Du Maurier

10. An American Dream, Mailer (9)

NONFICTION

1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)

2. Queen Victoria, Longford (5)

3. Journal of a Soul, Pope John XXIII (2)

4. The Founding Father, Whalen (3)

5. My Shadow Ran Fast, Sands (4)

6. The Italians, Barzini (6)

7. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (10)

8. Life with Picasso, Gilot and Lake

9. Catherine the Great, Oldenbourg

10. Design for Survival, Power (9)

*All times E.D.T.

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