New Season: III

By Gerald Clarke, Frank Rich

Sad Lydia, sterile John, dim Paris

Love for Lydia (Sept. 23, PBS). Fluff up the cushions and settle back into the easy chair. It is time for another British soap opera from Masterpiece Theater. Appropriately, this sad tale of the dangers of love, taken from a novel by the late H.E. Bates, begins its run on the first day of autumn and continues through the sea son, ending Dec. 9. Lydia Aspen (Mel Martin) is a beautiful young heiress who comes to Aspen House on the death of her father in 1929. Three middle-class youths from the town, a factory center in the Midlands, fall in love with her. Two of them find the attraction fatal, but the third lives to tell the story and use it as the subject matter for his first novel. The pace is glacial, but the series is slowly -- ever so slowly -- engrossing. The acting is superb, and Christopher Blake is little short of wonderful as the shy but alway believable writer.

Gerald Clarke

Trapper John, M.D. (Sept. 23, CBS, 10 p.m.). This M--A --S--#spin-off is the most misproduced show of the season: a seemingly foolproof idea completely spoiled by, well, fools. The series picks up its title character (originally played on television by Wayne Rogers) 28 years after Korea. Nowadays Trapper John is chief of surgery at a San Francisco hospital, and he is acted with consummate world-weariness by Pernell Roberts. A few grafted-on references to M*A*S*H notwithstanding, the show turns out to be nothing but an inept Marcus Welby retread. The plotting is vague, the tedious medical cri ses are easily averted, and the comedy leaden. As always in this genre, there is a young sidekick for the middle-aged hero. This time out, the second banana calls himself Gonzo, purports to be a Viet Nam veteran, looks and acts like a fashion mod el and lives in a very cute van called the Titanic. SOS!

Paris (Sept. 29, CBS, 10 p.m.). The good James Earl Jones, last seen in Roots 2, is an actor whose somber presence of ten gives way to humanizing bursts of humor. The bad James Earl Jones is so unrelievedly grave he could turn an audience to stone. This series, which casts Jones as Police Detective Woody Paris, brings out the actor's worst. Watching Paris explain his crime-solving logic is about as much fun as hearing an insurance sales pitch. The show's troubles do not end there. The supporting cast is amateurish, and the identity of the murder culprit in the opening episode can be guessed after the first scene. It does not take much longer than that to deduce the ultimate fate of Paris.

Frank Rich

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