Television: The Bodies in Question

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It is not easy to blend social comedy with slapstick, especially when the emphasis is on the latter. Farce is a precision instrument: the cuckolded husband must negotiate a labyrinth of plot twists before he opens his bedroom door at the split second his lovely young wife adjusts her peignoir and the milkman defenestrates himself. Farce demands ingenuity, grace and discipline — qualities in short supply on network TV. Occasionally those magic imps Penny Marshall (Laverne) and Cindy Williams (Shir ley) bring it off. Now Chris Thompson and Joel Zwick, two veterans of L & S, have devised Bosom Buddies (ABC, Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. E.S.T.). The first ep isode is as silly as its prem ise: two guys dress as women to secure lodging in an all-girl hotel. Some Like It Hot this is not, and some of the jokes are more than nine days old. But there is promise here: the young stars, Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, know when to underplay a line and when to run with it. If Thompson and Zwick can find inventive ways to extend this single-joke situation, Bosom Buddies could be worth watching.

One wishes that could be said for Ted Knight and Too Close for Comfort (ABC, Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m. E.S.T.). As Mary Tyler Moore's Ted Baxter, Knight embodied a wonderful comic oaf: vain, inept and hilarious. In his new series he is just another henpecked husband, who must put up with two nubile daughters and fall over a loveseat every eight minutes. The other seven minutes, Too Close slavers over the sight of bountiful Lydia Cornell as she ponders the implications of taking a deep breath. The show can not see the farce for the tease. The actors exaggerate their gestures grotesquely, as if performing R-rated charades for the nearsighted. Too Close for Comfort marks a milestone in TV history: the eclipse of a fine comic actor, and the full festering of the smutcom. Never has the medium more fully deserved its reputation as the boob tube .