Video: The Blackboard Jumble

Networks start the new season by going back to school

It is that sunny, uncertain time of year on the offshore islands of network television. The new season has just been launched, and the vice presidents of programming are watching the skies. The winds can blow balmy in these weeks or the weather can turn cruel. The season is young enough for any new show even a thrice-cloned knock-off from an already enervated formula, to have a shot at success. At the same time, the season is far enough along—and computers, demographics and ratings systems so sophisticated—that storm clouds filled with cancellations are already gathering on the horizon.

As this year's line-up unfolds (the last of the new shows, depending on the duration of the World Series, may not appear until late October), certain patterns have already emerged. One cornerstone show is Ripley's Believe It or Not!, starring Jack Palance as a sort of host-narrator who guides the gullible down shadowy byways of history, folklore, sociology and pseudo science. Palance, who has the congeniality of Robert Louis Stevenson's body snatcher, goes in for twisted smiles of irony, as if he were trying to bite open a marble. He is the only presiding television host who actually seems to pronounce ellipses. When he says, "Witness the death rites of a Balinese prince in a fiery ceremony designed to release his soul for reincarnation," each dot of the ellipsis seems to detonate on the soundtrack like a small grenade.

The show (ABC, Sunday, 7-8 p.m. E.D.T.) is thoughtful enough to provide identifying labels for those viewers who may be getting their diploma through a matchbook correspondence course: Isadora Duncan is described as "the controversial dancer," Balzac and Proust, in no uncertain terms, as "French novelists," and Thus Spake Zarathustra as "the famous composition by Richard Strauss."

Ripley's signals a small trend among new shows to package a little educational value and, indeed, to use school as a significant backdrop. Voyagers!—exclamation marks appear to be a la mode this year-even ends with a plug to send the youngsters out to the library, where they can get the full scoop on some of the history the show has skimmed. A sort of hybrid of You Are There and the film Time Bandits, Voyagers! (NBC, Sunday, 7-8 p.m.) features Jon-Erik Hexum as a pilgrim from the future who crash-lands in the apartment of a lonely city boy (Meeno Peluce). Hexum, who is rigged out in knee boots, tight trou and leather jerkin, looks to have lost his way en route to a community-theater production of The Pirates of Penzance, but convinces the incredulous Peluce of his credentials by whisking him off to Egypt, 1450 B.C., where they discover Moses in the bulrushes; France, 1918, where they frolic during World War Iand Dayton, where they peek in on a couple of querulous Wright brothers and help get them flying. The youngster, of course knows all about history, while the oft-addled time traveler ("Smokin' bats-breath! This isn't 1492!") makes up in grit what he lacks in gray matter.