Video: Lunks, Hunks and Arkifacts

A couple of unlikely private eyes top the new fall season

On their way to tacking together television's new season, the networks have at least cleared up one mystery. Raiders of the Lost Ark, fans will recall, ended inside a huge warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with wooden cartons marked "Top Secret." The networks have sneaked onto those premises, crowbarred off the lids and let the world see what was in the packing boxes: knockoffs.

Audiences, who are far more tolerant in front of a tube than a theater screen, may wring a reasonable amount of fun from Bring 'Em Back Alive (CBS, Tuesdays, 8 p.m. E.S.T.), which appropriates the dashing slogan, cut-to-measure mythos and even the name of the 1930s animal hunter Frank Buck. Mounted like an old Republic serial, the slap-happy adventure show boasts a congenial leading man in Bruce Boxleitner. He is required to trap all manner of jungle animals without doing them physical harm and, not incidentally, battle Nazis, Asian warlords and assorted jetsam that floats past Malaya.

Elsewhere in the South Seas of the '30s, TV viewers will come upon Jake Cutter, mainstay of the Tales of the Gold Monkey (ABC, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.S.T.), who is not as burly as Buck, and is subject to occasional bouts of malaria besides. A hard-times flyboy with a beat-up leather jacket and a Terry and the Pirates cap, Cutter finds himself enmeshed, often to his considerable chagrin, in a variety of exotic adventures having to do with lost treasures and old legends. Cutter, attractively played by Stephen Collins, darts around in a wreck of a seaplane and tends to have rather more extravagant adventures than Frank Buck, although the show's budget is frequently hard pressed to match the inventions of its writers.

These two shows share a certain fitful buoyancy of spirit that, on a good night, can make for a quiet laugh and an easy hour. And they may even suggest that television is doing better imitating the movies than cannibalizing itself. Police shows, a usually reliable network staple, have pretty much come a cropper—or, under the circumstances, anything but a copper. Brian Devlin (Rock Hudson) on The Devlin Connection (NBC, Saturdays, 10 p.m. E.S.T.) is head of a huge culture complex in Los Angeles who does some investigating with his son on the side. As played by Robert Urich, Gavilan (NBC, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) is a crime-busting oceanographer more at ease in a wet suit than a trench coat. And the Tuckers (Tim Matheson, Catherine Ricks) on Tucker's Witch (CBS, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.S.T), although carrying P.I. credentials, have to rely for investigative inspiration on Ms. Tucker's erratic supernatural skills. All of them are in serious need of some vocational guidance.