Video: Crime Pays in Prime Time

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Never Trust the System. Despite a conservative, law-and-order frame of mind, TV's new crime fighters are profoundly skeptical of the law-enforcement establishment. Virtually every series hero is either a private detective or a fiercely independent cop at odds with his or her by-the-book boss. In NBC'S Hot Pursuit, a law-abiding married couple are even forced to go on the lam, Fugitive-style, to solve the murder for which she has been wrongly convicted.

Cars Can Fly. This year, as in the past, few TV hours will go by without a highspeed auto chase involving vehicles with the uncanny ability to defy gravity in picturesque slow motion.

As adherents to the formula go, NBC'S Hunter is probably the most entertaining of the newcomers. Former N.F.L. Defensive End Fred Dryer stars as a Clint Eastwood-style police detective who is teamed up with an equally independent female cop (Stepfanie Kramer). Producer Stephen Cannell (The A-Team ) knows how to poke fun at the genre without trashing it: after a high-speed car chase, a culprit drags himself, half dead, from under his demolished auto. Crouched in front of the malefactor, Dryer deadpans, "Stop or I'll shoot."

ABC'S Jessie, starring Lindsay Wagner as a police psychiatrist, wants to be taken more seriously. But in the original pilot, she helped track down a murderer-rapist with such amazing clairvoyance that even ABC was incredulous: the network fired the producers and hired crime-show veteran David Gerber (Police Story) to make the show more plausible. With Wagner, TV's former Bionic Woman, spouting unctuous psychobabble, that will be no mean feat.

For civilized crime fighting, Angela Lansbury is delightful as a mystery writer who solves whodunits in her spare time in Murder, She Wrote (CBS). And for a walk on the wilder side of law enforcement, NBC is offering Miami Vice. Shot in a gritty, cinéma-vérité style, the show has a good deal of hard-edged vitality. Still, one cop keeps a pet alligator for laughs and gets predictably surly when he is teamed with a transplanted New York City detective: "This is Miami, pal... and down here you're just another amateur!" Yeah, and Miami Vice is just another cop show.

If Miami Vice offers the grit, plenty of others will provide the glamour. Loni Anderson and Lynda Carter decorate a San Francisco detective agency in Partners in Crime (NBC). The gaudiest bauble on the fall schedule is ABC'S Paper Dolls, a soap opera set in the New York City fashion world, with Morgan Fairchild doing a Joan Collins impression as the head of a modeling agency. The show resurrects almost all the show-business clichés (the "star" model spoiled by success, the naive newcomer, the demanding stage mother) and stirs them up for a season of soapsuds that will probably be mistaken for entertainment by a large audience. But Paper Dolls looks like Thomas Mann next to the inanities of Glitter, a Spelling comedy-drama set in the offices of a PEOPLE-like national magazine. If possible, the show seems even more retrograde than its prototype, Spelling's The Love Boat.