TELEVISION: Murder, They Wheezed

Alexander Scott, the globe-trotting secret agent played by Bill Cosby in the 1960s series I Spy, made a return visit to his old top-secret agency a couple of weeks ago. And no one was more surprised than the security guard who had to inspect his outdated photo ID. "Long assignment?" she asked skeptically. "Sick leave," he replied.

It may be too harsh to call them the over-the-hill gang. But TV's newest batch of prime-time detectives are, let us say, not the sleuths you'd feel most comfortable hiring to follow an armed robber down a dark alley. Cosby, now 56 and with a No. 1-rated sitcom under his (expanding) belt, not only resurfaced in I Spy Returns on CBS but also played a police crime consultant in The Cosby Mysteries, the first of a planned series of NBC movies. Dick Van Dyke, now an avuncular 68, portrays a crime-solving physician in the CBS series Diagnosis Murder, and Gene Barry, 74, is back in Burke's Law, a new version of the '60s series about a millionaire police detective who tools to crime scenes in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

In yet another TV revival, Robert Wagner, 64, and Stefanie Powers, 51, returned last week in Hart to Hart: Home Is Where the Hart Is, an NBC movie based on their decade-old series about high-living husband-and-wife detectives. George C. Scott and Louis Gossett Jr. are among the stars who will join the old-codger crime-fighting brigade later this spring. Add to these such veteran TV sleuths as Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote, Andy Griffith in Matlock and Peter Falk in occasional Columbo movies, and you've got enough votes to block Clinton's Medicare reforms.

Detective shows are the low-impact aerobics of network programming. To an aging star for whom feature-film roles have dried up and sitcoms are too demanding, a detective show can be a comfortable sinecure. For viewers tired of raucous sitcoms and hard-charging magazine shows, these TV whodunits provide easy-to-take, low-decibel entertainment. Murder, She Wrote, in its 10th season on CBS, is still a Top 10 hit; ABC's Matlock is a solid success in one of the week's toughest time periods; Diagnosis Murder and Burke's Law, new this season, have given CBS its best Friday-night ratings in years.

Even so, the genre has had to struggle to get back into network favor. The audience for these shows tends to be older, at a time when advertisers seem obsessed with targeting the young crowd. A recent Nielsen survey found that Murder, She Wrote, despite its high ratings, gets less for a 30-second commercial than its low-rated (but younger-skewing) Sunday-night competitor SeaQuest DSV.

Yet by the same token, the shows offer counterprogramming to youth-oriented sitcoms, plus a way to lure back the broad-based family audience that has drifted away from network TV. "Every segment of the audience has value," says CBS Entertainment executive vice president Peter Tortorici. "The better job you do of connecting them so you can get them to watch together is, ultimately, the best use you can make of the medium."