"The difference is probably one show'Bill Cosby' It shows what one show can do. As Mike Hammer, toughest of private eyes, Ralph Meeker gives a lift to a distraught Cloris Leachman and the corpses commence piling up. Its very honesty merits widest possible dissemination" QUOTE OF THE WEEK Prince, in Rolling Stone: "I write a lot and I cut a lot". "I don't think that most stations would go to the extremes that this one does" said Mike Robe about fictional KRKD-TV in the CBS movie "News at Eleven" airing at 9 p. m Wednesday on Channels 2 and 8. Phyllis George beamed at the camera on "The CBS Morning News" Then-a thoughtful expression on her face, a clipboard on her lap-she began to interview industrialist Armand Hammer about the health of Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko Never mind that she butchered Chernenko's name. The BBC-produced documentary was written and produced by historian Norman Stone.

If all goes according to plan, the bridge will remain romantically enshrouded through next Sunday. However, most of the non-tourists waiting to get into the store knew or cared little about the history of the building. If anything, both Duclon and Aldrin said, they would have wished that the episode could have been telecast sooner, while the event was fresher in the minds of children and they were still sorting through it emotionally. "If after we've done that the audience throws up en masse, we won't do it anymore. Harris inherits seven pilot orders from all three networks, including a commitment from NBC for a new sitcom from "Cheers" creators Glen and Les Charles.

But on examining it closely, in terms of the condition of the membership, it was not that way at all" The condition of the membership, as Reisman puts it, was "revolutionary" and "destructive" In other words, sharply divided-only 60% of the membership had voted to go on strike and that majority seemed to be slipping as the strike wore on. . The news program about show business will air Mondays through Fridays at 7 p. m on the NBC-owned station. One of the hardest-to-get-into shows in New York just now is Shepard's new "A Lie of the Mind" uptown at the Promenade Theatre This is Shepard's longest play, running nearly four hours. "I felt I'd be able to forge out on my own without that added pressure" With the children fast moving up in the ranks, Dan Petrie indicated that the situation is changing. Music director of the New York City Opera, Keene is just the sort of conductor one prays for in a revival of some four-hour bel canto warhorse. With assorted replacements, Purple lumbered to a halt in 1976 The band's best lineup has been in mothballs since 1973 About a year ago, they decided to reunite It turns out that the "old guys" aren't that bad. At the top of the list were four NBC comedies: a rerun of "The Cosby Show" the new Saturday night comedies "The Golden Girls" and "227" and a rerun of "Family Ties" "Hell Town" a new drama starring Robert Blake as a priest, was seventh.

As the director notes, "There's really no (movie) industry there to speak of. by hiring an outside publicity firm, the Howard Bloom Organization. He also said that HBO may experiment with running some movies before they are released on cassettes. The essence of Tears, a pop/rock band with a synthesizer sound, is young Englishmen Curt Smith (bass, vocals) and Roland Orzabal (guitar, vocals, who, with their backup musicians, will be making the rounds of Southern California in the next week as part of their first American tour. Smith only half-heartedly defended "The Hurting" "It's hard to listen to now-it seems like what was on our minds so long ago. It has the sound I love more than anything-that '40s, dreamy quality, written to epitomize the separation of lovers in the war: the longing, the nostalgia, the coming home.

I've seen scattered tapes from various travel series but none approach the comprehensiveness or quality of Republic's Travel Tips series, released last month They're good enough to stand on their own as entertainment. "The most impressive fact is that it doesn't have to be that way anymore, according to both conservative and liberal experts, who say that there is plenty of food and technology, both of which have already ended hunger in about 40 countries since World War II "All that information made me tremendously guilty" he added. A Huey Lewis cassette (Warner Video, $29. 98) will be released on Sept 30. When the show closes, they can probably flog it off to Disneyland" But the show itself struck Morley as "an anticlimax" even with Frank Finlay playing Capt Bligh. If it's possible for a film to achieve greatness without becoming a masterpiece, then the evidence is surely D W. (According to Paramount, the distributor, the movie which so far opened in just 10 U. S. The few black comics I've seen usually avoid anti-white humor, instead aiming their insults at gays.

The problem with tribute shows in general-and this production is no exception-is that they are content to deliver nothing more than physical and vocal likenesses of famous personalities. NBC's fall roster, which shifts eight returning series to new slots on the schedule, has 13 new and returning comedies, which a spokesman called the most in the network's history Three of the sitcoms are new. Reports of human rights abuses by the contras and predictions that they would set up another dictatorship if they took control of the country are juxtaposed with Reagan hailing the rebels as "freedom fighters" who are "the moral equal of our founding fathers" The documentary was not produced with the current debate over funding of the contras in mind, and does not directly address the merits and pitfalls of Reagan's proposal Instead it focuses on the campaign by retired U. S Army Maj Gen. Parton was so good as the opening act that she gave Rogers a shot in the arm. The winners came from the widest possible spectrum of this year's releases, from tiny-budget independent American films to big studio productions.

Speaking for the festival board, Griem warned that if the city fails to agree to lower the rent-primarily by cutting the city's share of gross gate receipts from the current 17. 5% to the festival-proposed 10-the festival would consider shutting down in 1990, when the current 18-year lease expires. The tragedy is that Strasberg's "Method" threw off that balance, stressing self-discovery over the need to measure up to the otherness of a character "Lee was my teacher and, more important, my friend I'll always be grateful to him But I think he ghetto-ized the American actor. Your pipe dreams are small change next to his, and a lot less dangerous O'Neill's pipe-dreamer is named Hickey. "The director said, 'The swing is a vehicle for the protagonist's attempt at homeostasis' I said, 'Gee, all I wanted to do was keep the audience interested' " " 'The Last Class' is a one-man show (I appear in it) which deals with a professor who's been fired and is giving a final lecture on 'Philosophy and the Dynamics of Creativity' It's about a man who walks the razor's edge. By superimposing several impressions, he is able to create monoprints that resemble paintings, each composed of a complex, viscous cross-hatching of stick forms in a broad spectrum of colors. Yet where in fiction do we find the woman who will go down in flames before she'll knuckle under to the status quo? She doesn't really exist in fiction, and for good reason: She's rare in reality.

And Lelouch's reputation, after half a dozen unremarkable features and several shorts, was made Now comes the sequel. It's the kind of exhibition that will get its greatest appreciation from starry-eyed students eager for any snippet from the great man or from connoisseurs who only need to read footnotes (Mekler Gallery, 651 N La Cienega Blvd, to April 20). I wasn't talking to Steven; we'd go into the studio in shifts" While Perry and Tyler say they've grown wiser, they claim they're still not choirboys: "That decadence never left We just learned how to refine it" Perry said. She didn't get that on this occasion but, in general, the ABT team performed with style, ardor and suavity-more, in fact, than the initial efforts last year led one to expect. "Burt wants to be first on the credits and Kirk wants to be first.

Lately, Alhilali has been working with aluminum modules, fashioning large wall-pieces that resemble shimmering fields of pastel grass or silvery, feathered cloaks. This time Eugene's adventures had real comic bite-Eugene being one of the bitten: "We watch him grow up as no other Simon character has" Variety's Richard Hummler thought it a less affecting play than "Brighton Beach Memoirs" but an even more comical one: "a landslide of laughs engineered by a masterful comic dramatist with a rare talent for the accurate re-creation of human behavior-here the behavior of a handful of raw Army recruits sharing a barracks. Most of all, he is remembered as the ultra-fussbudget, Felix Unger, his Emmy Award-winning role in "The Odd Couple" television series of the early '70s. Last year, Randall played Felix in yet another revival of Neil Simon's original "The Odd Couple" play-this time in Australia "Am I a neat freak, like Felix? No, not at all. All three networks have been tightening up on those fees in recent years, citing double-digit costs at a time of single-digit earnings caused by a softening of the economy. When the producers of tonight's "George Burns 90th Birthday Special" (8 p. m, Channels 2 and 8) needed assistance locating vintage footage of the comedian, they turned to a seemingly unlikely source-a 26-year-old. "But I had always wanted-the only word that comes to mind is tenderness.