DATE: Sunday, October 26, 1997              TAG: 9710230261

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS

                                            LENGTH:   65 lines

DEGREE IN TELEVISION GETS FUZZY RECEPTION

Lord, am I glad my kid is out of college.

I'll still be paying the loans when I'm too old to gum my way through a dinner of strawberry Jell-O. But at least I don't have to fear that he'll come home to announce that his senior thesis is, ``The Role of Barney Fife's Single Bullet in the Contemporary Debate on Gun Control.''

This could happen if you're planning to send your kid to Syracuse University, where they announced last week the formation of a Center for the Study of Popular Television.

Tuition at Syracuse, by the way, is $8,775 per semester. Room, board and drugs are extra. So unless your Little Genius is up for a full scholarship, you'd be looking at, oh, more than $100,000 over four years. To turn your Little Genius into an expert on the social ramifications of the inequal distribution of wealth among the castaways on ``Gilligan's Island.''

Don't hold your breath for that call from the Nobel committee. (On the up-side, though, Syracuse does have a pretty fair basketball team, although Jim Boeheim can never seem to win the big one.)

All this comes at an inconvenient time for educators, who are in the midst of their annual autumn drive to convince legislatures across the nation that education is underfunded. Which it usually is. But it doesn't help their case to have Syracuse turning out graduates whose field of expertise is ``Neo-Bestial Tensions in the Substructure of `The Beverly Hillbillies.' ''

Television certainly has had a dramatic impact on modern American culture. So have frozen foods. But will Syracuse add to its history syllabus a study of ``Swanson's: The Chicken a la King Era (1954-59).'' Not likely.

Even if you accept the premise that ``popular television'' is worthy of four years of study at an ivy-like institute, you'd have to ask what in God's green acres (whoops) these graduates are going to do with their degrees.

Certainly their sheepskins would be of no value in job-hunting at the major networks, which have shown no interest in studying, or replicating, anything of television's past that might have been amusing, or even mildly interesting. The evidence is in the TV grid for an average night's viewing on the Big Three networks, which looks something like this:

8 p.m.:

NBC: Jiggling Flesh

ABC: Exploding Automobiles

CBS: Aberrant Lifestyles

8:30 p.m:

NBC: Aberrant Flesh

ABC: Exploding Lifestyles

CBS: Jiggling Automobiles

9 p.m.:

NBC: Aberrant Automobiles

ABC: Jiggling Lifestyles

CBS: Exploding Flesh

And that's what's on while the kids are still up. Later, the serious adult dramas begin:

10 p.m.:

NBC: Tortured-soul Lawyers

ABC: Tortured-soul Doctors

CBS: Tortured-soul Cops

Once, a Doritos-fueled 14 hours of MTV was called ``vegging out.'' Now it's called ``cramming for my finals.'' We have reached the day when Syracuse University's idea of the perfect graduate is a Phi Beta Kappa who can tell you anything you want to know about ``Jeopardy'' - except the answers to the questions.

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