Mary and Dick- Shows of Their Very Own : Still Trying to Keep Up With the Petries

So Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore are back on CBS--again.

This may sound almost like “The Twilight Zone” . . . but are Van Dyke and Moore doomed to spend the rest of their TV lives competing against their earlier selves? Probably.

They start anew tonight, Van Dyke co-starring at 8 with his son, Barry, in the generally unfunny premiere of “The Van Dyke Show,” and Moore returning at 8:30 in the unpreviewed “Annie McGuire” (on Channels 2 and 8).

Through the magic of reruns, we can still flash back to the Van Dyke and Moore of old, and watching them in those TV classics is the equivalent of going to sitcom school.

In a way, Van Dyke and Moore have been chasing their past TV glories the way dogs chase their own tails.

For Van Dyke, it’s “The Dick Van Dyke Show” that through the years became at once his greatest achievement and greatest burden, surely the funniest sitcom of its time (1961-66) and one of the best ever, but also the impossible standard against which he will always be measured.

Moore had a similar experience. Although successful as Laura Petrie, Van Dyke’s wife in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” it was “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970-77) that gave her superstardom and her very own supersitcom whose genius she isn’t ever likely to match. She has spent many of the ensuing years trying to live up to and, in a sense, live down Mary Richards.

Both “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” continue to be as fresh and funny in reruns as when they were originally produced. Their stars, however, have never been as fresh or funny in their numerous TV comedy lives since, although Moore moved on to some successful dramatic roles in TV and features.

And now comes 1988, with both Van Dyke and Moore beginning the season in some confusion as underdogs opposite ABC’s hit comedies “Growing Pains” and “Head of the Class” and NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries.”

In “Annie McGuire,” Moore plays a recently married woman whose husband, Nick, is a construction engineer. You knew Moore faced trouble when CBS and the producers could not even arrive at a title for her series until recently. Far more serious was the belated recasting of Nick, with Denis Arndt replacing Edward J. Moore, who appeared in the pilot that was made before the writers strike. The opening half hour was not available to be reviewed.

Van Dyke’s problems are somewhat different but still potentially lethal, a producing change and radical retooling having not raised the humor level for tonight’s premiere.

Van Dyke plays stage, film and TV actor Dick Burgess (named Terry before the retooling), whose son, Matt (Barry Van Dyke), is a former advertising man who now operates a small-town community theater. Tonight, en route to New York, Dick drops in on the son and grandson he sees infrequently because of his acting career. And he decides to stay and run the theater with Matt.

The opening script by co-executive producers Sam Bobrick and Ron Clark contains more yawns than laughs, the high point coming when Dick tries to sleep in the top bunk of his young grandson’s bed, only to keep tumbling out. We tend to forget that Van Dyke’s forte was always physical comedy, and here again he is a master of sight gags, a one-man circus still able to do wondrously funny things with his gangly, elastic body.

Otherwise, this is pretty awful stuff, particularly the theater sequences, including a scene in which Dick blunders onto stage during one of Matt’s plays and participates in the dialogue because he can’t find his way off. A seasoned actor?

As Laura Petrie would say: “ Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h , Rob!”

New York is a great city.

A deranged drug dealer shoots Nick Tattinger in the chest at point-blank range during daytime in mid-Manhattan, then stands over him and gloats before casually walking away. And no one seems to notice.

A thug throws a woman through her shop window, apparently in full view of bystanders, then takes his time leaving. And no one seems to notice.

The same thug beats up an elderly newspaper vendor on a busy street corner on the same block, then leaves unhurriedly. And no one seems to notice.

If New York cops seem to be on vacation here, so do the writers who concocted the premiere of NBC’s “Tattinger’s,” airing at 10 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39 and starring Stephen Collins as a flamboyant restaurateur with a nose for food and trouble.

Six months after somehow surviving being shot, Nick returns from Europe for the debutante coming-out party of his eldest teen-age daughter, Nina (Patrice Colihan), only to find his once-elegant restaurant in shambles.

It seems that the inept lug he sold the restaurant to has plans to sell it himself, to an unscrupulous businessman who is trying to buy the block where Tattinger’s is located for purposes that are never explained.

This is the same man who hired the thug to throw the woman through her shop window and beat up the newspaper vendor because they didn’t want to sell. Neither does Nick, who couldn’t sell anyway because he no longer owns the restaurant . . . except that it turns out that he never officially sold it . . . meaning that the new owner could not sell it to the unscrupulous businessman . . . who orders his thug to beat up Nick . . . who continues to be shot at by the deranged drug dealer . . . who shrewdly drives around in an enormous red convertible that can’t be missed and warns Nick’s youngest daughter, Winnifred (Chay Lentin), and his restaurant manager, Sid Wilbur (Jerry Stiller), that he still plans to kill Nick.

Meanwhile, if you think the story is bad, you should try the pate.

“Tattinger’s” is a fine-looking, occasionally witty production, and Collins is a dashing leading man. One of the problems with “Tattinger’s,” however, is that, except for Sid, none of the supporting characters is very likable--not Nick’s indulgent ex-wife Hillary (Blythe Danner) or his spoiled and pampered daughters, especially Nina.

When Nick arrives at her debutante ball bruised and battered after being roughed up by the thug and shot at by the drug dealer, Nina protests: “Why can’t you be like the other fathers? They never get shot at!”

The premiere of “Tattinger’s” was written by executive producers Tom Fontana, John Masius and Bruce Paltrow, who was the executive producer of “St. Elsewhere.” Like the food, the show may get better.