c. 1996 Religion News Service

PASADENA, Calif. _ On CBS’ “Touched by an Angel,” you don’t get just a spoonful of sugar to help the morals go down. You get it in large economy sizes.

Each week, as heavenly co-stars Roma Downey and Della Reese travel the country in search of lost souls to save. For the past year,”Touched By an Angel”producer Martha Williamson doles out the good vibrations with as much subtlety as Oliver Stone. And starting this fall, she won’t be the only one.

While some new shows bask in darkness and paranoia (including such “X-Files” rip-offs as “Dark Skies” and “Profiler”), a second, more positive trend may well be the one that survives.

Following on the heels of CBS’ success with “Touched by an Angel,” expect three new shows about traveling good Samaritans:

_ “Early Edition,” which might as well be called “Touched by a Newspaper,” stars Kyle Chandler (“Homefront”) as an average Joe from Chicago who starts receiving tomorrow’s newspaper today and uses that knowledge to prevent real horror stories from happening.

_ “Promised Land,” or, if you will, “Touched by Major Dad,” is actually being marketed as a spin-off of “Touched by an Angel” but only because Downey and Reese, stars of the latter, appear in the pilot for the new show. The theme’s the same though, as Gerald McRaney loses his job, packs his family into a motor home and tours the country, trying to solve other people’s problems.

_ Though it’s nestled in the middle of NBC’s all-paranoia Saturday night, “The Pretender” quickly became “Touched by a Smart Guy” at the TV critics’ convention here. Michael T. Weiss (“Dark Shadows”) is a super-genius capable of assuming any role or job he chooses and travels the country in search of wrongs to set right.

Williamson, who also produces “Promised Land,” couldn’t be happier to see others cribbing her style.

“I’m thrilled that there are other shows attempting to copy us,” she said. “I hope they do it well, and I hope they do it right. I hope they decide to show the message that there are good things, there are right and wrong things in this world, and we need to take stands on them.”

Williamson _ who said she hopes “Promised Land” will “do for America what `Touched by an Angel’ did for God” _ thinks the time is right for a return to feel-good entertainment.

“We’re in an election year,” she explained. “We’re at the end of the century. We’re at a time right now where Americans are very discouraged about what’s going on. And yet, I was raised to believe some very fundamental, positive things about our country. And I was always hoping someday I’d have a forum to put them in.”

Steven Mitchell, co-creator and executive producer of “The Pretender,” also sees something special about this moment in time that demanded new TV heroes.

“When we were developing this, (it) was during the O.J. (Simpson) trial, Whitewater was coming out, and you turned on the radio or you read the paper, and it was always somebody making an excuse,” he said. “No one does anything. No one takes responsibility. … We all probably sat there and read the paper and said, `Well, somebody should do something about that,’ and we turned the page.

“Our feeling was, what if we had a hero who didn’t turn the page?”

Indeed, the hero of “The Pretender” has a handy portfolio of newspaper clippings about unfortunate situations. In the pilot, he helps a little boy who was accidentally crippled by an incompetent doctor get a big insurance settlement.

Newspapers naturally also play a big role in “Early Edition,” which inherits the old “Touched by an Angel” time slot of 9 p.m. Saturday. But producer Bob Brush went out of his way to distance his show from Williamson’s vision.

“We’re certainly not saying that Kyle’s character is somehow some kind of an angel from heaven who has all the right instincts,” Brush said. “He doesn’t. I think he’s very oppressed a lot of times by having this newspaper come. It’s a terrible responsibility. He’d rather it didn’t show up at his door.

“The last thing we want,” he added, “is for this guy to be some kind of happy chump who’s going around saving the world. It would get very uninteresting by the end of the second episode if that were happening.”

Brush’s protestations aside, audiences seem to want happy chumps who save the world. “The Pretender” tested better with preview audiences than any other new NBC show _ higher even than “ER” two years ago.

And the Williamson steamroller has already caused one other network to alter its fall schedule. The upstart network WB had originally scheduled its most-hyped new fall show, the Aaron Spelling-produced “7th Heaven,” to air Sundays at 8, opposite “Touched by an Angel,” because of the similar themes. But now, WB has moved the show to Mondays.

“7th Heaven” happens to be about a minister who _ all together now _ solves other people’s problems, although he doesn’t travel across the country to do so. Maybe Spelling needs to check with Williamson for God’s unlisted phone number.

MJP END SEPINWALL