TV REVIEWS : A RELEVANT WEEKEND FOR SITCOMS

If you’re looking for some laughs this weekend, TV’s comedy shows may be the last place to turn. Among the subjects they’re dealing with: AIDS, missing children, Vietnam veterans and the homeless.

In an unusual coincidence of scheduling, four TV sitcoms airing today and Saturday--ABC’s “Webster,” “Mr. Belvedere” and “Benson,” and NBC’s “227”--are doing episodes with “socially relevant” themes.

Incorporating contemporary issues into comedy formats, which previously had been limited to stories about wives burning dinner and fathers being outsmarted by their kids, was considered a landmark achievement when Norman Lear series such as “All in the Family” and “Maude” took to the air in the early 1970s.

A decade later, what was once daring and compelling is now commonplace and, like much of the rest of television, more often than not mediocre--as the four current efforts clearly demonstrate.

One of the fundamental problems confronting such undertakings is the difficulty of blending topical themes into comedic formats. Let’s face it: Most comedy shows have enough trouble just trying to be funny. To be funny about something serious is even tougher. The danger is that if it is done clumsily, the subject becomes trivialized.

Thus in tonight’s episode of “Webster” (8 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), after writer Judy Pioli sets up a crisis situation in which a friend of Webster’s has been kidnaped by his father, she must serve the format by injecting a scene where Katherine (Susan Clark) “humorously” complains that her panty hose don’t fit.

“Mr. Belvedere” (8:30 tonight, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) blunders even worse. While young Wesley (Brice Beckham) and his parents grapple with the explosive news that one of his elementary-school friends has AIDS, the subplot concerns the “hilarious” results of what happens when Wesley’s teen-age brother tries his hand at cooking and sewing for a home economics class.

Another major problem with these types of shows is that they frequently introduce an issue just for the sake of seeming relevant, when in fact they have nothing substantive to say.

Saturday’s episode of “Benson” (8:30 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), for example, deals in part with the plight of Vietnam veterans trying to get better treatment from the Veterans Administration. But it never goes beyond bemoaning “the system.”

“These people deserve more than to be swept under some bureaucratic rug. We have a responsibility to them!” one of Benson’s colleagues intones. Other characters also complain about the VA, but when Benson (Robert Guillaume) meets a character representing the agency, though he initially is played as insensitive and smug, he eventually fires back: “Believe me, we do the best we can. We work real hard because we care.” If only they had more help, he says--and there the matter rests.

Ditto “Webster.” The message of its episode tonight is that it’s wrong for a parent to kidnap a child, so couples getting a divorce ought to work out a satisfactory custody arrangement. That should help a lot of people.

Similarly with “227” (Saturday at 9:30 p.m., Channels 4, 36 and 39): It raises the issue of the homeless but its only point, as expressed by Mary (Marla Gibbs), is that “they’re not bums; they’re people--people who’ve been beaten down by life.” OK. Now what?

That brings up the final stumbling block for the comedies seeking to be serious: The need to impose a happy ending--viewers don’t tune in these shows wanting gloominess, after all--often overrides the concept that there is a problem they need to face.

In “227,” after learning of the plight of an old friend, Mary’s husband picks up the phone and in one call manages to find a boarded-up home that the man and his friends can have if they’ll repair it.

Just as the homeless in “227” find shelter by show’s end, so it is that the father who steals his son in “Webster” returns him before the half-hour is up, and the boy Wesley on “Mr. Belvedere,” after first fearing and shunning the schoolmate with AIDS, shortly comes to realize that the victim isn’t going to infect him and needs his support.

That TV sitcoms are allowed to tackle social problems is as it should be. But before they exercise that freedom, producers and writers ought to look seriously at what it is they want to say and whether it can be said effectively in their format. Otherwise they may inadvertently be exploiting the very causes they seek to endorse.