‘REMINGTON STEELE’ TO RETURN AS MOVIE

“Remington Steele” is coming back, but not as the midseason series that its producers had hoped.

NBC has slotted the first two of the six episodes it ordered for this season as a two-hour movie that will be broadcast Jan. 5. Air dates for the remaining four have not been set, but it is likely they also will be shown as two-hour movies instead of in weekly installments, a network spokesman said Tuesday.

Either way, however, no additional episodes of the romantic detective show will be filmed for this season, because Pierce Brosnan, who plays the title role, is about to begin work in an eight-hour miniseries for NBC based on James Clavell’s “Novel House.”

“Remington Steele” was canceled by NBC at the end of its fourth season last spring but an outpouring of viewer mail and an upturn in ratings during the summer prompted network executives to change their minds. That’s when they ordered six new episodes, which executive producer Michael Gleason had hoped would lead to its return as a weekly series at midseason.

That won’t happen now, but that doesn’t mean the series is dead. If the new episodes perform well in the ratings, “Remington Steele” could reappear as a series in the 1987-88 TV season. MTM, the production company, retains options on the services of Brosnan and co-star Stephanie Zimbalist.

NEW CAMPAIGN: Children’s Television Workshop, which makes “Sesame Street,” is producing a series of public-service ads encouraging children not to drink alcohol.

With a slogan of “Be Smart! Don’t Start!,” the campaign will begin airing on CBS radio and TV stations in April and will feature the pop music group called the Jets. It is being funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

“The project’s goal,” CBS said, “is to reach young people and those who affect their attitudes and behavior before they have their first encounter with alcohol.”

NEW RATINGS: As advertisers and TV executives grapple with the changes in viewing habits brought about by the videocassette recorder, the people who measure and otherwise try to gauge those habits are devising new ways of monitoring VCR use.

Nielsen Media Research reports that it has come up with two systems to determine when a TV broadcast is being played back, what the program is and whether the viewer is watching the commercials or skipping through them with the fast-forward button.

The systems will be tested in coming months to determine whether Nielsen can effectively integrate them into its computer-operated meter system that records what’s being watched in a representative sampling of U.S. homes. If one of them can, it would provide programmers and sponsors with important information about whether their shows and commercials have a larger audience than the one that was watching at the time of broadcast.

NEW BOOK: “Dark Shadows” has been out of production for 15 years, but ABC’s gothic soap opera is fondly remembered by a legion of fans. For them comes “My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows,” by Kathryn Leigh Scott, the actress who played Maggie Evans and Josette Dupres.

The book, which has been published by Scott’s own company, Pomegranate Press, contains her recounting of the show’s 4 1/2-year history and her involvement in it, a summary of its story, a cast list and dozens of photos.