TV Unsure About Riot-Based Projects : * Docudramas: Producers and writers ponder last week’s events. NBC pulls Monday’s scheduled telecast of ‘In the Line of Duty: Street War.’

While television news has been providing no-holds-barred coverage of the violence ignited by the verdict in the Rodney G. King beating trial last week, the entertainment side of the medium appears to be less clear about its proper role in the aftermath.

NBC has decided to pull Monday’s scheduled telecast of the TV movie “In the Line of Duty: Street War,” because of its frank portrayal of racial violence, while CBS has chosen to go ahead with plans Sunday to air “In My Daughter’s Name,” a TV movie that stars Donna Mills as a grief-stricken mother who kills the man acquitted for the murder of her daughter.

Meanwhile, although the networks are publicly saying they have no interest in TV projects dramatizing the turbulent events that have rocked Los Angeles, several production companies and development executives are scurrying around trying to make deals anyway.

“I’ve been approached by two different parties--two fairly substantial independent producers--who have asked whether I would be interested in looking at this material for a TV movie,” said screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, who wrote “The Heroes of Desert Storm,” the ABC docudrama about the Persian Gulf War that was rushed out and aired only months after the conflict ended.

“For my own part, I’m reluctant to try and deal with this as a broad canvas,” Chetwynd said Wednesday. “I don’t fully understand all the forces at work. This thing is so complex, and so confused, and there are so many conflicting voices. I don’t think it would be possible to shoot as a docudrama. There’s so much more to be understood.”

Elsewhere, producers Roger Corman and Brad Krevoy are planning a TV movie, tentatively titled “Night of a Thousand Fires,” that will feature footage of the riots shot by four black camera crews hired by the producers.

And a project called “Sins of Our Fathers” that was sitting on a shelf at Kushner-Locke has suddenly been thrust into development. The TV movie is “about a group of elderly men who leave the nursing homes in South-Central Los Angeles and go into the ghetto to fight gang violence using their wisdom and mentoring,” said Tim Johnson, vice president of development for the Sullivan Co., which is co-producing with Kushner-Locke.

“It was on hold and now we’re throwing it back in development, and we’re going to shop it to the networks,” Johnson said.

It’s too early to tell whether any of these projects will find a home.

“I’ve heard there are a lot of people rushing to try to sell something, but I think the networks will be smart enough to give this some distance and let time pass,” said Ken Kauffman, executive producer of NBC’s “Street War.” “It would be absolutely crazy to try and do something about this in an exploitative fashion.”

NBC decided to postpone “Street War”--a stark drama about a black New York cop who is killed on the streets--until the fall because executives felt that, given the timing, it could lead to further social unrest. The drama, starring Ray Sharkey, Mario Van Peebles and Peter Boyle, is the fifth in a series of movies about law enforcement officials killed in the line of duty.

“Street War” will be replaced Monday with “Kindergarten Cop” at 8:30 p.m.

“I do think the decision was the proper one,” Kauffman said.

“We’re all very conscious of the community in which we live, and how serious the problems are,” he said. “We do not want to fan flames. We don’t want the images in our film, which are graphic and very real by nature, to be misinterpreted, because our message is positive. ‘Boyz N the Hood’ was a tremendous anti-gang picture, but there was violence in theaters. We are very graphic in our showing of an environment, and that’s the problem.”

CBS, on the other hand, did not see any connection between the lawlessness set off by the King verdict and the decision by the tormented mother in “Daughter’s Name” to take the law into her own hands.

“I would think it’s kind of a coincidence of apples and oranges, really,” said “Daughter’s Name” producer Dennis Doty, who agreed with CBS’ decision. “The similarity of these stories is that a verdict of a jury set forces in motion. But at that point the similarity stops. One has to do with a very broad social issue of inequities in our entire social fabric. It’s an issue so much larger than the deep grief that one individual suffers in our movie. Ours is a very personal family story, dealing with the personal issue of the loss of a child, and the frustration with a justice system that does not function justly.”