Tom Arnold

When are good ratings not good enough? The Jackie Thomas Show has the kind of ratings that other shows would kill for. It ranks No. 8 among all prime-time series this season - ahead of such established hits as Cheers, Full House and Northern Exposure. Yet eight weeks after its debut, the ABC comedy's future is by no means secure. The reason: It is failing to hold onto a large number of people who watch the show that precedes it on ABC at 9 Tuesday nights, Roseanne. That show is the No. 2 show on TV this season, trailing only 60 Minutes on CBS. In 1989, ABC canceled the sitcom Chicken Soup despite its No. 13 ranking.

'Sweet are the uses of adversity," William Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It. Tom Arnold is the latest actor to illustrate the wisdom of that line, as he triumphs in his new comedy series, The Tom Show. "Direct thy feet, where thou and I henceforth may never meet," as Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night, may well be your reaction if you waste your time watching the wretched premiere of Alright Already. The Tom Show, joining Buffy the Vampire Slayer as the best series produced so far by the 2 1/2-year-old WB network, will premiere at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channel 17. Alright Already, ranking right down there with such all-time television disasters as The Kallikaks (1977)

Author Salman Rushdie won Switzerland's Colette literary prize but didn't go to Geneva to pick up the $25,000 award Thursday because his hosts said security would have cost too much. The Colette jury said it was "rising against intolerance" in choosing Rushdie, who has been in hiding for more than four years under an Islamic death sentence imposed over his novel The Satanic Verses. The Colette award, first given in 1988, is named for the French novelist who died in 1954. GOODBYE TO ABC Tom Arnold has told ABC he's leaving The Jackie Thomas Show to star in a new series at CBS, his publicist, Pat Kingsley, said Friday.

This fall really will be different. "Roseanne" will no longer be on television, but Tom Arnold will. Arnold - whose previous sitcoms, ABC's "The Jackie Thomas Show" and CBS's "Tom," fared no better than his marriage to the ABC star - has a new show, "The Tom Show," on a new network, the WB. Anyone who's looking for Arnold to forget his roots can just forget it: He'll be playing a man starting over in Minneapolis after a "bitter and...

THE TOM SHOW. Channel 17, 9 p.m. Sunday. ALRIGHT ALREADY. Channel 17, 9:30 p.m. Sunday. God knows, I didn't want to laugh. Tom Arnold, back on TV, playing a guy recovering from a bad marriage to one of the world's most famous women. Ed McMahon back on TV, too. How bad an idea is this? Extremely bad. Worse than "Star Search. " Worse than having "Roseanne" win the lottery. Worse than "Tom" and "The Jackie Thomas Show" put together. A funny thing happened on the way to "The Tom Show," though.

That they are in love, there is no doubt. Small, round Roseanne Barr, now Roseanne Arnold, snuggles on the sofa with her big husband, Tom Arnold; tickles the back of his neck with her long, red- painted nails; gurgles baby talk to him, whispers in his ear. She recently took his name, and he celebrated his conversion to her religion, Judaism, before 500 guests at their remarriage ceremony in Los Angeles. The band played "Kung Fu Fighting. " The two comics are here in the Catskills, at the enormous Concord Resort Hotel, on what they call their "Honeymoon Tour," with Roseanne the headliner and Tom her opening act. They play the Valley Forge Music Fair tonight.

Whatever became of Arsenio Hall? There were plenty of rumors. He was dying. He was ensconced in a tropical love nest with Paula Abdul. He was in drug rehab. Hall himself saw that last one. "I went on the Internet and read I was in detox at Betty Ford," he says, shaking his head. "I got on line under a fake name and typed in, 'I know Arsenio better than anyone else and he's not in detox, you idiots!"' But where was he? Three years after the demise of his late-night television program, he's finally emerged to headline a new ABC sitcom, "Arsenio," debuting tonight on Channel 6. But where has he been?

If it's for real and for ever, who's to say that anyone shouldn't be wed? Still and all, some celebrity love matches really don't click with their images or the public. Some of those we don't find out about until they're history. Here are a few marriages that have mixed us up over the years: Shannon Doherty and Ashley Hamilton Donald Trump and Marla Maples Liz Taylor and Larry Fortensky Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold (and Kim Silva) Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger Sean Penn and Madonna Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen Herve and Camille Villechaize Prince Charles and Diana Spencer Cher and Gregg Allman Tiny Tim and "Miss Vicky" Budinger Ike and Tina Turner Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra Ethel Merman and Ernest Borgnine Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates (his agent's secretary)

To the gallery of All-American movie hustlers, we can add Bill Hill of "Touch," a man who discovers a modern-day messiah and immediately tries to give him what Christ never had: an agent. Ours is not the first culture to exploit the lucrative aspects of spirituality, but as we see in "Touch," America is unsurpassed in its ability to turn nearly anything, even miracles, into a form of free enterprise. "Touch" stars Skeet Ulrich as Juvenal, a defrocked priest who works in a drug-rehab center in Los Angeles, where he moonlights as a faith healer.

Big Bully, which stars Rick Moranis and Tom Arnold and is a frightening waste of time, begins in Wonder Years-mode: A retrospective voice-over takes us back to a Midwestern Everytown, circa 1970, where grade-school pals ogle the prettiest girl in class, and where Roscoe "Fang" Bigger rapturously pounds the daylights out of David Leary, a timid kid with thick glasses and a face of weary resignation. "In a world of the hunters and the hunted," the grown-up Leary narrates, "I was always in season.

In his native Philadelphia, Bruce Graham is best known as the prolific and acclaimed author of numerous plays, including "Burkie," "Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar & Grille," "Moon Over the Brewery," "Belmont Avenue Social Club" and "Coyote on a Fence," which won the Rosenthal Prize and two Drama Desk nominations (and whose staging in London's West End starred Ben Cross, of "Chariots of Fire" fame). His efforts have been recognized with two Barrymore Awards (the local equivalent of the Tonys)

Directed by David M. Evans. With Michael Angarano, Tom Arnold, Sean Astin, Powers Boothe and Rachel Leigh Cook. Distributed by the Yari Film Group. 1 hour, 54 mins. PG (mild profanity, adult themes). Playing at area theaters. For a compendium of cornball homilies to keep you going for a couple of years, try the small-town baseball saga The Final Season . "Even the easy things are tough if you do them half-heartedly," says a wise old gramps. "Sometimes you just have to ride the horse in the direction it's going," says a pragmatic school board boss.

When Jim Ellis was a youngster, his father took him out in a boat and threw him into the lake. The lesson: Sink or swim. Swim he did. Ellis went on to become a competitive swimmer and coach, turning out nationally ranked African American swimmers from a tiny pool in gritty Nicetown. And now, like last year's underdog Philadelphia sports movie Invincible, about bartender-turned-Eagle Vince Papale, Ellis' tale has been taken on by Hollywood and turned into Pride, which stars Terrence Howard as the young Ellis.

Universal Pictures, the studio behind United 93, which tells the story of the passengers and crew who died aboard United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, have pledged to donate $1.14 mil toward a memorial to be built near Shanksville, Pa., where the plane crashed. The studio had promised to donate 10 percent of the film's first weekend grosses to the project. Families of the crash victims hope to raise $30 mil in private donations toward the memorial, which is expected to cost $58 mil. The studio's gift brings the total private donations to $9 mil. Slim's Detroit split The divorce battle between Eminem, 33, and Kim Mathers continues apace.

Karl Ulrich, a proud environmentalist who bikes to work daily, used to fret over what his fuel-thirsty Ford F-150 pickup did to the atmosphere every time he drove from Pennsylvania to property he owns in Vermont. "I'm living with this contradiction," Ulrich said. "I think, 'I'm burning up a lot of gas.' . . . But there's no way for me to write a check, to pay for my sins. " Ulrich, a professor who is chairman of the Wharton School's operations and information management department, bet that other enviro-conscious motorists also suffered from heavy consciences.

In University City, home to thousands of young Ivy League minds, studying is a given. But a bowling alley? Not a given. Strikes Bowling Lounge, which opened last month on Locust Street, has just changed that. It is the first of at least three bowling alleys coming to Center City and its immediate surroundings this year, one of a growing number of hip and trendy alleys that are more about socializing than about bowling a 300. "All the other things on campus are getting boring," said University of Pennsylvania sophomore Calvin Peng, 20, who bowled with classmates on a recent Friday night.

Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in yesterday as California's governor, capping a storybook ascent from immigrant bodybuilder to Hollywood megastar to leader of America's most populous and eccentric state. Schwarzenegger took the oath of office from California's chief justice on the west steps of the domed state Capitol while his wife, Maria Shriver, a television journalist and niece of President John F. Kennedy, held a 192-year-old Kennedy family Bible. Proclaiming it a "new day in California," the 56-year-old Republican laced his 12-minute address with frequent populist references and pledged to mend the political divisions that contributed to the state's vexing budget crisis.

If "reality" programs accomplish nothing else, they may yet cure us of our infatuation with celebrity. Would you want to be Ozzy Osbourne, doddering around his heavy-metal mansion, stepping in dog poop? Roseanne Barr is the latest boldface star to put her day-to-day existence on display. But The Real Roseanne Show, which premieres with two episodes at 9 and 9:30 tonight, is a show not even an exhibitionist could love. Roseanne's life is a bus crash with an Italian food buffet onboard.

Back and forth. Tom Arnold is offstage at ABC's The View, swaying like a boat anchored in a heavy chop. Joy Behar introduces him as a guy who has always been "out there. " And out he bounds. If he seems too pumped, cut him some slack. Arnold is an applause junkie. And for the longest time, a fix was hard to find. His dizzying career trajectory has mirrored Wall Street's. In the space of a decade, he went from working in a meatpacking plant in rural Iowa to partnering with Roseanne when she was TV's biggest star.

Madonna is getting her own game show. NBC has shot a pilot for the long-in-development Truth or Dare, based less on her 1991 concert documentary than on the adult parlor game. A risque, Madonna-produced game show doesn't seem much of a stretch for the network that is having the contestants on Fear Factor (Mondays at 8 p.m.) confront their fears of public nudity. NBC also is planning to revive Let's Make a Deal. Expect both game shows to premiere this summer. Royal doings Prince Charles has taken his longtime companion, Camilla Parker Bowles, to his grandmother's favorite church, the first time he is believed to have done so. The visit appeared to be another step forward in the couple's increasingly public relationship.