Tim Reid will be watching Sunday night's "Perry Mason: The Case of the Silenced Singer" (8 p.m., Ch.
2). But that's the only thing he's planning to watch on television this year."I've decided not to watch television for a year," Reid said in a telephone interview. "It's not a boycott of any kind. I just need to step back for a while.
"In my business, I have to pay attention to what other people are doing. For the past 12 years, I've been very involved in it. I think that for me to come back with a fresh look . . . I need to get away from television."
Reid is still stinging from the failure of his last two shows, both of which co-starred his wife, Daphne Maxwell-Reid. "Frank's Place" and "Snoops" both got good press - "Frank's Place" was highly acclaimed - but failed in the ratings.
The veteran of four series - including "WKRP in Cincinnati" and "Simon & Simon" - doesn't want anything to do with the pilot-season mania that sweeps through the television industry every year.
"I've decided to back away from it for a while," Reid said. "Rather than keep frustrating myself, and end up being known as a guy who's on a lot of failed series, I'm just taking a year off."
So instead of California, he's making his home on a farm he bought in central Virginia. A farm that, until recently, didn't include a television.
"We just got a TV," Reid said. "From November until April, we went without one. And we got one so we could play home videos."
He's still having a hard time figuring out exactly what went wrong with his last two series. Especially because "Frank's Place" was yanked all over the schedule by CBS, which seemingly couldn't figure out what to do with the critically acclaimed dramady.
"I was very surprised that it did not do a lot better than it did," Reid said. "Hey, we all try. It just didn't work out.
"I think if `Frank's Place' was being developed today I would go to Fox. They're more creative than the other three networks. They're doing some very strange and interesting programming."
And while he said he's not bitter about his two failed series at CBS, he certainly doesn't have anything nice to say about his experience with "Snoops."
"It was the most painful experience I've ever had in my life," Reid said. "I was the hands-on producer as well as an actor, and I did not get the support from people who were responsible for helping me.
"I needed the network to see that Daphne and I had something that, if given time, would work, and not try to cut me off at the knees. Not run when the first shot was fired."
But the ratings weren't good, and he said CBS immediately gave up on the series.
"Hour shows historically have always taken more than a year to develop," Reid said. "Shows like `Hill Street Blues,' `Simon & Simon,' `St. Elswhere,' `Cagney and Lacey' . . . those shows did not catch on until the second season.
"We knew after the third airing that we were gone," Reid said. "I couldn't get anybody on the phone at the network. We had just two writers working on an hourlong show. I was rewriting myself. Emotionally and physically, it was the most draining experience of my life."
While MTM is producing a new version of "WKRP" and Gordon Jump, Frank Bonner and Richard Sanders are returning, Reid is not.
"No one has called and asked me about it at all," he said. "I would've like to have been offered it, but I don't know that I would have accepted it.
"But that was a part of my life that was great. I'm happy for my friends who are going to go back and do it again.
However, Reid hasn't disappeared from television altogether. In "The Case of the Silenced Singer" he's the husband of the victim, the chief suspect and Perry Mason's client. He's also completed work on an ABC miniseries based on the Stephen King novel "It."
And he'll be back on TV with a daytime show in the fall of 1991 for King World - the incredibly successful syndicators of "Jeopardy," "Wheel of Fortune" and "Oprah."
"They came to us and asked us to develop a show for them," Reid said. "They seem to think that Daphne and I have chemistry that viewers will watch."
The exact format of the show hasn't been worked out yet, but Reid promises it will be something different from the current daytime fare.
"We've got a year to develop it," he said. "It will be information and entertainment - we're not going to try to reinvent the wheel.
"But it won't be `Oprah' or `Donahue.' There are too many clones out there right now, and they're all running a distant third, fourth and fifth. I won't say we'll have a new format, but at least a different one."
And if it doesn't work?
"Hey, I'm not ready to give up on television," Reid said. "I haven't seemed to be able to come up with anything that works lately, but I'll keep trying."