Increasingly, the "NB" in NBC has come to stand for No-Brainer. Tomorrow the network outstoops itself with the premiere of "Against All Odds" (7 p.m., Channel 4), a trashoid tattler about people who narrowly or not so narrowly escaped death or injury.

The series itself qualifies as an accident waiting to stop happening, especially since it airs opposite "60 Minutes."

Two half-hour episodes will air, both of them hosted by Lindsay Wagner and Everett McGill. Wagner does the second show sashaying about in satin jammies and with an unmade head of hair; McGill, who played spooky Ed on "Twin Peaks," looks alternately mortified and zombiefied in front of the camera.

Both performers seem positively sick with embarrassment at finding themselves in such straits. And on such sets - the studio decor features futuristic stalactites and stalagmites cluttering the stage. Maybe they're supposed to be thunderbolts.

Wagner and McGill wander 'mongst the bric-a-brac introducing taped vignettes, mostly reenactments, that show people plucked from the jaws of catastrophe. Says Wagner: "The worst in circumstances can bring out the best in us." Unfortunately, the existence of this show directly contradicts that thesis.

The first segment, the only one to feature "actual footage" rather than "re-creations of actual events," recalls the fateful frightful day last year that a British sky diver and his teacher jumped out of a plane together. "Something went terribly wrong" and they found themselves "spinning helplessly out of control."

It was nothing less, says Wagner, than "a harrowing brush with death!"

But they lived. At the last minute, something went terribly right, and now they can go back to having harrowing brushes with life. To judge from the unintentionally gigglesome footage, simply getting out of the plane can be half the pain, at least when you have someone strapped to your back.

A mother in Alabama is dragged from the wreckage of a car by her 5-year-old son, who keeps chanting "I think I can" from "The Little Engine That Could"; an Iowa farm dog loses a front and rear leg in a mowing accident but is patched up by a vet; cave divers risk life and limb swimming around in an underground river. And so on, all of it listlessly and for the most part pointlessly dramatized.

Introducing the cave segment, Wagner quotes Sir Edmund Hillary as having said in 1953 that he was going to climb Mount Everest "because it's there." If Hillary said it, perhaps he was quoting climber George Leigh-Mallory, who had originally said it nearly 30 years earlier.

Hyped narration tries to make everything seem fraught with danger, but it isn't hard to see through the histrionics. Among the hazards awaiting those embarked on the cave exploration: "Panic might set in." But that might set in during a trip to the Safeway! Not to mention the bone-chilling risks of homesickness, boredom and stomach upset.

The tiniest payoff of any segment comes in Part 2. We are teased with the idea that a "vicious" guard dog is going to attack a little girl who is going to have an epileptic seizure during an earthquake and be hit on the head with a microwave oven. Whew! Everything but the bloodhounds nipping at her heels! But thank heaven, the escaped guard dog actually pushes the toddler out of the way so the oven doesn't conk her.

"Against All Odds" is a step down even for Meurer-Cosgrove Productions, which does NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries."

The big three networks (not that they're quite so big anymore) should take greater care to keep their shows from looking like tacky Fox fare or like such syndicated schlock as "Inside Edition." If not, the public will lose its ability to distinguish. Come to think of it, it may be folly at this point even to try.