"The Nutt House" may be a television first: a show where the laugh track doesn't laugh enough. It's too bad that instead of being taped before a live audience, "Nutt House" was filmed with a dead one, because real humans would probably respond much more audibly to Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman than the darn sissy machine does.

Even so, "Nutt House"-premiering at 9 tonight on Channel 4 the season's most cherishable oddity, an anachronistic romp that occasionally borders on the uproarious.

Korman plays the manager and Leachman the head housekeeper at a New York hotel that has seen better days, though apparently never that much better. Rundown and largely deserted, Nutt House must somehow pull itself together in order to rebuff a hostile takeover attempt, as in the book and movie versions of "Hotel."

The show was constructed by two of our nation's nobler madcaps-Mel Brooks, who has a slew of screwball movies to his credit, and Alan Spencer, who did ABC's little-seen but merrily ambitious parody "Sledge Hammer!"

Completely different from all other network comedies now on the air, "Nutt House" has outrageous slapstick, broad burlesque and absurd sight gags. It represents an important kind of silly humor that needs to be kept alive, and Korman and Leachman know just how to preserve it. They're living treasures themselves, and they've been away from series TV too long.

Taking a whiff from a frosting flower someone mischievously sticks in his lapel, Korman acquires a candy-red nose yet strides through the lobby with lunatic dignity nevertheless. Leachman, her derriere bolstered with so much padding it's about as big as Montana, pounds angrily on a disheveled bed as she chastises two lazy maids for its untidiness-then realizes there's still a guest dozing under the covers.

At one point, or actually at two, Leachman pins another guest against a door frame with her breasts, which have been encased in metal housing much as they were in Brooks's spoof "High Anxiety," in which Leachman and Korman were also teamed.

In the original "Nutt House" pilot, the dowager owner of the hotel was played by Jeanette Nolan. But NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff didn't think Nolan was funny enough and had Mrs. Nutt recast. Result: Leachman, powdered whiter than Marley's Ghost, plays that role too.

"You never show signs of aging," marvels the manager as the decrepit Mrs. Nutt collapses to the floor. Others who populate the hotel include grinny Ronny Graham as a doorman who has trouble telling outdoors from indoors and Mark Blankfield as a phenomenally myopic elevator operator.

"What floor?" he asks two potential passengers. "Lobby," they say. "No-what floor am I on now?"

The requisite romantic leads, around whom the crazies cavort, are properly appealing: Brian McNamara as Charles Nutt III, a playboy who lasted only 20 minutes at Harvard Business School ("I'm a ne'er-do-well; the only thing I do well is ne'er") and Molly Hagan as Sally the secretary, with whom the young Nutt falls more or less instantly in love.

In truth, there are some terrible gags, and the show will no doubt be tighter at its normal half-hour length; Brooks insisted on a one-hour pilot on the grounds that, well, he's Mel Brooks. And indeed he is.

Curiously, the takeover tycoon (David Huddleston) isn't patterned after Donald Trump or any other familiar figure from the news; and it's too bad, given her high profile, that there's no one based on hot-water hoteliette Leona Helmsley, either. But this is comedy of proud irrelevance, and to compromise that might hurt it.

The laughter really is oddly quiet, and the direction a beat or two off at times. Surely Korman and Leachman would be happier flirting with a live audience. The soundtrack has a deadness to it, although NBC points out that the copy submitted for preview has not been through a final "sweetening."

Anyway, some people will just hate it and find it stubbornly unfunny. Others, especially those who enjoyed movies like "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun" and the Brooks farces, will fall more or less instantly in love. "Nutt House" is an irregular riot.

`Peaceable Kingdom'

Television is generally too insistent, too intrusive, too cacophonous. All true. But the proper antidote would not seem to be a show that falls asleep even before a viewer has a chance to-a show like the appropriately titled "Peaceable Kingdom," premiering at 8 tonight on Channel 9.

"Peaceable Kingdom"-the name of a new sleeping pill, perhaps? Actually, yes.

CBS would like nothing more than to develop a few 8 o'clock hits with which to lure viewers who might stick around for the rest of the evening. But this show, with Lindsay Wagner as the director of a Los Angeles zoo, ain't it. The character Wagner plays is too perfect (a single mother raising two kids as well as an ark full of furry creatures) and even though she has a crisis every two minutes, the premiere seems numbingly uneventful.

Tom Wopat, as a zoo doc, was to have been a love interest for Wagner, but the character's been changed to that of her brother. Presumably, their burnished dialogue will remain. After a thunderstorm makes a mess of the new gorilla exhibit, Wagner vows to open on time. Wopat scoffs, "What's it going to take? Try a miracle!"

Later, after a much-loved lion has wandered off and been hit by a truck, Wopat brings Wagner to her senses by barking, "The lion is dead. Don't take it out on the gorillas!" Add to this a sick baby kangaroo and a snow leopard who doesn't want to mate, and you have the surprisingly tedious answer to, "What's new at the zoo?"

Wagner makes herself comfortable, and comforting, right off, but she's no Sigourney Weaver and this is no "Gorillas in the Mist," and that wasn't even that good. "An animal species becomes extinct every 20 minutes," she is told. Yes, it is sad. But that's still more time than most viewers will want to while away in "Peaceable Kingdom."

`Young Riders' ABC's "The Young Riders" has a certain charm, and it's definitely a rare breed: a TV Western, the only one around in these here parts other than "Paradise" on CBS.

Previewing tonight at 8:30 on Channel 7 (and subsequently airing Thursdays at 9), "Young Riders" will remind some viewers of the bratpacker film "Young Guns," and still others of the John Wayne movie "The Cowboys." Another obvious antecedent is "21 Jump Street," the Fox show about moody broody young cops.

Sugarcured ham Anthony Zerbe has the Wayne-like role of Teaspoon Hunter, mentor and guardian to a troop of teenage cowpokes, recruits for the Pony Express circa 1860. A personable crop of actors play the riders-among them, Josh Brolin as cocky Jimmy Hickcock, Travis Fine as the mercurially mute Ike McSwain, and Yvonne Suhor as a pony boy who is actually, under the buckskin jacket and floppy hat, a pony girl.

The series was originally called "The Kid" and a kid called The Kid is still the central character through whose eyes we see the stories unfold. In that role, Ty Miller shows a steely and subtle charisma that easily makes him the centrifugal center of the show.

Unfortunately, the pilot continues the old Western tradition of glamorizing guns, and everyone measures everyone else by his or her prowess with firearms. But then, the old West was not a particularly peaceable kingdom, and no one could say the show dwells on violence or gore.

"Young Riders" is expendable and marginal as a series, but it's not badly done, and with its period costumes, diffused lighting and smoky photography, it does offer a kind of romantic oasis. Do kids still play cowboy? It's nice that at least during one hour of prime time, they do.