Alan Alda, a man who likes to...

Alan Alda, a man who likes to discuss relationships, gives us both sides of the coin Sunday: the nice marital and the not-so-nice extramarital. In The Four Seasons (Channel 13 at 3 p.m.), scored to Vivaldi, we get a year in the life of happily married Alda, droll movie spouse Carol Burnett and four longtime friends, suddenly thrown into disarray by the defection, divorce and impending remarriage of one of their number. This was Alda’s feature writer-directorial debut, and it plays like the best TV sitcom you ever saw: predictable but charming, with easy, deft interplay among the ensemble. In Same Time, Next Year (Channel 13 at 6 p.m.), adulterous Alan sneaks off with Ellen Burstyn for an affair that lasts only one weekend out of every year but endures for a quarter-century. This is an obvious theater piece--but adapted by Bernard Slade and directed by Robert Mulligan with warmth and skill.

The original movie Fame (Channel 5 Sunday at 6 p.m.) is set during four years at New York City’s High School of the Performing Arts--from audition to commencement. Alan Parker’s movie has a great, snazzy opening: the cross-cutting pops with energy. But the dramatic scenes are a disappointment; pumped up with the desperate, false dynamism of a mass tryout.

Alda may be interested in relationships but the Hollywood Wives (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m. and Monday at 8 p.m.) of Jackie Collins’ widely read novel seem to be interested in nothing but sin, sex, scandal, swank, huge charge accounts and their husband’s deals. For shame, ladies!

B. L. Norton’s Cisco Pike (Channel 13 Monday at 8 p.m.) offers Kris Kristofferson and Gene Hackman as a rock star and crooked cop fooling around with Acapulco Gold. For shame, guys! You want to end up like a Hollywood wife?

Butterfield 8 (Channel 13 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) is based on a good, salty John O’Hara novel--about a Manhattan call girl. But even though it won Elizabeth Taylor her first Oscar, it’s been turned into plodding, moralistic soap opera of the suffering-in-satin variety.

Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Channel 11 Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a sensationalized but absorbing bio of G-Man Hoover (Broderick Crawford) and his “cherished companion”--in Arthur Schlesinger’s words--Clyde Tolson (Dan Dailey). Cohen paints Hoover as a super-snoop, forging a private kingdom by playing up the Red Scare, playing down the Mafia--and accumulating the goods on all of Washington.

Any Which Way You Can (CBS Friday at 8:30 p.m.) brings back Clint Eastwood and his orangutan chum, Clyde, from “Every Which Way but Loose,” for more fisticuffs, foolery and romantic four-flushing. It’s one of Eastwood’s most engaging characters, but one of his lesser movies.

A Catered Affair (Channel 5 Saturday at 8 p.m.)--written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Richard Brooks--portrays a lower middle-class Irish Catholic family in the Bronx (Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine) and the traumas kicked up by the wedding of their daughter (Debbie Reynolds). Like all of Chayefsky’s dramas, it’s an interesting blend of warmth and acidity.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Channel 13 Saturday at 8 p.m.) presents an evening of fun and games at George and Martha’s, based on Edward Albee’s corrosive comedy-drama about two faculty couples descending into Walpurgisnacht. When told that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (in her second Oscar winner) had been cast as George and Martha, Albee suggested Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds for the other couple, Nick and Honey--though he later pronounced Mike Nichols’ film “the best ever made.” It’s not, but Albee’s spare dramaturgy and piercing language still sting.