Fall Season

Poor ABC couldn't find any light at the end of the tunnel in recent seasons because it couldn't even find the tunnel. Perhaps that is changing. If this is not the season that ABC turns the corner fiscally, it at least may be the season that ABC finally turns the corner creatively. A small corner, anyway. Gamblers are not necessarily born out of desperation.

Fox Broadcasting on Sunday unveiled early September premiere dates for several shows that executives said would help build on the momentum established from the previously announced August launch of its fall season. Fox, which had said last week that it would launch three new series and two returning series during the last 10 days of August, plans to introduce another newcomer and three other returning shows during the first week of September.

Fox is pitting must-be-scary TV against NBC's "Must-See TV" on Thursdays with the scheduling of "Hollyweird," a youth-oriented macabre series from horror filmmaker Wes Craven. Fox Entertainment President Peter Roth said Thursday that he hopes "Hollyweird" will help take some of the wind out of NBC in the 9 p.m. time period, where the network is putting the acclaimed comedy "Frasier" as a replacement for the departed hit "Seinfeld."

Lorrie Nichols upset top-seeded Nikki Gianulias, 197-191, at Rockford, Ill., to win the $30,000 Hammer Midwest Open, first event in the six-week Ladies Pro Bowlers Tour fall season.

In your juxtaposition of articles in the June 1 Calendar section, you have come up with the sure-fire hit for the fall season: "The Osbornes Visit the Hamptons." BILL BOW Los Angeles

The U.S. Football League, reeling from a $1 damage award in its recent antitrust suit against the NFL, announced today that it will postpone its upcoming fall season and possibly play in 1987. The league was to have begun its first fall schedule in mid-September with eight teams. The 4-year-old league once numbered 18. The announcement followed a day of meetings in New York with Commissioner Harry Usher and executives of the league's eight teams.

With the continuing absence of Christine Lund, KABC-TV Channel 7 has tapped former anchor Tawny Little to take her place for the next two weeks on its "Eyewitness News." Little, who was a news anchor at the station from 1978 to 1984, will join veteran Jerry Dunphy on Channel 7's 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. newscasts, beginning today. She will be filling in for Lund, who is in the process of renegotiating her contract at the station. A KABC spokeswoman described the assignment as "a two-week experiment."