Take My Daughters, Please (MONDAY. November 21; 9 to 11 P.M.; NBC) shouldn't work at all. Imagine Rue McClanahan as a widowed housewife who writes a column of handy hints for happy homemakers in a Santa Monica newspaper. Imagine her four grown daughters. unhappily married. The oldest, Deidre Hall, is a marketing professional who's sworn off sex since her failed marriage to a sixties hippie. The youngest, Kim Delaney, works as a secretary to support a law student (Michael T. Weiss) who may never make an honest woman of her. In between are Stepfanie Kramer, who waits around in a fancy apartment for a man who's married to somebody else, and Susan Ruttan. who has one child and wants another but is on hold until her boyfriend decides to abandon his entrepreneurial pipe dreams for a nine-to-five job selling shoes.

If you recognize all these faces, and they seem oddly to belong together, it's not because they are in any way related except by the packaging coincidence of having all been around on other NBC programs, like The Golden Girls, Our House Hunter and LA Law, the ultimate network family. Now imagine that Mom, on a local TV talk show, gets herself bad-mouthed by a post-feminist psycho-babbler more than a little gratified to point out to her that her daughters have a better chance of being kidnapped by terrorists than finding a man, and it's all Rue's fault. So Rue places ads in the personals column of the newspaper and haunts art galleries and baseball games and singles bars in search of males who are eligible, sincere, and squeaky-clean, and in general makes a Jewish-mother-with-a-southern-accent nuisance of her¬self, after which her daughters are a mite wiser if not a whit happier, to which she responds, "Ill butt out ... if you take over."

This seems to me as socially regressive as the forthcoming Bork Court. But Take My Daughters, Please, written by Lindsay Harrison and directed by Larry Elikann, made me grin against my will. Its funny—-the jokes range from Ingmar Bergman movies to Oliver North dolls, from G-spots to est seminars—-and quick and sure of its frothy self; and the talent gets a chance to stretch in new directions. If Ruttan is sulky, Kramer is sultry, McClanahan improves on Nancy Walker as Terminal Mother, Delaney brings out the cuddle, and Hall is especially impressive as an ice-queen/Cybill Shepherd sort of glamour puss with some repressed vampiness. If you can't stand the concluding pieties, you have to blame the vapid premise. Forgive that, and you're likely to forgive yourself.