Tonya Harding. Michael Jackson. Mike Tyson. Their foibles are fodder for the American media grist mill, for whom churning out endless hours of copy and film at the slightest scent of wrongdoing has become second nature. Ratings have shown that American television viewers like scandal, and they also like the drama of real-life enactments. Nothing could be better, therefore, than a real live drama, and television executives are the sort who aim to please. The latest person to fall under the blinding media glare is former football star O.J. Simpson, whose arrest for the murder of his ex-wife and the two-hour police chase that preceded it was broadcast live on every major American network. More than 50 million television homes nationwide at one point were tuned to the ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN's television network coverage showing police following Simpson on the Los Angeles freeways June 17. NBC kept breaking into the New York Knicks-Houston Rockets professional basketball finals to show the bizarre Simpson odyssey, which ended in his arrest at his Brentwood mansion. At one point, ABC drew 23.7 percent of all U.S. household viewers, the highest rating of all the stations. CNN, which said it had its highest ratings since its coverage of the Persian Gulf War, peaked at 12.3 percent -- roughly 772,120 households. CBS Research said Tuesday that an estimated 95 million U.S. viewers watched all or part of the live coverage of the pursuit and surrender of Simpson on Friday night between 10 P.M. and midnight Eastern time. "Inside the O.J. Simpson Story," a special edition of ABC News' "Turning Point," zoomed to the screen Tuesday night (the show was bumped up a day from its usual Wednesday time slot), co-anchored by Barbara Walters in New York and Diane Sawyer in Los Angeles. Correspondents included Sam Donaldson and Forrest Sawyer. The program was touted as having won access to never-before-seen footage. CBS joined the bandwagon Wednesday night with news magazine "America Tonight," featuring an interview with a close friend of murder victim Nicole Brown Simpson, seen in silhouette since she wanted to remain unidentified. The show also ran a "poll" asking viewers to vote on aspects of the Simpson matter. CBS followed immediately with yet another news magazine, "48 Hours," repeating its 1991 "Till Death Do Us Part," on violence and abuse in the home (Simpson was arrested in 1989 for beating his wife).Last Wednesday night's scheduled appearance of Mr. Blobby on CNN's "Larry King Live" was shelved in favor of another King hour devoted to the O.J. Simpson story. Mr. Blobby, a major television and video star in Britain, was subsequently penciled in for Friday night on the King show, but nothing was certain -- once King gets his teeth into a story there is no telling when he will let go. Other such programs -- CBS' "Eye to Eye With Connie Chung," ABC's "PrimeTime Live" and "20/20," and "Dateline NBC" managed to find their angle on the story as well later in the week. Cable television's Lifetime channel aired a special documentary, the Farrah Fawcett-hosted "Prisoners of Wedlock" on Wednesday evening, followed by a discussion panel. ABC News' Ted Koppel, with a kind of divine right, wanted to have his say on given topics even while criticizing somebody else for doing the same. Koppel demonstrated the trait at the start of his expanded Monday "Nightline" about Simpson: "As long as we are all dining at this particular trough, none of us has the right, I suppose, to (criticize) anyone else making a few bucks off the O.J. Simpson saga," he said. "Still, if you have any remaining capacity for nausea, you may want to consider the following. The reporter who gave us quickie books on the Jeffrey Dahmer case and the Menendez brothers has already signed a contract with St. Martin's Press to write 'Fallen Hero: The Shocking True Story Behind the O.J. Simpson Tragedy.'" Koppel does not say the reporter in question is UPI veteran Don Davis. But what's more "quickie," Ted -- a book on the subject, "Nightline," or instant television specials prepared in a day or less? Of the four entertainment networks, only Fox seemed immediately interested in putting together a television movie about the murders. ABC, CBS and NBC either said that for now they were not interested, it was too early to think about such a project, or they did not want to talk about it. ABC News correspondent Jim Wooten, a panelist on last Sunday's "This Week with David Brinkley," had some comments worth pondering about Friday night's dramatic Simpson-police chase. "I was mesmerized by it," he admitted. "At the same time, I had an underlying sense that something was wrong here, that I shouldn't be watching this. "As I watched those people, sort of jamming the overpasses and waving and stopping their cars, and the people on the streets with their placards and their towels, saying, 'Go, Juice. Go, Juice,' that basically what we had there is what we're going to have for a long time in a culture that has been so sucked into the television of the world, that the lines between reality and fantasy, the lines between live presentation and dramatic production, the lines between news and entertainment have been so blurred that people want and see a way to become a part of all this."Meanwhile, the show business newspaper Variety reported that Simpson was to have starred in a pilot for a Warner Bros. television series called "Frogmen," which now has been abandoned. Simpson was to have played a character called Bullfrog in the drama project about Navy underwater divers.