Let's hear three cheers for "Saturday Night Live."

And who better to lead our cheers as the show looks forward to its 23rd season than Cheri Oteri and Will Ferrell, who are Arianna and Craig, the desperately cheerful Spartan Cheerleaders?

Along with the rest of the "SNL" cast, Oteri and Ferrell are drifting through a party organized by NBC for the benefit of TV critics desperately seeking interviews.

Oteri, who is very short, seems bubblier than an ice-cream soda. She must have been a real cheerleader, right?

"Owww! Yeah!!" she admits with embarrassment bordering on agony. "At Archbishop Pendergast High School in Philadelphia. But I had no school spirit; I was in it for all the wrong reasons. I just wanted to perform. I didn't even know who we were playing.

"It was an all-girls Catholic school, but we cheered for the boys' team that was right next door. There was a squad that cheered for the girls' teams, but they were into school spirit and our school, and I didn't understand that at the time. I was thinking: What fun is that? Cheering for girls' hockey?' "

But on "SNL," she loves cheerleading: "We did one Cheerleaders sketch with Rosie O'Donnell at Christmas, cheering in front of Hickory Farms. We did one with Pamela Anderson Lee from Baywatch.' We actually went to Rockaway Beach to film that.

"Some hosts call ahead. Jim Carrey called and said he wanted to do a skit with the Cheerleaders.

"I'll tell you a great Jim Carrey story. Over the summer he invited Will and me over to his house for dinner. He had things that were special to him from his movies in glass cases, like the Joker outfit. And there was his Spartans sweater! I felt very special!"

Ferrell, who is very tall, seems not like a cheerleader at all, but more like a shy, quiet guy. He went to University High School in Irvine, where he was not a cheerleader: "We had one guy cheerleader; he was the first one. Technically, he was really good -- he'd do the jumps and splits really great. But he'd get assaulted with verbal insults.

"I guess my subtext is this guy, in a way, what he must have gone through. I was sitting there at the time, thinking, How does he stand this?' "

Put Will Ferrell in a dress and you get Attorney General Janet Reno, one of the funniest impersonations on "SNL" these days: "I remember watching her and thinking: She's such a big woman and she has this tough air about her. It would be funny to see her beating up people and getting them in headlocks.' "

By the way, Ferrell and Chris Kattan today start shooting "A Night at the Roxbury," planned for spring release, a movie based on their "Roxbury Guys" sketches about two inept, would-be nightclub swingers.
 

Now, a few more odds and ends gleaned from interviews at the critics' semiannual meetings with people in TV:

Writer David Halberstam, here to promote the History Channel's November documentary based on his book "The Fifties," described TV's prime-time magazine shows as "a disgrace. They are the work of lazy people wanting only to have ratings. They have replaced documentaries from the (Edward R.) Murrow era. . . . What you're really getting now is all about either celebrities or violence or sexual aberration, as opposed to answering larger questions about our society."

Compared with Murrow's work, he added, the magazines are "more manipulative, driven only to ratings, to get what some preordained survey has shown people want to have."

Bill Kurtis, promoting his "Investigative Reports" series on A&E, said he's taken his "The New Explorers" series from PBS to A&E because "the funding mechanism for PBS has gone, in my opinion, from difficult to impossible. . . .

"The charitable community -- philanthropic and corporate -- has dried up. Why? . . . Because they look to the cable networks and see that . . . the quality of PBS programming can be found at A&E, Discovery and the others."

David Caruso this fall plays a federal prosecutor in the CBS series "Michael Hayes" -- but before he could talk about that, critics at his news conference wanted to hear why he left "NYPD Blue" as that hit show was starting its second season.

Caruso, sitting with Paul Haggis, executive producer of his new show, gave answers that were so long, turgid and convoluted that at last Haggis pointedly looked down at the floor and said, "There's a shovel around here somewhere, David."

Bob Newhart, who co-stars with Judd Hirsch this fall in a CBS comedy series called "George and Leo," has made his flustered stammer a trademark of his comedy style. But a producer on "The Bob Newhart Show" once asked him if he could say his lines faster because an episode was running long: "And I said, Look, this stammer got me a home in Beverly Hills and I'm not about to screw with it now. You'd better take some words
out.' "

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