The new two-part Common Ground (CBS Sunday...

The new two-part Common Ground (CBS Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m.) focuses on three families caught up in the turbulent events surrounding the desegregation of Boston’s public schools. Jane Curtin, Richard Thomas, C. C. H. Pounder and James Farentino star.

Dangerous Passion (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.), a new TV movie, stars Carl Weathers as a security expert who falls in love with the wife (Lonette McKee) of a crime lord.

Anthony Quinn stars in a new TV remake of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.), about a Cuban fisherman’s battle with a giant marlin.

Francis Coppola’s The Cotton Club (Channel 13 Monday at 7:30 p.m.) jettisons authenticity in regard to the famed Harlem hot spot yet comes up with a fairly dazzling entertainment, a sort of gangster movie musical. Richard Gere stars as an ambitious cornet player and Gregory Hines as an equally driven tap dancer. It’s fun but mighty thin. However, Bob Hoskins is a splendid Owney Madden, the club’s gangland proprietor, and so is Fred Gwynne as his avuncular sidekick.

In Demon Seed (Channel 5 Monday at 8 p.m.), a fairly scary and decidedly weird sci-fi horror film that’s longer on razzle-dazzle gadgetry than substance, Julie Christie is menaced by a rapacious computer. More grotesque than awesome.

Swimsuit (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.) is a standard 1989 TV movie in which an ad executive (William Katt) searches for the ideal model to shore up a failing swimsuit company.

Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 Brainstorm (Channel 5 Tuesday at 8 p.m., again on Friday at 1:30 a.m.) prophesies the invention of a device which enables us to videotape our thoughts, memories, fantasies and emotion. Slip on a headset and you’ll enter the very being of another individual--for better or worse. All this becomes amazingly persuasive only to become grounded on such mundane ills as confused plotting, thin characterizations and underdeveloped relationships. Natalie Wood, Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher, however, give it their best.

Phil Karlson’s Walking Tall (Channel 11 Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is a bloody, slam-bang, fictionalized account of the exploits of the crusading Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker).

Whose Life Is It Anyway? (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) offers a soft, sugar-coated approach to the right-to-die question. A quadriplegic Richard Dreyfuss is gratingly comical while everybody around him is insufferably noble.

A terrifying, uncompromising portrait of rural America, Macon County Line (Channel 11 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) stars Alan and Jesse Vint as a pair of happy-go-lucky Chicagoans passing through the Louisiana backwoods only to be mistakenly arrested for murdering a sheriff’s wife.