For one last time in 1994, the NBC summer series "TV Nation" is back tonight at 8 with an all-new "Year in Review" show -- and demonstrates, one last time, why Michael Moore's wickedly clever series deserves to be a TV mainstay in 1995.

      Topical? You can't get much more current than correspondent Louis Theroux's "White House Rent-a-Cop" report, in which he hires a security guard to help beef up security around the Commander-in-Chief. This tongue-in-cheek report was filed before the recent (and, to the knife wielding assailant, fatal) assault on the streets outside the White House.

      Uplifting? Rather than copy other end-of-year shows by acknowledging the passing of various public figures, "TV Nation" marks the year by noting who didn't die in 1994‹sometimes with the direct co-operation of the lucky survivors.

      "Hi, I'm Jack LaLanne," says the long-famous physical-fitness advocate, "and I didn't die in '94!" Milton Berle, lively as ever, tacks on a supplementary punch line. "No, that's not true," he says, straight-faced. "I died twice last year‹once in Las Vegas, and once in Atlantic City." (Ba-Boom.)

      Informative? Moore manages, in the first piece alone, to convey an eye opening amount of information about which Fortune 500 companies were fined the most money for various transgressions in 1994, and what they'd done to deserve the fines: Prudential, for example, was hit with $330 million for defrauding investors, and Exxon was ordered to pay $5 billion in damages for the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

      Rather than present this odious list dryly, though, Moore goes at it from a tongue-in-cheek sympathetic angle. With a suitcase filled with $1000 cash, he visits the lobbies of these powerful companies to present the money as a gift. Predictably, and humorously, there are no takers. Undaunted, Moore goes straight to Wall Street and holds a charity concert, "Corp-Aid," with the Meat Puppets singing a Pro-business anthem, Steven Wright offering Woodstock-ish public service announcements ("There's some bad investment tips going around"), and Moore passing the hat for Exxon - and raising $275.64.

      "Who hasn't spilled something in their lives?" he asks, with insincere empathy, the poor Exxon guy he meets at the company's Texas headquarters. Exxon took the Corp-Aid hat and an autographed copy of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." But not the money.

      Cutting-edge? In another report, Moore tries to predict, then suggest, which country America should invade in 1995. He first settles on Belize, and visits the small country's embassy for a fact-finding tour. "How many people are in your Army?" He asks a friendly receptionist at the counter.

      "About a thousand," she estimates.

      "Just a thousand?" Moore asks‹then turns to the camera, ever so slightly, and lets out a sinister, schoolyard-bully chuckle.

      Moore and producer Kathleen Glynn have done it again -- and if they don't get the chance to do more of these brilliant hours in 1995, NBC deserves to be their next target.

      When Moore is in stride, his humor works better than any common pain reliever. He makes an intriguing case, for example, that short-term presidential candidate and business magazine honcho Steve Forbes is a pod person or an alien. What's his proof? Forbes, he astutely points out, rarely blinks his eyes during TV interviews.

      To highlight the thoughtless way money is scooped up by politicians' campaign efforts, he sends off legitimate checks in the names of fictitious groups such as Pedophiles for Free Trade, the deliberately misspelled John Wayne Gacey Fan Club, Satan Worshipers for Dole and Abortionists for Buchanan. The Dole and Perot efforts returned the checks but Pat Buchanan's kept the money from two of Moore's wildly bogus operations.

      Furious over the latest round of immigrant-bashing, he offers a detailed list of the places along the U.S. border where immigrants might sneak in. One of his suggestions is to cross from Russia to a tiny island in the Bering Strait. This route works best in the winter, he notes, but polar bears also live there. He also fumes about the union leaders who "rolled over and let the company bosses destroy the lives of their members."

      But his fury comes from the bottom up, and it is aimed at Corporate America and the corporate leaders who, he says, bounce sports teams from city to city in search of the sweetest municipal deal regardless of hometown allegiances, who pay miserly wages to workers in the Third World nations or who coolly shut factories after seeking sacrifices from workers to keep them open. This is a raw and dangerous anger that lingers among some of us. Republican and Democratic leaders know well it is there, and they deal with it in their own ways in their political campaigns. So did Buchanan. Similarly, fanatics on the right and left use it for their own purposes.

      Moore does, too, but with much laughter amid the rage.