IT'S A FRIENDLY FALL

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

They will be as hard to avoid this fall as TV's usual glut of precocious grade-schoolers. Soon to arrive in droves: wisecracking, style-conscious young men and women on perpetually unpromising blind dates. Within the next month, a macho cop will be fixed up with an earnest obituary writer; a messy-haired leftist will share a grueling meal with a money-obsessed adman; a skeptical guy who writes novels will not hit it off with a name-dropping magazine reporter; and a receptionist will dine uneasily with a balding editor afflicted with Tourette's syndrome.

Of the 42 new prime-time shows premiering in the next few weeks--on the Big Four networks as well as on two part-time newcomers launched last season by Paramount and Warner Bros.--nearly a dozen pay homage to the urban single life. Thank Friends, NBC's superhit of last season. The comedy about a group of young Manhattanites who spend their time drinking coffee and deconstructing their dating lives has spawned more copies than a Rolex diving watch. The networks' pursuit of sophisticated urban comedy mostly falls short, however. Even though sitcoms dominate in sheer numbers, the most interesting activity lies elsewhere. This season's best bets are a handful of intelligently conceived, suspenseful dramas.

But you have to find them amid the sitcoms. The Single Guy and Caroline in the City, two Friends-inspired shows on NBC, have received the most attention, largely because of their golden Thursday-night time slots. The Single Guy, which follows Friends at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, stars Jonathan Silverman, who never overdoes it as a New York City writer frustrated by his friends' efforts to find him a mate. The funniest of the matchmakers--and the show's greatest draw--is his friend Sam (Joey Slotnick), who scours the subways looking for women to introduce to his chum. Slotnick is one of the few comics who can appropriate Jerry Seinfeld's whiny inflections without making you want to hurl your TV set out a high window.

There is no such standout character on Caroline in the City, sandwiched between hits Seinfeld and ER at 9:30 p.m. E.T. Starring Lea Thompson as a flustered cartoonist with an oddball assistant and a promiscuous best friend, Caroline lacks the quirkiness and edge of its fellow NBC sitcoms. It also depends on the sort of hoary comedy devices that have made decades of TV sitcoms embarrassing to watch. When Caroline visits her handsome ex-beau at his office, she tries to cover up her attraction to him. "I'm going to go out and get some sex," she blurts out. "I mean lunch!"

Such banality also plagues other Friends-influenced shows. CBS's Can't Hurry Love stars Nancy McKeon (The Facts of Life) as a bland job-placement coordinator who daydreams while feeding the pigeons outside her lower Manhattan office window. The WB network is offering Simon, about two goofball brothers sharing a New York tenement flat, and First Time Out, which depicts three equally unfunny housemates--women this time--who gripe about finding men in L.A. and missing Jerry Springer. From Fox comes Too Something, featuring slacker best friends who work in a mail room and aren't nearly as offbeat as the show's creators (who are also the stars) seem to believe, and Partners, in which Jon Cryer overacts as a young architect who can't cope with the fact that his closest friend is marrying.

The best new ensemble comedy of the season is at least something of a departure. ABC's The Drew Carey Show (Wednesdays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.), starring and co-created by stand-up comic Carey, is a working-class Friends--a hip sitcom in which the characters avoid coffee bars, congregating instead in beer joints and bare kitchens with no visible signs of a Williams-Sonoma shopping spree.

Unlike most of his sitcom contemporaries, Drew (as Carey's character is called on the show) is no wiry Manhattanite spewing caustic one-liners. He's a beefy Midwesterner who is sparing with his barbs. As a department-store personnel manager, he finds his travails are more mundane. In the pilot Drew is threatened with a lawsuit by an obese woman in mounds of blue eye shadow who cries sexual discrimination when he doesn't hire her to run the cosmetics counter. Carey is so buffoonish he can elicit laughs with a mere bobbing tilt of his head. Among his friends, Ryan Stiles is engaging as a janitor reminiscent of Christopher Lloyd's Reverend Jim on Taxi.

If only the higher-tax-bracket singles on the new CBS drama Central Park West (Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) were as amusing. The show, revolving around a wealthy New York publishing family, was developed by Darren Star, creator of Melrose Place. But it lacks that series' appealing campiness. On Melrose the characters are so unfailingly stupid that they remain dumbfounded every single time they are blackmailed or cheated on. In comparison, the CPW crowd is rather sharp and as a result less fun to watch. Still, there are snippets of irresistible dialogue. When a stockbroker dumps his girlfriend after squandering her fortune in bad investments, she screams, "Why wasn't I diversified? What kind of scum are you?"

The characters on this season's more intriguing dramas have weightier things to worry about than the fluctuating value of hedge funds. Inspired by the success of the Fox series The X-Files, several new one-hour dramas venture into the paranormal. Strange Luck, which will air on Fox just before The X -Files (Fridays, 8 p.m. E.T.), centers on a photojournalist (D.B. Sweeney) who as a child survived a plane crash. Now he keeps finding himself in life-threatening predicaments, from which he somehow always succeeds in escaping.

A psychically beleaguered photographer is also at the center of Nowhere Man, an unusually frightening and well-acted thriller on the UPN network (Mondays, 9 p.m. E.T.). Thomas Veil (Bruce Greenwood) returns to his table at a restaurant to discover that his wife has vanished and everyone in his life suddenly doesn't know him. His identity has been erased, and the show tracks his efforts to regain it.

The two best dramas of the season represent the range of TV's fascination with matters of good and evil, from the darkest recesses of the soul to the harsh light of the courtroom. American Gothic (Fridays, 10 p.m. E.T.), one of the eeriest shows to come along in years, revolves around Lucas Buck (Gary Cole), a sinister sheriff. Buck runs everything in the fictional Southern town of Trinity, where the weirdness is as oppressive as the humidity. He lies, rapes and murders while whistling the theme song of The Andy Griffith Show. To the locals he appears a kindly, caring lawman; he finds people jobs and gives peppy talks to grade-school classes. But his mission throughout the series is to gain control of a young boy (Lucas Black) whose sister Buck has killed and whose only weapon against the sheriff is the girl's otherworldly guidance. Cole plays Buck with just the right pathological gaze and, alternately, avuncular smile; he's chillingly convincing in both roles.

American Gothic never lets up on its creepy surrealism--it is Twin Peaks without the sardonic levity. The show was created and scripted, improbably, by former Hardy Boys star Shaun Cassidy, who says he "wanted to do a show set in the Cape Fear South, where there is still a rich sense of folklore--not the magnolia-and-lemonade South we're used to on TV." He has succeeded. "I always saw this not as a horror show," he says, "but as a show about moral struggles."

The moral struggles are more intricately played out on ABC's Murder One (Thursdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), probably the season's most eagerly anticipated new show. Conceived by Steven Bochco, the creator of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, Murder One will spend its entire 23-episode season following the course of a single homicide case. And for viewers who find this suspiciously familiar, Bochco stresses that he came up with the idea years before the O.J. Simpson trial.

The story involves the murder of a 15-year-old girl found dead in her older sister's apartment. The accused is a socially prominent businessman with a sordid side, who police believe was having an affair with the teenager. Stanley Tucci exudes a quiet smarminess as the suspect, and despite the show's tawdry subject matter, it never feels cheap. If subsequent episodes prove as gripping as the first, audiences could get hooked on the unusual serial format.

Yet Murder One, scheduled opposite last season's hit ER, does have a tough road ahead. Bochco admits the format has pitfalls; though only seven scripts have been written, he knows how the case will be resolved--and there's little chance to make midcourse corrections. "The degree of difficulty of doing something like this is much higher than I thought," he says. "If you think you've made a wrong turn, you can't go back and fix it." For TV viewers, though, an hour with Murder One is the best blind date of the season.

--With reporting by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York