NEW (AND NOT) FOR '96

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Like the team's Roseanne and Grace Under Fire, the three new Carsey-Werner comedies making their debut this week are all set in worlds where gleaming Calphalon cookware will never hang from the kitchen racks. Herewith the lives of the working class as interpreted for television by the extremely wealthy:

COSBY (CBS, Mondays 8 p.m. EST) No longer the town-house-owning Huxtables, Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad star as Mr. and Mrs. Hilton Lucas, a Queens, New York, couple battling forced retirement. The show can veer toward the excessively emotional ("I didn't lose my job. My job was taken away from me!" Hilton screams early on), and Hilton, never far from a handsome cardigan, can appear awfully stately for an unemployed airline clerk. In general, though, Cosby does a fine job of capturing its star's wry sense of codger bewilderment. Home for the first time in 30 years, and confounded by all tasks domestic, Hilton upsets his wife's rou-tine, accidentally gets the house robbed and burns his daughter's turtle. Cosby's other great draw: Made-line Kahn as the couple's elegantly out-of-her-mind neighbor.

MEN BEHAVING BADLY (NBC, Wednesdays 9:30 p.m.) Former--and still grating--Saturday Night Live cast member Rob Schneider and Ron (ER) Eldard star as roommates who drink beer with cereal and say things like, "These weren't merely women--they were tire models." The show, inspired by a British sitcom, intends to make knowing observations on the lunacy of male behavior. At moments it succeeds, but mostly it offers two guys so implausibly ill-mannered and idiotic they seem more alien than the 3rd Rock from the Sun crew.

TOWNIES (ABC, Wednesdays 8:30 p.m.) The show about three women who stay put in a dead-end New England fishing village exploits every imaginable cliche of working-class life. Molly Ringwald stars as a waitress with a drunken buffoon of a father and a churchgoing mother she calls "Ma." She has two best friends, one of whom has had her baby first and her wedding later and another who sleeps with anything that's not in a lobster trap. As the pals, Lauren Graham and Jenna Elfman upstage Ringwald: her whininess, when it surfaces, is more befitting a girl with a bad seat at an Armani show than one who doles out fried clams.

--By Ginia Bellafante