The Season's Best, Ripe for Picking

Their Foothold Eroding, the Networks Dig Down and Come Up With Some Keepers

America Ferrera as a plain Jane in "Ugly Betty," which turns an ordinary girl's experiences in the world of high fashion into an extraordinary new comedy. (John Clifford -- ABC)

Although there'll be no mistaking the 2006-07 television season for a golden cultural renaissance, prime-time TV -- despite claims and fears to the contrary -- has one sizable silver lining: It's actually, genuinely getting, well . . . better.

Just see it to believe it: You will find fewer outrageously stupid shows among the new crop, and a greater number of them intelligently engage, earnestly challenge or cleverly confuse. You're likely to discover a new treasure or two this season (which, by the Nielsen count, officially starts tomorrow) -- something to absorb, provoke or even strike you as boldly delightful. We're talkin' NBC's reverberant "Friday Night Lights," CBS's star-driven mega-drama "Shark," Fox's glitzy but gripping "Justice" and, perhaps best of all, ABC's lovely "Ugly Betty."

The season also seems to be one of sobriety, with the networks walking the steps of recovery and assuming their cultural role with a newfound earnestness. This, dear viewer, is the season the networks get serious.

Maybe too serious? Perhaps. Several new shows convey the grim malaise of a post-9/11 world, with the terrorist tragedy of 2001 prominent again in our collective consciousness.

Even some new comedies have their bleak side. In NBC's sitcom "Twenty Good Years," Jeffrey Tambor and John Lithgow play men crossing the scarifying watershed of 60. "How many good years do you think we have left on this planet?" Lithgow's character asks Tambor's before answering his own question: "Twenty at best."

If TV's content is more grown-up and responsive, style and presentation are changing, too: More new series than ever look like carefully crafted theatrical features.

No matter how much programming improves, however, media savants tend to see the medium living out numbered days. It's feared that the Internet will do to TV what TV did to the movies in the 1950s. But instead of panicking, the networks are finding ways to co-opt the Web. NBC's "Friday Night Lights" is being featured on the teenage Web site Bebo, and YouTube is streaming advance peeks at such new series as "30 Rock." Viewers thrilled beyond containment at the prospect of "Studio 60" can catch new episodes a week early on AOL Television, if AOL happens to be working that night.

We must be realistic about the degree to which prime time is getting better. Promising pilots can devolve later into weak weekly series. A season ago, ABC's "Commander in Chief" looked like the best new drama, but it stumbled on a slippery slope and hurtled downhill before getting impeached from the schedule.

Now, though -- despite no new fake presidents to root for, hate or ignore -- a shiny prime-time season is at hand. And whether they're bad or beautiful, snazzy or sleazy, the shows must go on . . .

ABC: CHARMING 'BETTY,' BRIGHT 'KNIGHTS'

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'The Knights of Prosperity'

"The Knights of Prosperity" boasts -- although boasting might be overdoing it -- one of the craziest concepts of the season: A small team of downbeat deadbeats, feeling they have missed out on the major platinum-card pleasures of life, hatches a daffy scheme to burglarize the Manhattan apartment of rock god Mick Jagger (whom they see showing off his bodacious abode on a peekaboo TV show). Once titled "Let's Rob Mick Jagger," the series had to be renamed when Jagger announced he never imagined he'd appear in more than one episode. Regardless, the show is funkily funny and endearingly offbeat, with hilarious Donal Logue as the leader of the gang -- a ragtag Logue's gallery of lovable losers. (Tuesdays, 9 p.m.; premieres Oct. 17.)

'Help Me Help You'