Grand illusion TV's permanent fall season BY JOYCE MILLMAN

The fall television season doesn’t really exist anymore. Like record albums, or Pong, it’s a quaint memory, and any reference to it will peg you as an old crank. Fox is on a year-round rollout of new shows (not that anyone has noticed); NBC has been premiering its "fall schedule" since August. All of the broadcast networks are holding back their most promising shows to make a bigger impact at midseason. However, it is September, so let’s preserve the illusion of a fall TV season.

ABC

Irritating Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban makes like Willy Wonka in The Benefactor (Mondays at 8 p.m.), a reality series in which Cuban orders 16 finalists to jump through hoops (basketball pun!) to win $1 million or, as he might call it, lunch money. . . . So, you think The Practice is finally gone? Ha! It’s still hanging on, in the guise of the spinoff Boston Legal (Sunday October 3 at 10 p.m.). James Spader and William Shatner continue as flashy defense attorneys Alan Shore and Denny Crane. . . . Keith Carradine got killed off Deadwood, but he lives again in the family sit-com Complete Savages (Friday September 24 at 8:30 p.m.), playing the single father of five teenage sons. Mel Gibson is the executive producer. Insert your own The Passion of the Sit-Com Dad joke here. . . . ABC’s best series, Alias, is not returning until January. In its place is the prime-time soap Desperate Housewives (Sunday October 3 at 9 p.m.), starring Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, Nicolette Sheridan, and Teri Hatcher as suburban housewives with sordid secrets. I for one will be counting the days until January. . . . Freaks and Geeks producers Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah try again with life as we know it (Thursday October 7 at 9 p.m.), a comedy/drama about three teenage boys coming of age. . . . Alias creator J.J. Abrams’s new series, Lost (Wednesday September 22 at 8 p.m.), has a huge cast, including Matthew Fox, Dominic Monaghan, and Terry O’Quinn, and an intriguing premise: survivors of a plane crash find themselves on an island that appears to be deserted. Or is it? . . . The reality series Wife Swap (Wednesday September 29 at 10 p.m.) allows two women to see whether the grass really is greener. Based on a British TV hit. Hey, I’m starting to think maybe the British aren’t so smart after all!

Bravo

The NBC-owned cable network mines new reality territory with Manhunt: The Search for America’s Most Gorgeous Male Model (Wednesday October 13 at 10 p.m.). Are you thinking Zoolander? Also on the schedule is the six-episode reality series Long Way Round (Thursday October 28 at 10 p.m.), which chronicles a motorbike trip around the world taken by actor Ewan McGregor and pal Charley Boorman. For those who prefer old-school reality TV, James "Soupy" Lipton salivates and genuflects through another season of Inside the Actors Studio (Sunday October 10 at 8 p.m.), which kicks off with the greatest actress of her generation, Jennifer Lopez.

CBS

John Goodman returns to TV in the sit-com Center of the Universe (Wednesday September 22 at 9:30 p.m.). The former Roseanne co-star plays a nice guy with an eccentric extended family, including Olympia Dukakis as his mother and Ed Asner as his — I’m quoting the CBS press release — "sex obsessed" father. Oh, Mr. Grant! . . . The new comedy/drama Clubhouse (previews Sunday September 26 at 8 p.m.; premieres Tuesday September 28 at 9 p.m.) stars Jeremy Sumpter (Peter Pan) as a fatherless 16-year-old who finds a lot of surrogate dads when he becomes batboy for a pro baseball team. Mare Winningham, Dean Cain, and Christopher Lloyd co-star. . . . Run for your lives, the franchise keeps expanding! CSI: New York (Wednesday September 22 at 10 p.m.) stars Gary Sinise as driven Crime Scene Investigator Mac Taylor and Melina Kanakaredes as his impressively maned partner, Stella Bonasera. There are also some multi-ethnic underlings who were secretly cloned from the multi-ethnic underlings on the other two CSI shows. . . . For those of you who were bereaved when Rob Lowe’s Lyon’s Den circled swiftly down the drain last season, the Lowemeister returns in the drama Dr. Vegas (Friday September 24 at 10 p.m.) as the in-house physician at a Vegas casino, with Joe Pantoliano (who flopped last season in CBS’s The Handler) as his nurse. I’m kiddin’ ya! Whaddaya think Joey Pants plays? He plays a guy who’s a lot like Joey Pants! . . . Jason Alexander tries once more to prove there’s life after George Costanza with the sit-com Listen Up (Monday September 20 at 8:30 p.m.), in which he plays a sportswriter and TV personality based on the Washington Post’s Tony Kornheiser. Malcolm-Jamal Warner plays his partner on the TV show Shut Up and Listen (which you know as ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption); there’s also a wife and kids in there somewhere. . . . And there will be a Survivor: Vanuatu (Thursday September 16 at 8 p.m.) just as soon as the contestants figure out where Vanuatu is.

Fox

Fox digs itself deeper into the reality hole with The Complex: Malibu (Mondays at 9 p.m.), in which eight couples have to renovate units of an upscale apartment building, face a panel of judges, and then sell their units at public auction; the couple whose unit garners the biggest profit wins the profits from the sale of all the units. Truly, the most needlessly complicated reality show ever. . . . Impish Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson does a Donald in The Billionaire (Tuesday November 9 at 8 p.m.), in which young entrepreneurs fight for a share of Branson’s dough. . . . Speaking of d’oh, The Simpsons (Sunday November 14 at 8 p.m.) enters its 16th season with a line-up of guest voices that includes Ray Romano, Kim Cattrall, James Caan, LeBron James, and ultra-reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon. I swear to you — Thomas Pynchon.

HBO

There will be no sixth and (possibly) final season of The Sopranos until 2006. HBO’s coveted Sunday slot goes instead to the acclaimed cop series The Wire (Sunday September 19 at 9 p.m.), which is now in its third season. That’s followed by the new reality series Family Bonds (Sunday September 19 at 10 p.m.), which is about a family-run Long Island bail-bond/bounty-hunting business. On the TV-movie side, the big deal is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Sunday December 5 at 9 p.m.). Geoffrey Rush plays the enigmatic genius, with Charlize Theron as the most celebrated of his wives, actress Britt Ekland. The cast also includes John Lithgow, Emily Watson, and Stanley Tucci (as Stanley Kubrick, who directed Sellers in Dr. Strangelove).

NBC

The Friends spinoff, Joey (Thursdays at 8 p.m.), finds the lovable dolt (Matt LeBlanc) moving to LA and moving in with his 20-year-old nephew, who’s a scientific wunderkind. Paulo Costanzo plays the kid and Drea de Matteo, better known as the dear, departed Adrianna of The Sopranos, rebounds as Sis. Will the show get one-sixth of Friends’ ratings? . . . LAX (Mondays at 10 p.m.) is night-time soap cheese, but it has the guaranteed ratings draw of Heather Locklear, who plays the no-nonsense runway chief at LA International Airport. Blair Underwood is the terminal boss, with whom she locks, uh, horns. . . . Dennis Farina joins the cast of Law & Order (Wednesday September 22 at 10 p.m.), replacing Old Faithful, Jerry Orbach. . . . Kelli Williams of The Practice and Neal McDonough, who gave an electrifying performance as the alcoholic prosecutor in Boomtown, star in NBC’s CSI wanna-be Medical Investigation (Friday September 10 at 10 p.m.). Concerning a mobile response team from the National Institute of Health, it features some of the old Boomtown producers and writers, back for more punishment from the network that killed the best cop show it had.

PBS

The Masterpiece Theatre presentation The Lost Prince (October 17 and 24) is the little-known story of Prince John, the youngest son of George V and Mary (which makes him the uncle of Queen Elizabeth II), who suffered from epilepsy and was raised in secrecy by a nanny. Written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff, the show has a powerhouse cast that includes Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson, Bill Nighy, and Bibi Andersson. . . . Julie Andrews hosts the six-part series Broadway: The American Musical (October 19 through 21), a look at 100 years of musical theater and how it reflected the cultural landscape. . . . PBS’s rare foray into original American drama, Cop Shop (Wednesday October 6), stars Richard Dreyfuss, Blair Brown, Rosie Perez, Jay Thomas, and others in a pair of teleplays about New York City cops in an Upper West Side precinct. The show is already the subject of controversy: Dreyfuss and producer David Black have launched a protest against PBS’s decision to bleep out three expletives from the film. . . . And a new dramatization of the story of Henry VIII (November 7 and 14) airs on Masterpiece Theatre. Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast) has the title role; Helena Bonham Carter is Anne Boleyn.

WB

What do you get when you combine the producers of The West Wing and Everwood? You get Jack and Bobby (Sundays at 9 p.m.), a political drama/teen drama about two teenage brothers, one of whom will grow up to be president. . . . What do you get when you take a prodigal son who returns to run the family ski resort after the death of his father? You get Six Feet Under with snow — otherwise known as The Mountain (Wednesday September 22 at 9 p.m.). Oliver Hudson, Anson Mount, and Barbara Hershey star. . . . What do you get when Survivor producer and one-time British Special Forces soldier Mark Burnett creates a sit-com based on his experiences as a Beverly Hills babysitter? You get Commando Nanny (Friday September 17 at 8:30 p.m.). . . . What do you get when you mix live improv comedy with simultaneous animation? I don’t know either, but they’re calling it Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show (Thursday October 7 at 8:30 p.m.).