Rumble in the jungle ABC’s creepy, exciting Lost and PBS’s not-so-exciting Cop Shop BY JOYCE MILLMAN

J.J. Abrams is a master of persuading viewers to suspend their disbelief. Implausible stuff happens on his ABC spy series Alias, but if you just, you know, go with it, you’re rewarded with some of the most richly layered and wholly pleasurable drama in prime time. Last season’s final few episodes built up to an identity transfer between heroine Sydney Bristow and icy blonde überbitch Lauren Reed that echoed the psychodrama of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as well as the skittery, sexy thrills of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

With his fellow auteur of the unexpected, Joss Whedon, sitting out this TV season, Abrams is now network TV’s chief mind blower. ABC is holding back the season premiere of the ratings-challenged Alias until January (with writers/producers from Whedon’s defunct Angel coming on board), but it’s clear the network has confidence in Abrams. His new Lost (Wednesdays at 8 p.m.), which premiered September 22, has a decent time slot and the budget to pay a cast of 48 actors, 12 of them weekly regulars. The show could be considered a sci-fi series, and that’s always a risky proposition for network TV. But Lost, which plunks down plane-crash survivors on an uninhabited (or is it?) island, does not disappoint. It’s the best new series you’re likely to see this fall season. First, however, you must turn off your incredulity response and savor the giddy weirdness of moments like the one where a survivor shoots a large, charging bear — this is a Pacific island, mind you — and another survivor looks at it and says, "Guys, this isn’t just a bear. It’s a polar bear."

In the ferociously entertaining pilot, the survivors crawled through the wreckage in scenes that might put the nervous flier off air travel for good. With fleet storytelling that moves between flashback and the present (a signature of Alias), this first episode introduced the three nominal main characters: Jack (Matthew Fox), a doctor who may be suffering from a crisis of confidence; Kate (Evangeline Lilly), a spunky mystery woman who becomes second in command to de facto leader Jack; and Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), a self-effacing British rock musician and junkie. As the survivors tried to come to terms with their situation, they were scared stiff by a loud, eerie rumbling from the jungle at the edge of the beach. Jack, Kate, and tag-along Charlie went off to investigate, hoping to find the plane’s cockpit and radio transmitter. They found both, and more. One pilot (Alias’s Greg Grunberg in an unbilled cameo) had enough life left in him enough to deliver the cheering news that they were so far off course when they went down, rescuers wouldn’t know where to look and, oh, by the way, the radio was dead. Then they heard that rumbling noise again, and the pilot put his head out the window and was lifted out and chewed up by something no one stuck around to get a good look at. You’re getting the picture, right? Lost is Gilligan’s Island meets The Blair Witch Project with a little Jurassic Park on the side. And it is very, very spooky.

Because this is Abrams, who has given us a spy show where spying is a metaphor for fractured identities and broken relationships, Lost is about more than just things that go bump in the jungle. As each survivor swims into focus, we get a glimpse into the inner baggage that fell to earth with him or her — as the U2 song says, all that you can’t leave behind. Divorced father Michael (Harold Perrineau) is trying too hard to connect with the young son (Malcolm David Kelley) he barely knows. Belligerent redneck Sawyer (Josh Holloway) accuses a Middle Eastern survivor, Sayid (Naveen Andrews), of being a terrorist. A brother and sister (Ian Somerholder and Maggie Grace) can’t stop pushing each other’s buttons. A Korean man (Daniel Dae Kim) intimidates his cowering wife (Yunjin Kim). Then there’s Locke, the creepiest survivor since Richard Hatch; played by Terry O’Quinn (of course), this bald, silent character keeps to himself and takes an almost primordial joy in welcoming the rain that pours down on him.

As the survivors slowly realize that they could be on the island for a while, they begin to give way to their primitive emotions and impulses. Panic, suspicion, selfishness, greed, and bigotry rear their ugly heads. Fights break out. Misinformation spreads. Lost, you soon realize, is about fear itself — the devices people use to master it, the tragedies that result when people succumb to it. And knowing Abrams’s fondness for exploring identity in all its complexity, we can look forward to none of the survivors’ being quite what he or she seems. Sayid is a nice, techno-savvy guy; he can’t really be a terrorist, can he? Then again, he was in the army during the Gulf War — the Iraqi army. Sawyer is so obviously shifty, the others have him pegged for a weasel. But then he stands his ground as that bear charges, pulls a gun, and kills it. So he’s got balls. But where did he get the gun? (He claims to have taken it off an unconscious federal marshal as the plane was going down.) And who was wearing handcuffs — found in the rubble — and being transported by that federal marshal when the plane went down? Surprise! It was sweet-faced Kate.

Explaining the rules of backgammon to the boy, Locke — one half of his face bisected by a long red bruise that looks like war paint — holds up two playing chips. "Two players. Two sides. One is light. One is dark," he says with an unsettling grin. Did I say that none of the survivors would be exactly what he or she seems? I take that back. This guy is gonna be trouble.

ANYONE WHO NEEDS PROOF that PBS is in a dire identity crisis should tune in to Cop Shop (WGBH, October 6 at 9 p.m.). Made under the banner of PBS Hollywood Presents, Cop Shop comprises two 45-minute dramas about fictional New York City cops. It aspires to be edgy and modern television. Yet PBS bleeps out a handful of words you can hear every week on NYPD Blue. So there you have it: edgy and modern and scared of the FCC — that’s the new PBS.

Not that restoring those words would salvage this strange and nebulous project. According to the Cop Shop press notes, these two teleplays were conceived by veteran cop-show writer David Black (Law & Order, Hill Street Blues) as part of a series about the off-duty lives of police officers. Indeed, I had the feeling I’d walked in on the middle of a show I knew nothing about yet could swear I’d seen before. The cops here are not very different from those we’ve been watching since the birth of the warts-and-all cop series Hill Street Blues. Both teleplays feel stale, as if they’d sat around for a while. (In the second episode, "Blind Date," there’s a remark about whole-wheat bagels as health food that appears to have been written in carb-friendlier times.) And though the intent was to film the episodes like stage plays in a single take, as a nod to the Golden Age of television, the result is often self-consciously stagy.

The first teleplay, "Fear," is set in a community meeting on the Upper West Side, where residents, panicked after a string of rapes, demand answers and reassurance from harried police officers. This play is supposed to show cops as the Average Joes they really are, not the way they’re portrayed on TV. Despite that admirable premise and the assured performances of the three leads, no new ground is covered here. We simply have one more unassuming cop in the Lennie Briscoe mode (Jay Thomas as Detective Moe Diamond), one more prickly precinct commander (Blair Brown as Captain Francis Harding), and one more brash young cop with an itchy trigger finger (Michole Briana White as Officer Debra Ganier).

What’s more, the same middlebrow message — can’t we all just get along? — that’s elevated by the energetic rhythms of NYPD Blue and Law & Order simply drags on and on in this theatrical format. One after another, the stereotypical members of the community (Angry White Guy, Scared Old Lady, Cynical Young Woman) take their turns orating at the poor cops. By the time the Noble Black Man gets up to demand respect for crime victims, in stentorian tones that even James Earl Jones might find a tad theatrical, you’ll be grabbing for the remote and searching for a Law & Order rerun.

"Blind Date" fares a little better. Boasting some fine acting by Richard Dreyfuss (who has a cameo in "Fear"), Rosie Perez, and Rita Moreno, it takes place in a homy brothel where all the girls and their madam are recovering substance abusers. The intimate room feels less like a stage set than did the meeting hall of "Fear." And Dreyfuss and Perez as a recovering-alcoholic half-Jewish former-seminarian police detective and a Catholic Buddhist intellectual ex-junkie whore have real chemistry. But their momentum is blunted by the pointless arrival of two bad cops who try to shake down Moreno’s madam. Whereas too little happened in "Fear," too much happens in "Blind Date." It’s like a season’s worth of plot crammed into one episode.