Fear Factory

This fall on the networks, terror will have little to do with suicide bombers, security checkpoints, or Middle Eastern politics. While the real world is rocked daily by news of extremists and explosions, prime time will be more consumed with a red alert of a different kind: an alien monster alert. The enemies that will be terrorizing TV's new square-jawed heroes and tough-cookie heroines definitely won't be human, and they will arrive in clouds of fog rather than smoke.

In other words, the networks hope to scare the pants off viewers, but safely, without CNN-style realism, and with none of the relevance that has made ''24" so edgy and incendiary. As some 30 shows premiere over the next two months, we will be inundated with supernatural thrillers that have no explicit connection to today's headlines -- among them CBS's ''Threshold" (fright on a boat), ABC's ''Invasion" (fright after a storm), NBC's ''Surface" (fright in the ocean), and the WB's ''Supernatural" (fright with young hunks).

If these shows are an expression of American fear in the age of terror, then they're an indirect expression. They're angst incognito. We don't tend to think of aliens, ghosts, and monsters as escapist TV comfort food, and yet in their own matinee-movie way, they are. They provide us with a jolt of distraction from true-life dismay as thoroughly as any happy little sitcom. And they give us an outlet for our dismay that's detached from reality. We identify with characters facing cosmic horrors without ever having to make it all local.

If we want, we can think about the supernatural shows as metaphors of terrorism -- ''Invasion," for instance, in which aliens secretly inhabit a Florida town a lot like sleeper cells. But we don't have to, and most of us won't.

The odd thing about the soft-terror trend, which also includes ABC's tepid remake of the 1970s series ''The Night Stalker" and CBS's silly ''Ghost Whisperer," is that it has nothing to do with ''Desperate Housewives." Last spring, on the crest of ABC's ''Housewives" wave, observers were predicting a fall onslaught of clones, thinking the networks would try to squeeze more ratings out of the Wisteria Lane sensation. But it turns out they may have known that Mark Cherry's fiercely original show could not be easily duplicated. Instead, network executives have chosen to borrow from ''Lost," to exploit the popularity of the culty supernatural mystery that's also helped bring ABC back to life. ''Lost" is a genre series, and as such more easily imitated.

Like ''Lost," most of the new supernatural shows construct their own mythologies, mysteries that are built on scattered clues and that require patience and work by viewers. They reach back to the complicated plotting of ''The X-Files," which had fans trying to piece together its uber-story for nine years. Who'd have thought the show that sputtered out so shamefully in 2002 would still wield such influence? ''Supernatural" and ''Night Stalker" even feature overtly Mulder-Scully-like partners who solve smaller crimes as well as an ongoing puzzle. In ''Supernatural," two young brothers slay demons while trying to find out what killed their mother decades earlier. And in ''Night Stalker," a crime reporter seeks the awful creature that killed his wife. So far, he's the FBI's prime suspect.

''Invasion," ''Threshold," and ''Surface" zero in on the alien side of the supernatural. They're remarkably similar to one another, and they bear likenesses to ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers," ''Signs," and ''The Abyss," respectively. But they're built with heavily knotted plots ready to stand years of untangling, if that's in the cards. Of course, they may cancel one another out in viewers' interest, as TV clones are wont to do. And that would be a shame only for ''Invasion," which ABC has paired with ''Lost" on Wednesday nights. ''Invasion" is not as riveting as a movie, because you aren't among strangers in a dark theater, and because it has a slower build; but it does have the clear potential to creep us out.

The case file grows Interestingly, the cases on these shows, including Jennifer Love Hewitt's close encounters with unresolved spirits on ''Ghost Whisperer," are beyond the ken of the cops. TV is thronging with detectives right now, and yet these shows render them pointless. People such as Gil Grissom from ''CSI" are obsessed with science, and the seemingly paranormal events they sometimes encounter in their crimes of the week always turn out to have logical explanations. The forensic wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer, the maker of the ''CSI" shows, ''Cold Case," and ''Without a Trace," is rarely trumped.

This season, the hyper-productive Bruckheimer brings us yet two more of his coolly rational crime series -- a suburban procedural on CBS called ''Close to Home" and an NBC Pentagon thriller called ''E-Ring" with Benjamin Bratt and Dennis Hopper. (He has also produced Don Johnson's flaky WB trial drama, ''Just Legal"). And they are joined by a posse of variations on the ''CSI" theme -- Fox's clever ''Bones," CBS's promising ''Criminal Minds," and Fox's gruesome ''Killer Instinct." Joining the 11 crime dramas already on prime time, many of them are engaging, and yet few of them are distinctive. Most of them will be gone by next year.

And what of comedy? And by that, I mean intentional comedy, not the accidental ridiculousness of NBC's ''Inconceivable," a raunchy melodrama set at a fertility clinic, or UPN's irritating youth soap ''Sex, Love & Secrets." There are a handful of conventional four-camera sitcoms, ranging from ABC's promising ''Out of Practice" with Stockard Channing, to the stubbornly unsophisticated ''War at Home" on Fox. And there are a handful of laugh-track-free single-camera comedies, ranging from UPN's likable ''Everybody Hates Chris," based on Chris Rock's teen years (with him as narrator), to ABC's ''Sex and the City"-ish ''Emily's Reasons Why Not" with Heather Graham.

NBC's ''My Name Is Earl," starring Jason Lee as a thief who wins the lottery, is the offbeat comedy that critics will love but that viewers might be slower to embrace. ABC's ''Commander in Chief," starring Geena Davis as the president, is the drama that will polarize viewers into love-it or hate-it camps. And ''Head Cases" is the Fox show that will put neurotic Adam Goldberg in our faces for an hour every week.

Now that's scary.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.