The alien-invasion dramas are the least familiar of the lot, and therefore have the easiest time catching us off-guard. That said, ABC's "Invasion" (premieres Wednesday, Sept. 21 at 10 p.m.), while certain to conjure up nightmares from Katrina with the hurricane scenes of the first episode, features vaguely uninteresting characters, flat scenarios and a less-than-intriguing alien/swamp thing. CBS's "Threshold" (premieres Friday, Sept. 16, at 9 p.m.), on the other hand, may be the most riveting and the most haunting drama to air this fall.

In "Threshold," the always-good Carla Gugino plays Molly Anne Caffrey, our resident plucky hero-expert who's called in to handle worst-case scenarios for the government. Along with a gaggle of like-minded hero-experts, she's rushed off to investigate the appearance of an extraterrestrial craft in the mid-Atlantic. At first, the alien angle and the occurrences on the ship, along with the arguments between the hero-experts involved, all seem to fall along predictable, slightly hokey lines. And then, well, I'm not going to spoil this for you, but suffice it to say that things get very, very eerie, far more eerie than you imagined was possible on a TV drama. Some will call this one CBS's answer to "Lost," and maybe that's the case, but to "Threshold's" credit, I learned more about what Gugino and the others were up against in the first episode than I did during the entire first season of "Lost." Granted, "Threshold" isn't likely to delve as deeply into each character's history and psyche. But then again, based on the last few minutes of the pilot, it looks like anything is possible. At the very least, this one should scare the bejesus out of you. What more could you ask for?

Which leads us to the question of why we want such scary stuff on our TV sets in the first place. Are we addicted to fear, or do we live in so much fear of another big tragedy like 9/11 (or now, Hurricane Katrina) that, instead of holding our breaths and waiting for the next blow, we'd rather preoccupy our minds with running through some potential catastrophes, ranging from the alarming to the appalling?

Whether we're giving in to our phobias or cathartically expunging them, American pop culture seems to either turn its back on the facts completely, parading oblivious young things with handbag dogs in our faces, or it dives straight into the abyss with chilling depictions of one worst-case scenario after another. During the mid '70s to early '80s we were offered a similar confusing soup of escapism and fear-mongering, with shows like "Dallas," "Dynasty" and "Fantasy Island" providing shiny, vacuous diversion while disaster movies like "Airport '77," "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno" indulged our fears. Of course, the '70s-era disaster movie was recently just a running punch line, conjuring chuckles over how such films obviously pimped the country's fears about Vietnam, inflation, the Iran hostage crisis and the Cold War. Although it's easy to look back 10 or 20 years and see most of mainstream culture as vaguely quaint or foolish, those leg warmers and shoulder pads and goofy horror movies embodying a desperate, slightly manic attempt to counteract the uncontrollable or harrowing truths of the era, here we are, breaking into a similar cultural cold sweat with a fresh onslaught of aliens and monsters and demons. And today, instead of having some square-jawed, stoic heroes like Charlton Heston and Steve McQueen, all we've got are a charismatic gaggle of fallible hero-experts, some light alterna-rock, and more than a few melodramatic monologues attempting to assure us that justice will prevail in the end.

But will justice prevail in the end? The horror of the last few weeks has left us with our doubts, and aptly enough, this is the question that echoes through the new TV season. For some of the bolder dramas on the schedule, the answer is a big, open-ended "maybe." At the very least, we'll have to wait until May sweeps to find out.

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