full house; From ancient Rome to the Pentagon and alien invasions, the fall season has it all.(television programs)(Television Program Review)

As the worst movie summer in 20 years ends, a fall season begins on TV that is rich with hybrid vigor, or at least with hybrids. We get the ancient world with all its lust and ambitions, the present day with all its angst and ambitions, and the parallel world with all its heartless and predatory aliens, sea monsters, and spontaneous combustors from the other side. We get a famous out-of-control chef, Anthony Bourdain, fictionalized into a down-and-out chef renamed Jack Bourdain, we get a sleek lawyer after his breakdown, and Dennis Hopper as a Pentagon wacko. The girls are gorgeous, the men are fragile or insane, and the world is in danger. What else is new?

Henry Winkler, once Fonzie, more recently the useless lawyer on Arrested Development, is now also Dr. Stewart Barnes on CBS's very funny Out of Practice. The show cheers us because it's a better gig for Winkler and he gets to have Stockard Channing as his ex-wife, Lydia.

Julius Caesar, who was murdered on ABC's Empire in 44 b.c. on June 28, marches back from Gaul in HBO's Rome in 52 b.c. on August 28. Rome is the sexiest Ancient World yet seen on TV, with richer sets, bloodier animal sacrifices, and a lot of casual phallic pagan stuff. The scene in which senators in togas sit on marble bleachers looks, only at first glance, like a bunch of cranky old men in a steam bath. Polly Walker schemes, disrobes, and mates with godless thoroughness as Caesar's niece Atia of the Julii, James Purefoy is a dandy of a Mark Antony, Ciaran Hinds is Caesar; at a guess he'll get murdered this year around November 28.

NBC presents their rival to Desperate Housewives, a lewd and rude black comedy set in a fertility clinic, titled Inconceivable. The vain fertility doctor Malcolm Bower is played by British actor Jonathan Cake (who played Tyrannus in Empire). Inconceivable should be a hit. Under the freeing liberal influence of HBO, much fun is had with the props of artificial insemination: the porno flicks to excite the donors, the fear that a surrogate mother might be a nympho, vials of powerful ooze.

Commander-in-Chief, on ABC, an inspiring fantasy for all women, is both canny and soft. Geena Davis stars as the vice president of the United States, Mackenzie Allen, a former university chancellor, and an Independent. Miss Davis has matured into fleshy proportions that suggest a real politician, and it helps to remember that the actress has an ...