it can't happen here; Joan Juliet Buck travels to the Bermuda Triangle for a great sci-fi thriller but gives wide berth to hidden terrorists in an improbable miniseries.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

The impossible has been on television almost as long as we have been in front of it, or at least since 1955, when Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired the first of 267 sour, witty episodes. In 1959, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone established television as the home of science fiction, and proved that fantasy was the most satisfying use for the luminous box in the living room. There was soon a talking horse called Mister Ed, who at one point went surfing. In 1964 Elizabeth Montgomery was a witch with a twitch in Bewitched. From 1987 until 1990, Ron Perlman starred in Beauty and the Beast, as a hairy-faced lion man who lived under the streets of New York. Ron Perlman the actor, that is, not Ron Perelman the tycoon. Buffy slew vampires on UPN from 1997 straight across the millennium to 2003. Recently, the networks seemed to be souring on chick-mystics-Fox canceled Tru Calling, in which the girl morgue worker could turn back time, and tossed the enchanting Wonderfalls after only four episodes; its heroine had to obey orders from tiny plastic toys. Dead Like Me, a series about an understandably sulky teenage Grim Reaper girl, was canceled by Showtime after two seasons, and Joan of Arcadia, in which God talked to Joan, or vice versa, was silenced by CBS last summer. However, Joan and God were replaced by something called Ghost Whisperer, a title that haunts the story of a seer with the horsy shadow of Mister Ed, and this year the Emmy for best actress in a drama went to Patricia Arquette for playing a psychic in a show called Medium on NBC.

The fall season brought a swarm of new netherworlds: monsters from the deep attacked in Surface on NBC; aliens came to mess with us in Threshold on CBS and in Invasion on ABC. On the WB, two brothers called Sam and Dean fought demons in the generically named Supernatural.

For three nights this month, and just in time for the feast of Saint Nicholas, the laws of probability will be once again reversed, torqued, and generally messed with. This is business as usual for television and even more so for the Sci Fi Channel, but by some strange alchemy, The Triangle is everything you could want: accomplished, vastly entertaining, playful, and witty. Stories of the supernatural require wit to carry those members of the audience who do not believe in the other side, be it below, above, or way, way out there. The story is by Dean Devlin, who wrote the most raucous and funniest science-fiction film of all time, directed by Roland Emmerich with a touch as light as that of Ernst Lubitsch, the 1996 Independence Day.

The Triangle is that part of the Sargasso Sea where ships and planes vanish, and which, as the miniseries begins, attacks both Christopher Columbus and the ships belonging to Eric Benirall. Benirall, played with an English accent and a fine James Mason weariness by Sam Neill, does what any billionaire does in these cases: he enlists four misfits to investigate the triangle, offers them $5 million each, and then goes to pieces. The four are Howard Thomas, a former New York Times reporter who now earns less working for a Florida tabloid (this is science fiction); Emily Patterson, a deep-sea-rescue specialist; Bruce Gellar, a daredevil meteorologist from Australia; and Stan Lathem, a sad psychic with a particular affinity for lost children. Eric Stoltz plays the divorced Howard distracted, self-righteous, and believable. Michael Rodgers as Gellar has dirty hair, a ...