Big threats and big fun; Joan Juliet Buck previews a powerful season of great new shows that bring us the ultimate in survival and cool.(Saturday Night Live, Studio 60, Jericho. )

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Saturday Night Live, born 31 years ago this fall, has in its old age become deified as the apogee of freewheeling, truth-telling TV. Last winter's NBC film Live from New York about the show's first five years confirms that it was largely smug, silly shenanigans, acerbic writers and comedians dressed up as presidents, bees, coneheads, and a shark. It was most of all Cool, and in a desperate bid for cool, the networks this season have come up with concepts that range from nuclear bombs going off all over America to deep questions about the meaning of life to Saturday Night Live itself. NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and 30 Rock both use Lorne Michaels's l975 creation as their model.

Studio 60, thought up by Aaron Sorkin, the most talented wild card in television, is elegant, passionate, and unpredictable. 30 Rock, produced by Lorne Michaels himself, written by and starring the Saturday Night Live regular Tina Fey, has some good jokes, but despite cheekiness about corporate takeovers, its tone is a little squeaky. Alec Baldwin lumbers mightily as Jack Donaghy, an offensive pig of a marketing man, proud of having invented the "GE trivection oven," who is suddenly "new VP of East Coast television and microwave-oven programming for NBC-GE-Universal-Kmart." Tina Fey gets to say "It's not HBO, it's TV," but then it's all about the comic Tracy Morgan taking over something called The Girlie Show, and the edge is lost.

Sorkin has an edge, and a mission to civilize. His Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, live on Friday rather than Saturday night, begins as its producer Wes Mendell assures the guest host, Felicity Huffman, that her monologue "isn't funny," strides into a live sketch, and goes into a rant just like the one Peter Finch gave in the 1976 film Network. It goes, in part, "I think you should change the channel . . . this show used to be cutting-edge political and social satire, but it's gotten lobotomized by a candy-assed broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience. . . . People are having contests to see how much they can be like Donald Trump. . . . Guys are getting killed in a war that's got theme music and a logo." Judd Hirsch does Finch all Walter Matthau weary and rumpled, and of course he is fired at once. The TV news reports what happened, and every newscaster refers to Paddy Chayefsky's Network. The new network president is Jordan McDeere, a beautiful young woman dressed in Prada for a dinner party, and she thinks it's great they all know about Chayefsky. Played tentative but steely by Amanda Peet, she can't find her office but sets about saving the honor of TV overnight, and insists that the team of Matt Albie and Danny Tripp be brought back to run the show. The writer and director combine into a self-portrait of the famously wild Sorkin: Matt (Matthew Perry) is crazed on Vicodin, Percocet, and a steroid after a back operation, Danny has tested positive for cocaine; Matt wins awards, Danny gets things done. Danny is played by Bradley Whitford, who looks but exactly like the young Lorne Michaels. It's TV as homage and object lesson, and everyone who watches will feel both cool and engaged in cultural salvation.

If you want destruction, watch CBS's Jericho. On a fall day, sly-faced young Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) returns to the small Kansas town of Jericho after a mysterious five-year absence, greeted by friends and his old girlfriend. His dad's the mayor, he needs money, he tells each person a different story about where he's been, and as he's leaving to get back to San Diego, a bright-pink-yellow mushroom cloud erupts in the sky to the West, presumably over Denver. The mayor ...