“NORTH AND SOUTH,” Starts Sunday, 9-11 p.m....

“NORTH AND SOUTH,” Starts Sunday, 9-11 p.m. (7) (3) (10) (42)--The television season’s first major miniseries will also pave the way for one of its last. Even as the first 12 hours of ABC’s Civil War saga unspool this week, production is under way on the 12-hour sequel, which is scheduled to air near the end of the season next spring.

The two miniseries, based on the John Jakes novels “North and South” and “Love and War,” center on the relationship between two young men--a Yankee and a Southerner--who meet as West Point cadets in 1842.

Through their friendship and the far-flung activities of other members of their families--the industrialist Hazards of Pennsylvania and the plantation-owning Mains of South Carolina--the melodrama endeavors to delineate the issues and events that tore the nation apart over the next 23 years.

Like “The Winds of War,” an earlier historical miniseries on ABC, this first offering of “North and South” deals with the period leading up to the outbreak of war in 1861. The second 12 hours, “North and South, Book II,” will cover the actual war years.

“North and South” will air in six two-hour installments, beginning Sunday and continuing Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and next Sunday, 9-11 p.m. each night.

The production’s central characters, Yankee George Hazard and Rebel Orry Main, are respectively portrayed by James Read and Patrick Swayze. Others in the cast of continuing characters include Kirstie Alley as George’s abolitionist sister, Genie Francis and Terri Garber as Orry’s sisters, Lesley-Anne Down as Orry’s love interest and Georg Stanford Brown as a Southern slave who escapes to freedom in the North.

Also on hand in smaller roles are Hal Holbrook as Abraham Lincoln, Robert Guillaume as Frederick Douglass, Johnny Cash as John Brown, Gene Kelly as a U.S. senator and Elizabeth Taylor as a bordello madame.