THE NEW TV SEASON : The Fall Season: From the Outer Limits to Real Down to Earth Problems : Why science fiction is alive and well on television

On Channel 13, a 60-year-old woman is implanted with an alien seedling. When she gives birth, the infant is offered up to the Eternal--a hideous, tentacled, pulsating monster straight out of a child’s worst nightmare.

Over on Channel 11, a human cop meets, dates and copulates with his neighbor, an attractive female scientist from outer space who is endowed with a bald, leopard-spotted head and some peculiar erogenous zones.

And on Channel 4, a physicist whose experiments have gone just a little haywire can be found leaping back through time to assume the identities of a gorgeous woman, an elderly black man, a baby and maybe even a dog.

Science fiction is alive and well--and outrageous and creepy--on television this season. Aliens from the planet Morthral are vying to take over Earth in the second season of Paramount’s syndicated “War of the Worlds.” An entire community of some 250,000 bald-headed “newcomers” from the planet Tenctone are intermingling with the human population of Los Angeles in Fox’s new series “Alien Nation.” A perplexed scientist and his mischievous hologram sidekick are traveling through time and swapping identities in NBC’s “Quantum Leap.” And with the U.S.S. Enterprise continuing to encounter out-of-this-world adventures on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” sci-fi buffs won’t have much time for their usual dose of Heinlein, Asimov and Bradbury.

But while pleasing hard-core sci-fi fans is essential to the success of these series, the trick for TV programmers is to make science fiction appealing to the mass audience as well.

Over the past 25 years, that hasn’t been easy. Re-creating the magic of Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” which wasn’t exactly a huge ratings smash itself during its six-year run in the early ‘60s, has been virtually impossible.

Witness NBC. Brandon Tartikoff has guided the network from an almost-dead, last-place standing to a commanding first in the prime-time ratings during his nearly 10 years as president of the network’s entertainment division. His knack for ordering and scheduling programs that lasso the loyalties of the Nielsen families has been uncanny. Except when it comes to science fiction.

Throughout Tartikoff’s reign, NBC has repeatedly tried and repeatedly failed to score with a sci-fi or fantasy series. Neither “Voyagers,” “The Powers of Matthew Star,” “Misfits of Science,” “Manimal,” “Amazing Stories” nor “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” lasted more than two seasons. Even the network’s two blockbuster sci-fi miniseries, “V” and “Something Is Out There,” flopped as weekly series.

“I came to Brandon with the idea for ‘Quantum Leap,’ ” said Donald Bellisario, the show’s creator and executive producer, “and he was definitely reticent to give it a try. He said, ‘science fiction just doesn’t work.’ Different is OK, but science fiction is a four-letter word.”

Unabashedly science-fiction shows such as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “War of the Worlds” have flourished in syndication the last couple of years with a smallish (by network standards) audience of hard-core fans. But not a single science fiction/fantasy show has clicked on any of the networks since “The Incredible Hulk” was canceled in 1982 after a four-year run on CBS and “The Bionic Woman” and “The Six Million Dollar Man” enjoyed their modestly successful runs on ABC in the mid ‘70s.

Over the last two decades, a period in which sci-fi movies such as the “Star Wars” trilogy, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” were shattering box-office records, the networks were churning out such sci-fi flops as “Battlestar Galactica,” “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” “Project UFO,” “Man From Atlantis,” “Starman” and “Max Headroom.” In the ‘60s, neither “The Invaders” nor “The Time Tunnel” could survive past their first year, “Outer Limits” lasted only a year and a half and even the original “Star Trek” wasn’t anything close to a hit during its three seasons on NBC.

“It’s part of the history of the sci-fi and alien form,” said Warren Littlefield, NBC’s executive vice president of prime-time programs. “You go all the way back to ‘The Invaders’ on ABC, which started out great and then faded fast. What happens ultimately is the audience asks for a resolution. Is it going to be us or them? Who’s going to win? They get frustrated sitting week after week without getting to the final battle.

“With the miniseries ‘Something Is Out There,’ it was really scary and we had great monsters and the audience responded to that. But when we got into the weekly grind of series television, we couldn’t deliver that kind of scary stuff and great monsters every time.”

So why, in the face of so much failure, do the networks keep trying?

“It’s not as if we walk around here with a sci-fi stamp and say, ‘Where is it, we’ve got to have it,’ ” Littlefield said when pressed about NBC’s seemingly obsessive search for a science-fiction hit. “But we do walk around looking for something that’s different. And when you introduce a show like ‘Quantum Leap’ that covers new territory and the audience doesn’t out-and-out reject it, that’s enough for us to say, ‘Let’s stick with it.’ ”

Perhaps in deference to that less-than-ringing endorsement of their genre, science-fiction TV producers such as Kenneth Johnson, executive producer of Fox’s “Alien Nation” and formerly the creator of the miniseries “V” and “The Incredible Hulk,” say the secret to making a science-fiction series with mass appeal is “to completely forget about science fiction.”

“Sure we want to come up with episodes and approaches that you can only see on ‘Alien Nation,’ but they have to be driven by character and personal, moral issues rather than driven by externals,” Johnson said. “ ‘Battlestar Galactica’ became mostly shots of space ships flying around and eventually people said, ‘Haven’t I seen that already?’ And when they turned ‘V’ into a weekly series, it became dependent on action and special effects, whereas the miniseries was really an allegory about power and how different people react to it. Conversely, the series was all about, ‘Well, last week Diana ate a guinea pig, what can we have her eat this week?’

“The reason ‘Star Trek’ has been so successful is that people know that when they tune in, it is going to be about something. With science fiction, as with everything else, you have to capture their minds more than just dazzle their eyes.”

So while syndicated series such as “War of the Worlds” flaunt their traditional sci-fi aliens and monsters, today’s network shows downplay their sci-fi weirdness. “Alien Nation,” Johnson maintained, is not about aliens from outer space. It is instead a giant allegory about the integration of an outsider race of people into mainstream society. It is an exploration of the prejudice encountered by any group--the Jews and Italians at the turn of the century, blacks in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Vietnamese boat people today--as they search for acceptance from the majority.

True, the aliens look strange, they get drunk on “sour milk rather than sour mash,” they can see in the dark and they have two hearts and some bizarre reproductive requirements, but all those physical differences, Johnson insists, only make it easier for the audience to swallow strong statements about bigotry and the moral necessity of accepting others.

Likewise, Bellisario, whose show recently began its first full season on NBC after an abbreviated, mid-season run earlier this year, has limited the time-travel element of “Quantum Leap” to the span of the main character’s lifetime--this in an effort to bring as much realism to the show as possible. Whereas “The Time Tunnel” in 1966 sent its two scientists to the siege of Troy, the battle of Jericho and the home of Marie Antoinette, Bellisario’s scientist pops in and out of only the last four decades, and he never gets involved in any major historical events.

“What makes this interesting from week to week is if you get involved with this character,” Bellisario said, “and it’s hard to do that if you’re bouncing around with the lions and the Christians in ancient Rome. You suspend belief so much (in that kind of series) that it becomes an unrealistic kind of show. But our audience can identify with the Walter Mitty idea of becoming someone else. People think about what it would be like to be a baseball player or an airline pilot. We daydream about that.”

To enhance the realism of the program and to acclimate the audience to the idea of “quantum leaping,” the first few shows of the new season will see the physicist, played by Scott Bakula, assuming the identity of men around his own age. (In the series, the TV audience sees Bakula as himself, but other characters see him as the person he has become. When he is reflected in a mirror, however, the TV audience also sees him as his new persona.)

“Once everyone understands how this works, then we’ll get wilder,” Bellisario said. “He’ll come leaping in as a woman, then as a baby. We may even bring him back as a dog, but until we have the audience on our side, it’s dangerous to be too weird.”

On the other hand, “War of the Worlds,” is weird, scary and impelled by the age-old battle of good against evil--exactly the kind of thing you think of when you hear the words science fiction. In contrast to the network’s experience with sci-fi, syndication has been the genre’s best friend. The popularity of the original “Star Trek” series didn’t explode until it was canceled by NBC and sent off into syndicated reruns. And Paramount’s other first-run sci-fi/fantasy/horror dramas, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Friday the 13th,” have found loyal audiences in syndication as well. All three shows air weekly on more than 200 stations nationwide, including KCOP Channel 13.

Network executives contend that science-fiction shows work in syndication simply because they can survive with relatively small audiences. “You can be a hit with much smaller numbers made up of strictly hard-core fans,” Littlefield said. “ ‘Misfits of Science’ had a hard-core 19 share and they were upset when we canceled it, but it just wasn’t enough to sustain the show on the network.” (Hit network shows generally score at least a 25% share of the audience.)

Frank Kelly, executive vice president of programming for Paramount Television, conceded that syndicated shows can “tolerate” smaller audiences. But he added that Paramount’s three syndicated sci-fi series have succeeded primarily because syndication allows for more adventurous content than the networks seem to permit with all their research, formulas and preconceived notions about “what works and what doesn’t.”

“They try to get this demographic and cover that audience and apply rules from other shows and they think about whether a show fits into their schedule on a particular night or hour or week, and that can bog down a good product,” Kelly said.

“There is more freedom in syndication to take risks and push things as far as you can push them,” said Frank Mancuso Jr., the executive producer of “Friday the 13th” and “War of the Worlds.” “If you try to fit sci-fi into a network box, it won’t work. There’s a certain homogenization that takes place at the network and maybe that’s why genre pieces don’t work there. They are careful to make shows that are certain not to offend anyone, but those shows won’t turn anyone on either. Genre shows create a rabid following because they are willing to go out there in the fringe.”

“War of the Worlds,” which premieres locally Saturday at 10 p.m., is filmed in Toronto and produced on a budget of about $600,000 per episode, significantly less than the money spent on a typical network drama. Young men flock to the show, and though Paramount was disappointed with the content of the series’ first season, it still was the fourth-highest rated of all syndicated programs among adults between the ages of 18 and 49--advertisers’ favorite demographic group. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was first, and does as well as or better than many network shows.

It’s a matter of opinion as to whether these syndicated dramas are more adventurous than the sci-fi programs that have come and gone on the networks. It would be difficult to argue that “Max Headroom,” which died a quick death two years ago on ABC, was less risky, less innovative, less spectacularly cinematic or less out there on the fringe than anything Paramount Television has ever tried. What is certain is that all three Paramount series have benefited from recognizable titles, which Kelly said induces large chunks of the audience to at least sample them once or twice and then stick around if they like it. The studio has yet to produce a syndicated sci-fi series that isn’t named after a famous previous success. Fox’s “Alien Nation” is likewise based on the Twentieth Century Fox movie of the same name, even though the film was far from a box-office smash and the title, according to Johnson, is “alienating, sinister” and at cross purposes to drawing a broad network-style audience.

“You would think from its title that this would be a show for young boys, but it’s not,” Johnson insisted. “Women will click to this show as long as we can get them to try it, because our female characters are liberated and not afraid to speak their mind. The promotional problem will be getting them past the title. People have had it up to here with aliens.”

Or maybe not. Even if “Alien Nation” and “Quantum Leap” crash with warp speed onto the sci-fi TV scrap heap, it is unlikely that the genre will ever become the exclusive domain of those rabid hard-core audiences that garner profits for shows only in syndication.

No matter how many times they strike out, network programmers never stop swinging for the fences. At least every once in awhile.

“I think you’ll continue to see the networks experiment in this genre,” said NBC’s Littlefield. “You won’t see a lot of it, because it requires an investment of roughly $15 million just to step up to the plate with a new series. And since it costs a fortune, there’s a tendency to say, ‘Maybe we should be up there with a genre that has been doing better.’

“But ultimately the pores get so clogged with the same old thing that you just have to try something different. You may go down in a ball of flames, but part of being a good programming executive is to believe you can step up there and hit a home run with that next at bat.”