The <i> Real </i> Dream Team--on HBO

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has requested my two cents.

So here it is. The academy voters should be ashamed of themselves for excluding HBO’s smart and scorchingly funny “Dream On” from this year’s Emmy nominations for best comedy series. It and its cast are among the best. Week after week (10 p.m. Saturdays with repeats at 10:30 p.m. Wednesdays), I laugh so hard, my nose ring falls off.

You could make an Emmy case for each of the series that did get nominated: “Home Improvement” on ABC, “Cheers” and “Seinfeld” on NBC and “Brooklyn Bridge” and “Murphy Brown” on CBS. But in some instances, not nearly as strong a case as for “Dream On,” prime time’s first R-rated sitcom, which began its third season in June with a string of episodes whose “family values” would really give Dan Quayle something to be gratingly sanctimonious about.

David Crane and Marta Kauffman are the creators and share executive producer credit with Kevin Bright and John Landis. Their high-libido, struggling protagonist--divorced New York book editor Martin Tupper (Brian Benben)--is a child of 1950s television. His private thoughts are hilariously expressed by intercutting black-and-white clips from antique series and movies. The concept isn’t new, but its application here is especially creative.

The 38-year-old Martin is at once Everyman and every heterosexual man’s fantasy, leading a life whose major themes are as follows: coping, sex, parenting, sex, career, sex.

That sex, like the witty writing, is explicit and preponderant. It’s a rare episode when “Dream On” isn’t excruciatingly funny and biting, and just as rare this season when Martin and a gorgeous female aren’t shown grinding away, sometimes in the nude. Compared with “Dream On,” Fox’s gratuitously raunchy “Married . . . With Children” is “The Brady Bunch.” Did the show’s unabashed sexiness make the Emmy voters recoil?

Yet even with all of Martin’s lusting, “Dream On” itself is much less gratuitously titillating than purposefully satirical. The season opener (“And Bimbo Was His Name-O”) set the summer tone, as Martin’s fling with a senatorial candidate’s wife (Terri Garr) became a tabloid-splattered scandal that turned him into a reverse Gennifer Flowers. (In fact, tabloid queens Flowers, Jessica Hahn and Rita Jenrette were given bit parts in the episode as reporters.)

Martin these days finds himself in an epicenter of chaos and instability. His son, Jeremy (Chris Demetral), is increasingly rebellious as he approaches 13. His remarried ex-wife, Judith (Wendie Malick), still turns him on (one of this season’s funniest episodes saw him attempt to seduce her). His best friend, Eddie (Dorien Wilson), is a career-obsessed talk-show host. His life at the office is complicated by his Secretary From Hell, Toby (scene-stealing Denny Dillon). And his Aussie publisher boss, Gibby (Michael McKean), is a greedy boor.

Gibby was behind Martin’s misery in a side-splitting half-hour titled “Terms of Employment,” which found Martin self-righteously quitting on principle after getting a pay cut, only having to crawl back later (the episode used clips from “The Incredible Shrinking Man” to illustrate his plight) and beg for his job. He got it back, taking an even bigger pay cut.

That’s typical. Whether in his personal or professional relationships, compromise and intimidation thread Martin’s life. Martin: “Good Morning.” Toby: “Don’t start with me.”

It was this season’s splendid episode titled “For Peter’s Sake”--whose theme was AIDS--that earned “Dream On” truly hallowed status, its high-wire balancing of dark humor and tragedy lifting it far, far above the crowd.

Directed by Betty Thomas and written by Crane and Kauffman, the plot had Gibby (with McKean at his parodying best) commissioning an AIDS book titled “I’ll Be Dead by Christmas.”

Gibby smells a holiday blockbuster: “It’s hot. It’s now. It’s got drugs. It’s got sex. Everybody’s getting it.” To market it, he wants to distribute a condom with each copy.

At one point, when Martin fearfully balks at drinking a glass of water offered him by Peter (David Clennon), the gay author with AIDS selected to write the autobiographical book, we fast cut to a clip of Edgar Bergen with his famous dummy Mortimer Snerd.

“How can you be so stupid?”

“It ain’t easy.”

Although the dying Peter finishes his book, ever-crass Gibby drops him for a more prominent author with AIDS. In a touch of honest poignancy rare for television, to say nothing of comedies, Martin later gets Peter’s book published posthumously by another company.

Meanwhile, Saturday’s episode--Martin is shocked to learn that his parents (Paul Dooley and Renee Taylor) are divorcing--commingles risque dialogue with another streak of tenderness, this one between father and son.

You laugh, you sigh. Just another day at the office for a dream series ignored by the sages of Emmydom.

Dream World: If viewers watch a newscast primarily for the personalities--even when that newscast is inferior--they have only themselves to blame for being uninformed.

Take Monday, for example, when anchor Paul Moyer’s return to KNBC-TV Channel 4 inspired a bigger-than-usual tune-in to news programs on that station. A good time was had by all on the 11 p.m. newscast, co-anchored by Moyer and Wendy Tokuda. That’s because Channel 4 found plenty of time for Moyer to kid around with sportscaster Fred Roggin, who was calling from Barcelona.

Unfortunately, it found no time on the 11 p.m. program for that day’s whopper local story that’s still reverberating loudly--the Kolts report blasting the performances of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner.

It was an epic omission, and a revealing one, by a station whose priority in news now seems clear: jokes and personalities over substance.