COLUMN ONE : Separation Anxiety in Prime Time : Same night, same station, over the years, we grow to love our favorite TV characters. So when a show like ‘Cheers’ ends, a bit of our soul goes too.

The laughs are over at my favorite bar, Cheers,

My giggles and chuckles have now become tears.

Turn over the bar stools,

Dim down the lights . . . .

Where will I hang out on Thursday nights?

“I had to express myself somehow, express my feelings that a part of my life was closing down,” said Human Numan, a flip New York deejay turned sentimental poet by the imminent death of his favorite TV show.

“I know some of those ‘Cheers’ people better than I know some of my own friends,” Numan, 35, said somberly. “I really felt like I belonged there, and that’s what made that show great. Somehow, they got it across to you that you were welcome to pull up a stool and sit down with the regulars.”

Tonight’s final episode of “Cheers,” the NBC sitcom set in a Boston bar, will pull the stool out from under Numan and millions of other viewers. After nearly 11 steady years, the broken relationship probably will leave fans with a sense of loss, nostalgia, perhaps even resentment.

Such fidelity demonstrates TV’s unique ability to penetrate the national psyche, bringing into millions of living rooms each night characters who, over the years, may come to be better understood by viewers than some of the real people they know.

Unlike other art forms, a TV series--and its characters--develops over time. A viewer can grow up, grow old, gain weight or lose hair with a favorite character. So when a show leaves the air, the routine is disrupted, the friends are lost and a void frequently is created in the viewer’s life.

That life may be getting a lot emptier this month, as “Cheers” and a host of other favorites--including ABC’s “The Wonder Years” and CBS’ “Knots Landing”--are sent packing. Although “Cheers” is ending voluntarily, the others are being dropped because their popularity has ebbed and the networks--facing increasing competition--need new ammunition for the ratings wars.

“There’s going to be a lot of emotional loss out there in viewerland with this blood bath,” said Dorothy Swanson, president of Viewers for Quality Television, a national fans group. “With a novel, you read it, put it down and you know it’s over. With a television series, you know with a little luck it can go on and on for years. So you build your hopes on that.”

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“Chris Cagney was almost an alter ego for me. Not Sharon Gless, whom I also loved, but her character , whom I identified a great deal with at the time,” said Sue Chapman, a homemaker from Rancho Cucamonga. She says she misses Cagney, a tough-talking New Yorker featured in the CBS series “Cagney & Lacey,” a 1980s cop drama starring Gless and Tyne Daly. The show has been off the air for four years.

“I was drinking too much at the time, and I had a very feisty, independent attitude,” Chapman said. “I don’t know that she changed my life. But I watched her deterioration and I saw my own. So perhaps she did change my life in a sense, because I know I got myself together. And she may have been instrumental in that.”

Judy Rigmont, coordinator of a New Hampshire arts council, said she became an AIDS volunteer after a character developed the disease on the ABC series “Life Goes On,” a family drama whose last original episode will be broadcast Sunday.

“I have that character, Chad, and the ‘Life Goes On’ writers to thank for raising my consciousness about AIDS and leading me to find a very special person to support for as long as possible,” Rigmont wrote on a computer bulletin board--a popular new way for fans to commiserate. “He’s taught me so much about living and has given me a real sense of purpose to my life. That’s something . . . ABC can’t erase.”

Such powerful viewer attachments usually lead to a period of grief when a show ends. Television “brings happy, interesting, intriguing people into our homes each week,” said Robert Kubey, associate communications professor at Rutgers University. “When those people leave, there’s almost a kind of mourning and sense of loss, especially for the fans who watch regularly.”

Some viewers grow angry that their friends have been abruptly taken away, and they fight to get them back.

“Cagney & Lacey” was saved from cancellation after its second season in 1984 when Swanson, also inspired by Chris Cagney’s strong will, formed Viewers for Quality Television to mount a letter-writing campaign aimed at CBS.

Such grass-roots efforts are being waged to save some of this year’s departing series, including the nostalgic comedy “Brooklyn Bridge,” the civil rights drama “I’ll Fly Away” and the time travel adventure “Quantum Leap.”

These days, the chances are slim of saving such low-rated series to please a core of passionate fans. The networks say their hands are forced by their need to fight for as much of the audience as they can get.

But the networks should not dismiss the powerful connection between viewer and characters, said Pat Murphy, a Virginia government worker who started writing to networks when CBS considered yanking the comedy “Designing Women” in 1987. When a viewer loves a show, “all the attention stays focused (even) when the stupid commercial comes on,” she said. “We pay attention because we’ve invested some emotion and some time.

“But when that connection gets broken, many people don’t come back. Some people don’t forgive or forget. I’ve talked to people who are not watching television today because of what happened to ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or ‘Frank’s Place.’

“Those (cancellations) are heartbreaks. Viewers aren’t as willing to invest or get attached. (Networks) want us to be loyal to their shows and their products, but then after they hook us they show no loyalty back.”

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Television producers, writers and actors know their series can create massive emotional waves among viewers. When characters marry, fans often send wedding gifts. Soap opera villainesses are sometimes heckled on the street.

Ann Lewis Hamilton, a producer on ABC’s yuppie yarn “thirtysomething,” remembered the tender connection viewers made with the character Nancy Weston, played by Patricia Wettig, when she developed cancer. “Originally she was going to die,” Hamilton said. “But so many people wrote in. With all the mail we got, there was no way we could have killed Nancy because it would have just killed that hope.”

The torrent of critical and fan affection for “Brooklyn Bridge” made creator Gary David Goldberg believe that he had hit the bull’s-eye--until the series was canceled by CBS this season. Now the disillusioned Goldberg is considering retiring from television after a long, lucrative career that included the hit sitcom “Family Ties.”

“The most difficult thing for me to deal with now on ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ is the sense that somehow I have let these (fans) down by not being able to keep this show on the air,” Goldberg said. “In a sense, they are an extended family. So I have the embarrassment of letting my family down.”

Goldberg criticizes networks and advertisers for relying so heavily on the Nielsen ratings because they do not measure the intensity of viewing--only whether a TV set is turned on.

“I did not casually view ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ ” said Goldberg, a fan of the just-canceled NBC series about a socially conscious attorney in the 1950s. “It was an event in our life. My family was gathered around me, so it was a larger experience than what was on the screen. It was my family . So what was taken away was a family event in my life.”

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The networks look like the bad guys in all this. But they say they are just trying to keep their balance on a TV landscape that is shifting under their feet with dazzling speed. New alliances are being forged among entertainment, computer, cable and telephone companies that will deliver hundreds of channels to consumers within five years.

Viewing habits have already changed radically. About a decade ago, 90% of American TV households watched CBS, ABC and NBC--the Big Three networks--in prime time. Last season, with increased competition from cable, home videos, the growing Fox network and syndicated programming, the major networks averaged just 60% of households.

Networks must pay producers huge fees for the right to air a series--as much as $1 million an episode for a one-hour drama. Those programs are growing more expensive to produce at the same time that advertisers are spending less on network TV. Consequently, prime time series must draw as many viewers as possible for networks to recover their spiraling costs and still earn a profit.

The result of all this has been the fragmentation of the TV audience and the dawn of a new era, said Bob Thompson, professor of television at Syracuse University.

The days when all of America tuned in to the same program together, when television the night before became the fodder for conversations at the water cooler the next day, has faded into a cultural memory. Future generations will be much less likely to band around a single TV series as earlier viewers did with “I Love Lucy” or “The Cosby Show.”

“This week (of farewell episodes) is a final wake-up call to anyone not paying attention to the fact that American television has made this massive change in the cable era,” Thompson said. What was so interesting about traditional TV, he said, was that “it was the one cultural feature everyone shared. If you walked on a bus and didn’t share the same job or religion or politics with the other passengers, everyone could at least sing TV theme songs.”

For better or for worse, television has finally joined the ranks of other popular arts in its ability to pinpoint audiences, said David Marc, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC.

“TV, barely 50 years out of the gate, is finally becoming like all of the other arts,” he said. “Watching TV is now like going to the library. You have to remember there are people who will be watching ‘The Honeymooners’ for the first time today. Television has become a kind of permanent museum of itself.”

Marc predicted that the whole idea of cancellation will become “largely irrelevant to the viewing habits of most people, and less relevant all the time as the viewing choices continue to grow.”

Indeed, the sheer number of choices, made more accessible by remote control, has created an entirely new TV watcher who is more difficult for programmers to reach.

The typical viewer watches a favorite series less than twice a month, said Arnold Becker, vice president of television research for CBS.

The new series, even the best ones, don’t have the power they once did to draw viewers to the set, Becker said. “I know there’s sort of a notion in the world that people watch day after day after day, and always watch the same program. But even though television is such a major activity in people’s lives, there are other things they do. You really can’t change people’s habits.

“If they’re used to going to the supermarket or on a date Friday night, because they got paid on Friday, there’s really not much you can do about that.”

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The outpouring of affection for “Cheers” is enormous. Bars across the country are holding parties tonight. At the 50,000-seat Skydome in Toronto, organizers are screening the last episode free and expecting the largest public gathering ever for a TV viewing. The governor of Massachusetts will proclaim today “Cheers” day. And NBC has sold advertising spots at near Super Bowl rates, expecting one of the highest-rated entertainment broadcasts in history.

“The people at ‘Cheers’ were not only a set of friends we had for 11 years, but they were a point of reference we could talk about together,” said Syracuse professor Thompson. “When you called someone a Cliff Clavin, everyone knew what you meant. So we’re losing a set of friends that we shared collectively with America, and that’s a pretty big loss.”

* ROSENBERG ON ‘CHEERS’: It was immediately obvious that ‘Cheers’ was something quite grand. F1

Changing Season

The following ABC and NBC prime time series will not be returning next season, according to the networks’ recent fall schedule announcements. The fate of the CBS shows listed below has already been determined, although CBS’ complete plans will not be released until today , with Fox to follow next week .

ABC

* “American Detective”

* “Camp Wilder”

* “Civil Wars”

* “Covington Cross”

* “Crossroads”

* “Doogie Howser, MD”

* “Delta”

* “FBI: The Untold Stories”

* “Getting By” (picked up by NBC for fall)

* “Going to Extremes”

* “Homefront”

* “Laurie Hill”

* “Life Goes On”

* “Jack’s Place”

* “Sirens”

* “The Jackie Thomas Show”

* “The Wonder Years”

* “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”

CBS

* “Angel Street”

* “Brooklyn Bridge”

* “Designing Women”

* “Frannie’s Turn”

* “Knots Landing”

* “Space Rangers”

* “The Hat Squad”

NBC

* “A Different World”

* “Almost Home”

* “Cheers”

* “Crime & Punishment”

* “Final Appeal: From Files of ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ ”

* “Here and Now”

* “Homicide: Life on the Street”

* “I’ll Fly Away”

* “Out All Night”

* “Quantum Leap”

* “Reasonable Doubts”

* “Rhythm & Blues”

* “Secret Service”

* “The Powers That Be”

* “The Round Table”

* “What Happened?”