If This Is August, It Must Be Fall (in TV Land) : Forget about this month being the ‘dog days.’ Over the next two weeks, the four major broadcast networks will premiere 14 series.

The calendar says August, but the TV listings say new fall season.

Over the next two weeks, the four major broadcast networks will premiere 14 series--some of them new shows getting a brief, late-summer tryout, some of them new fall shows taking early bows and some of them returning series jumping off to a head start on the traditional fall season opening in September.

“The whole game of programming is about trying to be responsive to the audience,” said Peter Tortorici, executive vice president of CBS Entertainment. “And the viewing patterns are clear that as the summer starts winding down, people start watching television again. People have the wrong impression about August being the dog days because in terms of viewership, it’s not. Our theory is that the reason the fall season is an institution is because that’s where the audience is, and we are simply trying to respond with shows now because the audience is available now.”

“It’s the whole chicken-and-the-egg thing,” said Dan McDermott, Fox’s senior vice president for current programming and specials. “I believe it’s categorically untrue that there is not as significant an audience in the summer as compared with other times of the year. It might be a few percentage points lower, but not enough for the networks to roll over and just play repeats. And the audience has not been there in the past because all they’ve been getting is repeats. We had some of our highest ratings ever last summer with original episodes of ‘Beverly Hills, 90210.’ ”

Original summer programming is far from a new thing. Fox has been making strides during the past few summers with some original shows and fall debuts in July and August against lesser competition on the other networks. CBS has been using the summer as a zone for limited runs of new series for the past several years, and the network likes to point to “Northern Exposure” and “Top Cops” as two summer successes that then went on to become mainstays in the network’s regular lineup. ABC and NBC have toyed with summer shows in the past too.

But this August seems more cluttered with new series than ever before.

CBS, which introduced the comedy “Big Wave Dave’s” last week, rolls out “Ned Blessing,” a Western, on Wednesday; “The Boys” and “The Building,” two sitcoms, on Friday, and “Tall Hopes,” another sitcom, on Aug. 25. All of these are intended simply to run for a few weeks; if the audience responds, they might then be reordered for a return later.

Meanwhile, to take advantage of lesser competition now than in September, CBS will also debut two fall shows next week: “The Trouble With Larry,” a sitcom starring Bronson Pinchot, and the soap opera “Angels Falls.”

Fox, which did not air original episodes of its regular series this summer but instead launched a new night of programming with movies on Mondays, presents the season premiere of “Martin” followed by the debut of the sitcom “Living Single” on Sunday; the premiere of “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.” on Aug. 27, and the season openers of “Roc” and “America’s Most Wanted” on Aug. 31. Original episodes of “Cops” and the new magazine show “Front Page” are already airing.

NBC gets in the act Wednesday with the debut of “Now,” a newsmagazine with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric, and then rolls out a limited series, “Great Escapes,” Aug. 27.

ABC will premiere “Missing Persons,” an action show starring Daniel J. Travanti, on Aug. 30. That is also the day David Letterman takes his late-night act to CBS.

McDermott said that the Fox strategy of premiering shows in August is simply to try to create “an event” out of each new launch and to take advantage of weaker competition on the other networks than there will be in September. By staggering the premieres of both its new and continuing series over the course of many weeks in August and September--as opposed to doing it all in one or two premiere weeks as Big 3 network tradition dictates--Fox is able to promote each show in a big way, he said.

“With all the choices available to viewers now with cable and everything else, you have to make a lot of noise to get people to come to your original programming,” McDermott said.

The CBS strategy is motivated in part by Major League Baseball. Since playoff and World Series games will keep regular series off the air on some nights for several weeks in October, a six-episode run of a limited series that begins now will fit in perfectly before the games consume the network schedule.

But Tortorici contends that putting on these limited series now is simply part of CBS’ ongoing commitment to give viewers fresh choices throughout the year. Several of these short-run series are scheduled in time periods that will contain new series once the fall lineup is in place, Tortorici said, in an effort to encourage viewers to look at CBS as a place to come for something different.

And though, like at any time of the year, the failure rate of these summer series far exceeds the chance of success, any show that elicits a hint of audience approval will get another shot later in the season, Tortorici said. Even so, he added, a successful summer repeat will do better in the ratings than a failed new show.

“Just putting on a new show is not the answer to our prayers,” he said. “If people don’t like it from the start, they often won’t come back, and that hurts. But everyone is paying lip service to year-round programming, and for me, it really has been part of my mission. We have been putting on waves of new shows at different times during the year when usually you would see repeats to keep things fresh for our viewers. Economically, that is a challenge to keep that up and still run things to make a buck.”

The only way to do that, Tortorici said, is to greenlight more series than ever before, but order them in shorter runs--committing to just six episodes instead of the traditional 13 or 22.