(Upper) West Side Stories : New York will soon be all over TV. But can the tube truly capture the city?

Come September, America will be spending long evenings with New Yorkers, watching them career about spacious apartments on the Upper West Side and act out on the sidewalks along overcrowded streets.

YOU GOTTA PROBLEM WITH THAT?

After strip-mining every other setting, including rural America, the Midwest, Beverly Hills and Miami Beach, the networks this fall are offering a heavier than usual ratio of sitcoms and dramas that take place in New York City.

So, between the glitzy vistas featured on one prime-time show about the rich and glamorous to a more eclectic sitcom of two mail-room clerks, the so-called lives of New Yorkers, particularly Upper West Siders, should come to life.

But don’t count on it. Since when has TV Land reflected real life?

Take the opening scene in the new CBS drama “Central Park West.” The main character played by Mariel Hemingway shows her disconsolate husband, who didn’t want to leave Seattle, the view from the terrace of their new penthouse and marvels that the rent is only $3,000 a month.

“This is a steal,” she says.

America is supposed to gasp. New Yorkers know better.

“I sold that place for $2.5 million,” says Carol Gat, the real estate agent who negotiated the deal for a doctor who is leasing to CBS. “$3,000 a month? In our dreams. It’s more like $6,000.”

Three thousand or $50,000, most of America will find either rent equally appalling--and enviable if the show’s creators know what they’re doing. Certainly, by coming to New York and selecting posh Central Park West, Darren Star, the man behind “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place,” is seeking a high level of panache to match his fanciful track record. And so he turns New York into a glossy theme park.

But Jim Frawley, the show’s director who grew up on Park Avenue, insists all New Yorkers, never mind Upper West Siders, will recognize their city by the landmarks.

“Even if someone is on a telephone at a booth, you can get Lincoln Center in the background,” he says. “That’s why filmmakers come to New York--for the shots of Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building.”

The creators of “Too Something” also plan to use romantic views of skyscrapers and subway cars. But only with the credits because they’re shooting in an L.A. studio. So they’ll rely on the story line for a New York sensibility.

“Avoiding the conventional at all costs,” the press release says of the main characters in the new show, “these guys live in a world where logic and social conventions simply don’t apply.”

If that’s not the West Side, then what is?

It is one of the few areas that rivals Berkeley for a liberal voting record. And it is one of the only places on Earth where you can get your legs waxed, your nails manicured, buy a cafe latte and a great novel, and hear people speaking English, Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese--all on the same block.

Of course, the guys from “Too Something,” played by Eric Schaeffer and Donel Lardner Ward, live in a sprawling apartment with high ceilings and great molding and of course, it’s rent-controlled. How else could two guys who work in an investment bank’s mail room afford so much space?

Funny how all the up-and-comers in shows like “Friends” and “Mad About You” have big apartments when on the Upper West Side, for example, two-thirds of the apartments include three rooms or fewer. (And by definition, a “room” in New York is not like a room anywhere else. On the Upper West Side, it can mean a bathroom or a foyer the size of a Beverly Hills closet.)

But Efrem Seeger, co-creator of “Too Something” with Schaeffer and Ward, insists every oddball incident and weird detail in his show is drawn from reality.

“Everything comes out of a real situation that either Eric, Donny or I went through when we were all living on the Upper West Side and hanging out together at the Bagel Nosh and the American Diner on Broadway,” says Seeger, 34.

In fact, there is this coincidence that many of the thirtysomething creators of these new New York shows at some point early in their careers lived often on the Upper West Side.

Brad Hall, creator of NBC’s new “The Single Guy” about the romantic foibles of the last unmarried guy among an ensemble of married friends, worked in the city in theater and on “Saturday Night Live” throughout the 1980s. He and his wife, Julia Louis Dreyfus of “Seinfeld” fame, had an apartment near Riverside Park just like one of the fictional married couples in Hall’s show.

“In some sense these shows allow for vicarious living through our characters,” Hall says.

(By the way, back East we love the idea that the crush of new New York shows and rush by movie people to buy co-ops on Central Park West reflect how much everybody in L.A. is secretly miserable and longs to be in New York--great intellectual and cultural capital that it is. Now, this probably isn’t true, but it’s a nice conceit.)

In fact, comedy writers look to their own lives for material and to memories of New York life because it makes for such good TV, Hall says. “In New York you can actually run into people on the street, unlike in California where you’re always in the car. In New York you go to the coffee shop, have a bagel, walk down the street, get hassled, run into someone else. People just waltz into your world and it’s believable.”

There is so much running into somebody in these shows that there’s even an idea kicking around NBC to have characters from one Thursday night sitcom appear half an hour later on another show. And this fall, Thursday is really going to be New York night on NBC. The lineup is: at 8, “Friends”; 8:30, “The Single Guy”; 9, “Seinfeld,” and 9:30, “Caroline in the City,” about a zany single woman who writes a popular comic strip a la “Cathy” and lives in a loft in TriBeCa.

“So Seinfeld could be reading Caroline’s strip in the paper, and somebody from ‘Friends’ can show up on ‘The Single Guy,’ ” suggests Fred Barron, co-creator with Marco Pennette of “Caroline in the City.”

But wait a minute.

Why would America, particularly during a presidential campaign season that would invariably involve Republicans bashing New York, want to spend long evenings with neurotic New Yorkers in a Democratic stronghold like the Upper West Side, and on tense urban streets?

Well, apparently viewers accept New York as a setting when no one overtly states an ethnic case. So characters can be unofficially Jewish or Italian with plenty of neuroses, alternately maddening and endearing, as long as ethnicity is not thrown in the viewer’s face.

“People are a lot more tolerant when they’re home watching TV and they’re looking for a laugh,” says Hall, who has a gay character and an interracial couple on his show.

This is certainly true of the comedies. But the New York dramas, most of which like “Central Park West” are actually being shot in the city rather than in L.A. studios, are more likely to exploit ethnic differences and the uglier tensions of a city. While the comedy writers mentioned they would have at least one character mugged in an episode for laughs, the dramas will go for grittier crimes and more vivid excitement.

Ian Sander, executive producer of CBS’ new “New York News,” about a big city newspaper, says he hopes to quicken the viewers’ pulse.

“New York is a character in this show,” says Sander, who was born in the Bronx, “so no matter which way we turn the microphone and camera you will hear and feel and see and sometimes smell the city because this is probably the only city in the world, other than Paris, that makes your heart beat a little faster.”

Yet, it is unclear how important reality is to the success of any television show. Perhaps the details add up, maybe they don’t.

There certainly was a little tittering on the Upper West Side when the Jerry Seinfeld character bought a hot dog from a vendor who cooked in a pot atop his cart. Everyone here knows those ubiquitous franks are kept hot floating in greasy water inside the cart.

But Seinfeld gets a lot of credit, not only for sparking this latest trend of having New York on screen, but also for getting it right. He knows the Upper West Side well enough to have five locks on his door and to hang a bicycle on the apartment wall. And he knows to whine, but not grate.

In fact, the Upper West Side is as caught up in the mall-ization of America as any other small town. Just last month the famous Endicott bookstore on Columbus Avenue emptied its shelves with its proprietors grumbling about a second Barnes & Noble super-store opening 13 blocks south.

Still, the area remains a holdout of obstinate urban zealots who shun the ‘burbs as an outback and the East Side as sterile at the same time they rhapsodize about their knowledge of culture and a city that couldn’t possibly be captured on prime-time TV.

Would Mariel Hemingway ever have the good sense if she has a fight with her TV husband to walk over to the Broadway Nut Shop for chocolate malted balls or to Gray’s Papaya for the recession special: two hot dogs and a drink for $1.95?

Will those zany guys on “Too Something” encounter a real homeless person flopped out on church steps next to a million-dollar brownstone? Or will they run into a TV-version of a homeless person: a down-and-out stockbroker with a hygiene problem?

And will any of these shows get into one of the quiet but quite serious debates that has raged for years on the Upper West Side as to which has the better sable (we’re talking smoked fish, not fur): Murray’s Sturgeon Shop or Zabar’s?

Saul Zabar, whose family has been selling smoked fish here since 1936 and who now sells 4,000 pounds of it a week, doesn’t think so.

“To tell you the truth I don’t watch much TV,” he says, a typical West Siders claim--that they’re too busy reading the Sunday Times and the New York Review of Books.

“I mean, the other night I went to [Central Park] to see ‘The Tempest,’ and I didn’t get in but I walked around for a while and you should have seen it. There were people everywhere at 8 o’clock at night, walking on the street with ice cream cones, kids in strollers, eating sandwiches on line. . . . It may be that this is the dream world for the rest of the country, the ideal city dwelling. . . . TV couldn’t get that.”