TELEVISION : Do Families Matter?...

At the home of sisters Bobbie and Felicia Bagneris, there is the sense of controlled chaos that comes automatically with five children, each of them younger than 10. Their demands--help me with homework, change my diaper, pay attention to me--parade in past the living room television each evening.

With the TV deliberately tuned to Fox for a week, what would and wouldn’t hold these kids’ attention became quickly evident.

Few things would. At least for very long.

It didn’t take long to figure out the pattern. At 8 p.m., Bobbie, 37, and Felicia, 32, both divorced, would settle in on the couch and love seat. Felicia’s children--Aljovan Thomas, 9; Alona Thomas, 8, and Alston Thomas, 6--would find spots on the floor with their cousin, Dillet Black, 9.

By the first commercial break, everyone was restless. Bobbie’s 18-month-old son, Darrien Black, would run around the room or display his latest skill: turning down the volume. By 8:30, the older children were off in one of the two bedrooms in the Lake View Terrace apartment playing Sega video games. Darrien, in his pre-verbal way, was suggesting that someone turn on the “Lion King” video.

It wasn’t that these particular episodes of “Melrose Place” and “Strange Luck” contained anything inappropriate for children. They just didn’t contain much of interest to children.

“It was just dull ,” Felicia said after the supernatural drama “Strange Luck” on Friday.

Fox got its start nine years ago by counter-programming the Big Three networks, concentrating on series for the 18- to 35-year-old market. Shows dependent on adult comedy, even in the traditional family hour from 8 to 9 p.m., became standard fare.

Vestiges of that strategy remain. Monday night’s “Melrose Place,” for example, is packed with scheming characters and sprinkled with sex.

Given that, the episode that Bobbie and Felicia sat through on Sept. 25 seemed tame. But it’s still nothing either of these women would want her children to watch regularly.

“It’s just raunchy. He gets her drunk so he can take her to bed,” Bobbie said of a seduction scene.

What bothers Felicia about the trend of putting adult shows on at 8 p.m. isn’t that her kids might see them but that she couldn’t watch them even if she wanted to. As a parent who doesn’t get home until 6:30 or so, she reserves the early evening for the kids: dinner, homework, choir practice.

“I don’t think it should be on at the time that it’s on. We’re usually doing homework with the kids at this time. So even if we adults wanted to see it, we couldn’t,” Felicia says. “Eight o’clock is for ‘Fresh Prince [of Bel-Air]’ and ‘Full House’--things your kids want to see.”

For Bobbie, the programming Catch-22 may become most frustrating on Saturday nights during Fox’s 8:30 sitcom “The Preston Episodes.” She said she could relate to the characters--single African Americans in an office setting. She found it entertaining, the kind of show she might watch again.

But does she want her kids hearing suggestive monologues like one by Preston (David Alan Grier) in the Sept. 30 episode?: “Look at these two coffee pots sitting side by side,” he says. “I think we all see the same thing: a firm, pouting fanny, two shapely orbs of flesh, hot to the touch, calling out seductively, ‘Spank me, Daddy!’ ”

She wasn’t sure if that was appropriate. Children probably hear that kind of talk at school or with friends, she acknowledged, and so far her 9-year-old has been willing to discuss what language and behavior is acceptable.

“There are lessons in there, but a parent would have to sit with their child to bring that out,” she said.

Since Bobbie moved in with her sister’s family in mid-September, though, it’s harder to control what Dillet sees on television. She has overheard the children as she approaches the apartment door: “Turn it off. Aunt Bobbie’s here.”

Felicia, a legal assistant for Disney, brings home lots of videotaped movies for the family to watch--some of which Bobbie wouldn’t choose. “We have different tastes,” Bobbie said. “She likes scary stuff and I don’t.”

It’s the scary and violent programs--on TV or videotape--that most concern Bobbie. The sexual innuendo is less worrisome to her as long as her children don’t understand it. But children understand violence, she said. Her son is more at risk of getting in a fight at school than of having sex.

“Children are out of control,” Bobbie said. “They aren’t respecting authority. They’re numb to violence and killing. . . . Our [TV] programs need to teach children that there’s more to life than killing and taking drugs.”

Felicia has different concerns, which were most evident when she discussed Fox’s “Beverly Hills, 90210,” which airs from 8 to 9 on Wednesday nights. Bobbie wouldn’t worry about Dillet’s watching it, because it seemed to address coming-of-age issues such as dating and changing relationships with parents. Felicia, however, viewed the show and its all-white cast as perpetuating stereotypes. “There are ethnic groups that live in Beverly Hills, but this doesn’t show that,” Felicia said.

She noted a similar discrepancy during the Sept. 26 made-for-TV movie “W.E.I.R.D. World,” which began at 8 p.m. and revolved around a group of young scientists experimenting with deadly viruses and time travel.

“I’m always concerned about how they portray blacks,” Felicia said at the end of the first hour. “Here, the black man is a security guard. Why couldn’t he be one of the scientists?”

I ronically, Fox’s most positive black characters are on shows that have been criticized for their frank sexual comments. “Living Single,” at 8 p.m. Thursdays, is the only Fox show Bobbie and Felicia watch regularly and one of the most popular shows among African Americans nationwide.

“Living Single” is centered on three upwardly mobile women sharing a New York brownstone. It isn’t completely accurate in its presentation of black characters, Bobbie said, but it is one of the few programs with an African American cast and provides her children with positive role models. The character Kyle (T.C. Carson), for example, is a career-minded stockbroker. Khadijah (Queen Latifah) edits her own magazine.

The Sept. 28 episode contained some adult-oriented humor: Handyman Overton (John Henton) finds out he looks exactly like a porno star named Nas-T. But the double-entendres in the dialogue do their job, Bobbie said.

“In this family, they can hear that stuff and not even hear it. It doesn’t ring a bell with them. You can say the word orgy and they don’t even know what it means,” she said. “A couple of months down the road, [9-year-old Dillet] will ask me a question if it bothered him.”