Cover Story : A Dose of Teen Reality : The networks may think they know which shows will hit it off with younger viewers. But a panel of teenagers shows that their tastes are anything but predictable.

A year ago, The Times brought together the heads of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox to discuss where television was and where the medium is heading.

Having witnessed what those networks chose to put on their prime-time lineups to open the TV season that officially begins next month, it was decided this year’s panel should represent television’s new power brokers--in short, teenagers.

While it may be hard to fathom how a group not yet old enough to vote can dictate what winds up on television, upon surveying the coming year’s new series, one trend is unmistakable: Teenagers are in, holding sway over the broadcasting airwaves as they never have before.

Driven by a desire to reach the audience that has turned the WB network’s “Dawson’s Creek” and “Felicity” into darlings of media buyers and magazine editors alike, the networks have scheduled an inordinate number of programs built around teen characters. Concepts range from a “Dynasty”-style teen soap opera (Fox’s “Manchester Prep”) to the WB’s “Roswell,” where some of the requisite teen angst and confusion is heightened by being--and dating--an extraterrestrial.

This programming strategy seems to hinge in part on a mathematical gamble. Ad buyers pay a premium for viewers in the elusive 18-to-34-year-old demographic. Networks hope those young adults will relate to coming-of-age story lines set in high school (which wasn’t all that long ago if you’re between the ages of 25 and 35), at the same time betting teenagers--currently living out their own mini-dramas--and younger children will tune in as well.

Teens thus became a focal point of this year’s prime-time development, forcing networks to issue open casting calls in order to find enough youthful actors to populate their series candidates. This is all the more remarkable given that teens (the 12-to-17 age bracket, as measured by Nielsen Media Research) still represent the smallest individual audience segment--albeit one that is already a driving force in the movie business, from the “Scream” films and this summer’s “The Blair Witch Project” to the girls who flocked to “Titanic” time and again.

Beyond commerce, what teenagers watch has been much discussed in the wake of school shootings such as the tragedy in Littleton, Colo., making the timing right to go directly to the source--in a sense, the TV critics who really matter. Indeed, the opinions of middle-age viewers and critics feel irrelevant in regard to many new programs because they so clearly are not the target audience those shows aim to reach.

To better understand teenagers and TV, The Times took a randomly assembled group, locked them in a conference room, discussed what they like and dislike about television, and asked them to sample three prototypes for new teen-oriented series: “Freaks and Geeks,” an NBC series set in a suburban high school circa 1980; “Popular,” a WB show about high school cliques; and the aforementioned “Manchester Prep,” a serialized TV version of the teen film “Cruel Intentions,” itself adapted from the twice-filmed novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”

It’s clear, right off the bat, that our jury is by no means

a wholly like-minded bunch. Polling them about their favorite programs draws an eclectic mix of responses in addition to what might be considered the usual suspects--shows such as “The Simpsons,” Nickelodeon’s “Rugrats” and old sitcoms on “Nick at Nite.”

Holly Goldstein, 14, of Eagle Rock, lists CBS’ Don Johnson cop show “Nash Bridges,” generally associated with a much older audience, among her preferred programs. “I don’t like watching the news,” she says. “It’s all so gruesome and gross.”

Sky Laws, also 14, of Hancock Park, mentions “60 Minutes” among his top choices, along with “The Simpsons” and the syndicated video show “Real TV.”

Moye Ishimoto, 17, of Los Angeles, has watched the WB’s teen soaps but isn’t one of the many young girls enamored with the more family-oriented “7th Heaven.” “That’s too conservative for me,” she says.

Gaines Newborn, 17, of Los Angeles, is a fan of “Jeopardy!” and watching operations on the Learning Channel. While he views animated series such as Fox’s “The Simpsons” and its newer sitcom “Family Guy,” he also harbors some misgivings about their content. “In all the shows the father’s a drunk. . . . It sends a bad message,” he says.

Annie Preis, 13, of Mount Washington, is a self-described “Nick at Nite” junkie who admits she’s spending much of her summer catching up on reruns of old sitcoms, including late-night showings of “Seinfeld” and “Murphy Brown.” “I love ‘Nick at Nite,’ ” she says. “We got rid of my cable when I entered school because it distracted me from my schoolwork. I watched Nickelodeon 24 hours a day.”

Joudeh Ghazaleh, 16, of Beverly Hills, generally likes Fox’s prime-time animated shows but dismisses another genre widely associated with teens. “I never follow soap operas,” he says. “Real life is more interesting.” (“You guys watch. You know you do,” counters Ishimoto.)

Chrissy Roussell, 17, of Los Angeles, says she watches a few of the teen soaps, though her interest in “Dawson’s Creek” has waned since the first season. She also likes “Nick at Nite” (citing a recent “Maude” marathon) and, on the movie front, “anything with Will Smith.”

Taylor Richardson, 17, of Glendale, is particularly disgusted by programs such as “When Animals Attack” and “World’s Wildest Police Chases,” which generally do well with teens and young males. “It’s insulting,” he says of the entire real-life mayhem genre. “The lowest-common denominator . . . just watching other people get mauled.”

Ruth Sacayon, 16, of Los Angeles, enjoys Fox’s nostalgic teen comedy “That ‘70s Show” as well as reruns of “Married . . . With Children” and the “Austin Powers” movies.

If there is little consensus in terms of individual viewing choices, the nine youths strike a note of near-unanimity in regard to one issue--namely, concern about the influence media images have on children and teenagers in the wake of what happened at Columbine High School.

“I think that [kids are] a lot more affected by what happens to them in actual life than what they see, and I think that if a child or a teenager at any age is healthy emotionally, then it doesn’t matter what they see,” Preis says. “It’s not going to have such an influence on them.”

“I’ve watched violence and I’ve never thought, ‘Let’s go out and shoot everyone,’ ” adds Ishimoto, who recently graduated from high school and will attend Brown University. “I think the majority of teenagers have a firm grasp of reality.”

“I wish people would give teenagers more credit,” Richardson says, suggesting the negative influences on teens have more to do with “the kids that they might be around.”

“Why do they blame only the TV shows and the music, when there’s got to be something else if a kid is going to go to that extreme?” Goldstein asks. “There’s got to be something with the family, or something that’s wrong. Not just a TV show is going to set it off.”

Parents, she continues, need “not only to monitor what their kids are watching, or the video games [they’re playing], but they need to set a good example.”

Ghazaleh agrees. “Parents have to establish a strong moral base when [their children] are young,” he says. “No kid is born evil. They’re not just going to go out and kill somebody. It’s when they’re young and their parents are so oblivious to what they’re learning, what it is they’re watching.”

Most did express a belief, however, that younger children are more susceptible to the messages in TV shows, especially the sexual situations contained in teen programs such as “Dawson’s Creek.”

“The parents need to teach them early on [that] it’s not right to do that at that age,” says Newborn. “Shows like ‘Dawson’s Creek’ bring out a lot of sex questions that kids want to know [the answers to], but they don’t answer them. It raises it, but it doesn’t answer it.”

In fact, the teens at times find the sexual content they encounter on television more troublesome than violence--especially if they’re not watching alone.

“That’s the most uncomfortable thing--watching a sex scene with your parents,” Ghazaleh says.

Not surprisingly, some of the teens also cite a sort of general disconnect between their tastes and those of their elders.

“I don’t ever watch TV with my mom, ‘cause she doesn’t laugh at the stuff I’m laughing at,” Ishimoto says. “The only thing that we can watch together is ‘Headline News.’ ”

And what about the rating system, designed to help parents decide what programs are appropriate for their kids? For the most part, our teen panel indicates they pay little attention. As Goldstein puts it, “I just look at the age and say, ‘I’m close enough.’ ”

Based on their reaction to the three programs screened, producers who wish to connect with these teen viewers had best be careful about playing fast and loose with reality, including the casting of characters who actually look as if they graduated from high school during the Bush administration. Attempts to be hip and trendy can also backfire, particularly if those notes ring hollow or false--as if some adult is trying to approximate the way a 15-year-old would speak.

Trying to get a better sense of these teen critics’ tastes, they were asked to view three prime-time programs that focus on protagonists near their age. Given the WB’s recent success with teen-oriented programming, the process begins with one of its new one-hour dramas.

“Popular”

Airs: WB, Thursdays, 8 p.m.

Synopsis: Explores the “universal quest for popularity and acceptance within the teen caste system” at fictional Kennedy High School. The opening episode tracks the first week of school from the perspective of Brooke, a popular cheerleader; and Sam, editor of the school paper, who, along with her friends, resents the “in” crowd.

Thumbs: 4 up, 2 down, 3 sideways

Was It Realistic?: Mostly no

Would You Watch Again?: 3 yes, 3 maybe, 3 no

General: For some members of our panel the issue of realism takes a beating as soon as the character of Brooke, supposedly a high school sophomore, appears on the screen.

“What is she, 25?” Ishimoto blurts out. (The actress who plays the role, Leslie Bibb, is indeed 25.)

Ishimoto also groans at the outset when Sam (Carly Pope), in voice-over, talks about being horrified when she looks at her naked body in the mirror.

“They do this in ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ but in the very beginning, the girl is [worrying about] her body, and I’m like, ‘You have a great body, why are you doing this?’ And she’s talking about acne, and I’m going, ‘I don’t see any on her face.’ . . . Once again, they’re trying to relate to teens by using the most unrealistic people.” Ishimoto adds that she has a “big problem with Brooke’s sidekick. I thought she looked way too old to be in high school. She looked like an adult.”

With all the recent discussion about the near-absence of minority characters in new network shows, it’s noteworthy that several of the kids comment, unprompted, about the lack of diversity in this public high school. “All of the main characters were white,” Goldstein says, noting that the cast looks nothing like her school.

“I didn’t like it,” Newborn says flatly. “I thought it was racist, sexist and just bad.”

The show also irks the teens in more minute ways, such as the fact that the action is supposed to take place during the first week of school.

“They’re already dissecting a frog in the first week?” Laws asks.

“It wasn’t a normal first week of school,” adds Preis, who calls the show “a wannabe ‘Clueless.’ ”

Overall, the reaction is decidedly mixed, with some of the efforts to approximate a teen sensibility falling flat.

“I hated that guitar woman,” Roussell says, referring to a device that has a woman singing and playing guitar over the credits and between the scenes.

“The small details were accurate. Little things like the lockers having scratches all over them,” Ghazaleh says. “But I thought the dialogue was horrible. You have all these terms that might still be used today, but they’re going out of style. There are new sayings every month or so, and someone’s going to look at this and go, ‘Nobody says that anymore.’

“Also, you only see two groups. . . . That’s not the way schools really are. You have a bunch of different types of people.”

“I liked it, but it was too ‘Valley,’ ” Sacayon says. “You used to see that in the schools back in the ‘80s.”

“It wasn’t anything different than a lot of other shows [like this],” Preis suggests. “I thought it was less interesting than ‘Dawson’s Creek.’ . . .

“I thought it was funny, not because it was realistic at all, because I go to school in the Valley too, and nothing is like that, but more because they were playing on stereotypes, and I think the stereotypes themselves are funny, so I find it fun to watch the stereotypes play out.”

Richardson is also mildly impressed, for different reasons. “I liked the way it blended things together,” he says. “It gets into big issues.”

Goldstein sums up the net response: “Everything is so exaggerated, it’s like times 10. Tone it down a little bit.” She adds that the narrative is “really predictable. I’d try it one more time. After that, I don’t know.”

“Freaks and Geeks”

Airs: NBC, Saturdays, 8 p.m.

Synopsis: Coming-of-age story about a brother and sister attending the same Michigan high school in 1980. In the pilot episode, the 14-year-old boy, Sam, is picked on by a bully, while his older sister Lindsay--shaken by her grandmother’s death--begins hanging out with a different group at school.

Thumbs: 7 up, 2 sideways

Was It Realistic?: Yes

Would You Watch Again?: 9 yes

General: By far the best-received of the three, the show makes points with its youthful-looking cast, heavy dose of comedy and overall originality vis-a-vis what else is already on the air.

“It wasn’t like other shows,” says Roussell. “It’s different. I can’t even compare it.”

“You could relate to this so well. . . . [And] at least they looked like they weren’t in college,” Goldstein notes.

“None of them were drop-dead gorgeous or shockingly pretty,” Preis says, picking up that theme. “They all looked like normal kids.

“It might take place in the ‘80s, but I don’t think that much has changed in terms of high school cliques,” Preis continues, adding that she could especially relate to “the family stuff.” At the dinner table, the kids’ father (played by “SCTV’s” Joe Flaherty) seeks to frighten them into behaving by citing famous people who didn’t heed such advice and wound up dead.

After “Popular,” Ishimoto is especially happy to see the program delve into deeper issues, as Lindsay (Linda Cardellini) deals with losing her grandmother. “It’s not ‘Am I fat? Am I anorexic?’ ” she says.

There is plenty of laughter during the screening, prompting the following suggestion from Newborn: “It was funny. They should make it an all-out comedy.”

“Manchester Prep”

Airs: Fox, Thursdays, 8 p.m.

Synopsis: Sebastian Valmont moves to Manhattan and takes up residence with his philandering father, enrolling in a prestigious prep school that places him at odds with his scheming step-sister, who seeks to manipulate him as well as fellow students.

Thumbs: 3 up, 3 down, 3 sideways

Was It Realistic?: No

Would You Watch Again? 4 yes, 1 maybe, 4 no

General: Fox is overhauling the series, which sounds like a good idea based on the initial response by many that this prototype was a bit too over the top.

“Too weird,” says Roussell.

“I thought it was funny, in the way a bad soap opera is funny,” Ishimoto says. “The idea’s going to get really old.”

Though some are intrigued by the pilot’s tone, most feel that the program won’t wear well as a weekly series. Fox, which introduced the series with much fanfare, has yet to set a firm premiere date. Production on the show has twice been halted, making its future unclear.

“I liked it until the point where they started going off to a secret club,” Newborn says. “If it were a movie, it would be all right, but as a TV show, I can’t see where it’s going to go.”

Preis concurs. “It seems like it would be a lot better as a movie than a TV show,” she says. “It seems like the kind of soap opera where if you miss one episode you’re going to be completely lost for the rest of the time. I found it very interesting for this one episode, but I doubt I would become a normal viewer.”

“I like the conflict, the suspense,” Richardson says. “It seems like he has it in him [to be evil], but he’s fighting it.” Yet as far as watching again, he says, “It depends what happens. I wouldn’t go out of my way.”

Laws says he enjoys the mental chess game between the step-siblings, and the idea of a youth from the wrong side of the tracks moving into Manhattan opulence, which “sort of reminded me of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.’ ” Sacayon also likes seeing the extravagant Manhattan lifestyle presented, but she doesn’t care much for the mean-spirited tone. “I didn’t like the part where they showed the group that’s bossy,” she says.

There is also some second-guessing about the program’s sexuality, which has the teenage step-sister, Kathryn (Amy Adams), not only seduce her step-brother but also refer to doing the same with a school administrator. Some of those scenes will be altered or cut entirely before the program’s premiere.

Based on the general tone of the pilot, Ghazaleh is aghast to hear the series will air at 8 p.m.--an hour when younger children are more apt to be in the audience pool.

“I think that it should be on at a time when younger viewers won’t be able to watch it--probably really late at night, like 11 o’clock or 11:30,” he says.

“It was OK . . . until they did the whole thing with the relationship between the step-sister and step-brother,” notes Goldstein. “I didn’t like that. That was really gross.”