TV: Reviewing the New Season : A Dreamy Case of Double Exposure : Alan Ball captures the big screen (‘American Beauty’), then shoots for the small screen (‘Oh Grow Up’).

Standing on the flagstone terrace behind his home in the Hollywood Hills, writer Alan Ball looks over at his pool-spa and says with a sigh: “In some ways, I’ve turned into a hideous Hollywood cliche.”

A lot of people in his position would become just that. He has two freshman projects--the film “American Beauty” and the ABC comedy “Oh Grow Up”--debuting at the same time, and both are generating tremendous buzz, propelling him from obscurity to Hollywood It Boy.

The sheepish, almost apologetic tone in Ball’s voice provides a sense of his true nature, however. He’s a small-town Southern boy who has somehow stumbled into the Dream Factory and remains dazed by it all.

“I feel like I have such an embarrassment of riches right now,” he says.

At first glance, Ball’s back-to-back arrivals seem about as different as can be. “Oh Grow Up,” which debuts tonight, is a buddy comedy Ball created about a trio of thirtysomething male roommates, while the just-released “American Beauty” is a startling mixture of dark comedy, stark drama and free-floating fantasy about suburban families unable to achieve that myth known as the American dream.

At least one quality spills over, however: a profound sense of human interconnectedness.

The guys in “Oh Grow Up” are always watching out for one another and, although the lost souls in “American Beauty” are too preoccupied with their own problems to be of much help to anyone else, they do manage, now and again, to connect just long enough to experience a flash of clarity, a moment of beauty.

Trying to explain where such ideas come from, the 42-year-old Ball says that writing is “a sort of spiritual discipline, almost meditative. You can get into a certain psychological state where you’re not forcing things to happen, and what comes out of you, or your subconscious, can be very informative about what you really believe.”

Even before “American Beauty” opened in limited release last Wednesday, word had spread that its writing, directing (by Sam Mendes, the British theater director behind such sensations as the re-imagined “Cabaret”) and acting (a cast led by Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening) had galvanized into something rare. By the end of its opening weekend, it had grossed more than $1 million, playing in just 16 theaters.

Word about “Oh Grow Up,” meanwhile, has been mixed. Still, Robert Greenblatt, partner in the Greenblatt Janollari Studio that produces the show, says: “We hope to continue this roll that Alan is on. I’m sure he’ll make more movies and, knock on wood, our show will run for years. I’m sure he’ll be a voice that you’ll be hearing for many years to come.”

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A self-described “terrible student” who didn’t complete his college theater degree, Ball learned how to write by simply doing it. Catching Hollywood’s attention with his play “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress,” he moved to Los Angeles in 1994 to work with producers Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey, writing for their sitcom “Grace Under Fire” and later rising to co-executive producer on “Cybill.”

The premise for “Oh Grow Up” comes from his New York theater years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when he shared an old Brooklyn brownstone with three other guys and a dog named Mom.

Life there meant congregating on the roof to drink tequila and discuss such wacky things as the most humane way to dispatch a mouse caught in a glue trap.

“There were many nights like this--these goofball guys involved in this really serious, philosophical debate about something really weird,” he says. “A lot of laughing went on in that house.”

Though he has trimmed the number of roommates to three, he has kept Mom (whose barks are subtitled), as well as the Brooklyn brownstone setting and much of the original household’s spirit.

Two of the roommates--Hunter (played by Stephen Dunham), a ladies’ man who runs a construction company, and Norris (David Alan Basche), a high-strung but nurturing sort who’s struggling to establish himself as an artist--have lived together for so long that they behave like an old married couple. They’ve taken under their wing their former college roommate, Ford (John Ducey), a lawyer who has just separated from his wife because he realizes he’s gay.

“They are a family,” Ball says, “and they’re going to be there for each other.”

In the real Brooklyn household, Ball’s being the only gay guy was never an issue, something else he duplicates in the series. In an upcoming episode, for instance, “Ford goes on his first date [with a guy], and Hunter and Norris become like the mice in ‘Cinderella,’ helping him pick out what he’s going to wear,” Ball explains. “They’re more excited about it than he is.

“I didn’t put the gay character in there because I wanted to have this guy on a soapbox,” he adds.

“I put the gay character in there because that was one of the realities of the situation in the house I lived in in Brooklyn. Also, from a purely practical storytelling point, if you have one of the characters gay and the other two straight, it’s going to give you more interesting areas to go than if they’re all three straight.”

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Central story lines include Ford’s determination to remain close to his wife (Rena Sofer)--trying, in Ball’s words, “to redefine their love for each other”--and Hunter’s crash course in fatherhood when the 18-year-old daughter he didn’t know he had (Niesha Trout), born of a long-ago love affair, shows up at the door.

Ball has come up with detailed backgrounds for each of his characters, which he is only too happy to share--at length.

“He falls in love with his characters,” series co-star Ducey explains later. “He falls in love with the work that he creates.”

“Every character is really well drawn and really clearly defined,” co-star Basche adds. The result: episodes “driven by character and not solely by jokes or situations.”

Basche notes that many of the reviewers who have weighed in on “American Beauty” have struggled to describe the myriad, morphing qualities of Ball’s writing. “They don’t know how to put their finger on what it is he does,” the actor says, “and that’s what I’m enjoying so much with this TV show.”

Though he hesitates to compare “Oh Grow Up” to “American Beauty,” Ball does volunteer: “Both have questions about fatherhood, what it means to be a father. . . . I definitely have father issues.”

His own dad “was not a bad father,” he hastens to add about his childhood in Atlanta-area Marietta, Ga., as the youngest of four children of a quality-control engineer for Lockheed and a stay-at-home mom. “But he was a deeply, deeply unhappy man, and he was very distant.”

“American Beauty”--inspired, in part, by the Amy Fisher-Joey Buttafuoco case--is not intended as a grand pronouncement about the state of the American family, Ball says. His intent is simply to tell a story about “people looking for love and acceptance, like everybody else.”

The story focuses on next-door households headed by an unfulfilled trade-magazine writer who is growing ever more estranged from his appearance-conscious real estate agent wife (Spacey and Bening) and by a brooding, recently retired Marine Corps colonel and his browbeaten spouse (Chris Cooper and Allison Janney). The teenage children in each home (Thora Birch and Wes Bentley, respectively) are borderline misfits, out of sync not only with their parents but also with most of their peers.

Each of these characters is unhappy because life hasn’t turned out quite as planned. It’s a frustration shared by many, Ball senses, in an America that believes that beauty and happiness are the airbrushed versions in advertisements, magazine photo spreads and much of the entertainment media.

“The life that we are encouraged to aspire to is, for the most part, manufactured,” he observes. “And I think there is something deeply, deeply wrong with that.

“Real beauty is not manufactured,” he adds. “Beauty and truth are inextricably connected, and when a moment of truth happens--when you see what is really there [in a person]--that is a moment of beauty.”

Though it is screenwriting that has propelled his career to a new level, it is the television work that consumes Ball’s time these days, and he seems to be loving every second of it.

Of course, it does place certain restrictions on his writing. “When you’re doing a situation comedy, it’s about funny and likable people you want to invite into your home every week,” he says, adding, with a laugh: “Can you imagine ‘American Beauty: The Series’?”

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* “American Beauty” is in limited release. It is MPAA-rated R.