And so at last the fall television season is upon us. Magazines and newspapers grow fat with ads, buses come wrapped in photographs of thespians, and just as the temperature drops, tourists disappear, and New York becomes livable again, an army of publicists urges you to stay inside and watch television.

Not just a bit of television, mind you. Lots of television. You are to become hooked, my friends, on at least a dozen different TV shows that may, if they are successful, hang around for years.

It’s all part of what one local publication terms a “Three Month Culture Orgy,” and if you consult the calendar, you’ll notice that all this ecstatic aesthetic grappling is designed to end in mid-December, when, to quote John Donne, “The sunne is spent,” emitting “light squibs, no constant rayes,” “The world’s whole sap is sunke,” and “life is shrunke / Dead and interr’d.”

In other words, just when it’s freezing out, dark at five, and the holiday season looms like an ogre in a nightmare, the so-called “culture orgy” will come to an abrupt end, and it’ll be back to the monastery with the lot of you, where you can catch up on your reading and watch “Seasonal Ice Dancing from Rockefeller Center Sponsored by Master Card.”

So enjoy it while it lasts. Your TV, the couch you’ll do your viewing from, and that TiVo remote which so rarely leaves your hand were all probably made abroad. But when it comes to manufacturing entertainment, America remains the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

Among the first words you hear on the CW’s “Life Is Wild,” one of dozens of new shows about to descend on America’s airwaves, are, “My hair is a disaster and my pants are too tight.” A teenaged girl, Katie Clarke (Leah Pipes), is speaking. She’s getting ready for high school hell, and though she doesn’t know it yet, her father — New York’s veterinarian to the stars — is about to pack the entire family off to South Africa. The ostensible reason is that some sort of virus, which he has the means to cure, is killing African wildlife, but the real reason is that a cultural virus is destroying his household.

By the end of the pilot episode, the squabbling, six-member clan is enjoying its first peaceable meal for as long as anyone can remember — at the other end of the world. As Katie puts it, “It was our first meal … without drama, insults, or lifelong vows of hate.” And when she and her stepbrother arrive for their first day at the local high school, they discover they’re the only students not wearing uniforms — and they wish they were. The rancid animosity of the typical American high school seems entirely absent, and it’s a relief.

Whether or not this has anything to do with actual life in South Africa, it is clearly intended as a reflection on life in America. The South Africa of “Life Is Wild,” at least based on the opening episode, is everything this country is not. And — surprise! — it has nothing to do with politics or George Bush and everything to do with a deeper disenchantment with what American life has become: rude, confused, and so teched-up it might as well camp out in cyberspace full time.

“Aliens in America,” a new sitcom also on the CW, is set in Medora, Wis., where Justin Tolchuck (Dan Byrd), a sensitive, slightly built 16-year-old, is suffering through the pains of high school hazing. (“I was a space alien,” he thinks to himself, “but no one was coming to get me.”) His voluptuous younger sister has just been placed on the list of “The Ten Most Bangable Girls in School.” Unfortunately, Justin has made the list as well.

A school counselor suggests to Justin’s diva mother, Franny (Amy Pietz), who imagines her son resembles Ashton Kutcher, that the family take in an exchange student, thereby more or less guaranteeing Justin at least one friend in school. Franny thinks she’s getting a nice handsome blond boy, but to her barely disguised horror, a Pakistani shows up, in full Muslim gear. Raja (Adhir Kalyan) is well-spoken, very religious, and polite. He calls Franny “Mrs. Tolchuck,” voluntarily does housework, and is unfailingly kind to Justin.

“Aliens in America” comes dressed in protective liberal garb (“What about terrorism?” asks Franny. “They pose as students — Bill O’Reilly said so!”), vital to securing good reviews. It’s okay for Raja to be religious because he’s Muslim and therefore a victim, as opposed to a Christian, and the show can make fun of American fear of radical Islam. Nonetheless, the underlying message is socially conservative, the Pakistani Muslim being essentially a vehicle for old-fashioned good manners. Raja voices only one complaint in the opening episode: “What is wrong with the people in your high school?” he asks Justin following his first visit to the institution. “They are like wolves!”

“Aliens” closes with a dinner scene, and it’s a virtual echo of the ending of “Life Is Wild,” only in this case, a foreigner’s presence, rather than a foreign country, has made all the difference. “Dinner that night,” says Justin in a voiceover, “was the best meal we’ve had in a long time. We stayed at that table for hours. No one wanted to be anyplace else.”

As always, the fall television season is a mixed bag, and what one chooses to extract from it may reveal as much about the person pulling out the goodies as the contents of the bag itself. Shows set in foreign countries, or merely about foreigners, are unusual. There are, however, a lot of shows in which the protagonists harbor exotic magical powers — a theme that may not be entirely unrelated to the proliferation of prime time nerds and geeks (“Aliens,” CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory,” CW’s “Chuck”). After all, if you spend enough time in the virtual world, you’re apt to come down with a severe case of depression or become convinced that reality is thoroughly malleable.

Thus ABC offers magic realism and cutesy Americana in “Pushing Daisies,” in which a pie maker can revive the dead merely by touching them — and kill them if he touches them again. In NBC’s “Journeyman,” Kevin McKidd (of “Rome” fame) travels back and forth through time, while Michelle Ryan outruns cars in NBC’s “Bionic Woman.” Alex O’Loughlin is an undead private investigator in CBS’s “Moonlight,” there’s another immortal private eye on FOX’s “New Amsterdam,” and a slacker deals with the devil in the CW’s “The Reaper.”

Other forthcoming shows, such as the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” about the Upper East Side prep school set, and ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money,” place us among the gilded wolves, both young and old, of Manhattan’s priciest zip code. The latter has the makings of a great, soapy drama, anchored by the genial presence of Peter Krause (Nate on “Six Feet Under”), and the magisterial white hair and satanically tufted eyebrows of Donald Sutherland. It also has one of the most vicious priests I’ve ever seen on television (certainly a contrast to the sweet Muslim boy on “Aliens”) and, as on another promising ABC show about upper-crust New Yorkers, “Big Shots,” a transsexual plays the role of the femme fatale — mere biological femmes fatales being old hat by this point. At the end of the pilot episode, Mr. Krause wonders aloud whether money is the root of all evil, or merely symptomatic of a love of freedom, fame, virtue, vice, etc. Whatever else it is, enormous wealth is interesting, allowing what would normally be minor personality quirks to blossom into full-blown neuroses, turning everyone into a monster, or at least a caricature, of sorts.

Like so many other new series, from FOX’s “K-Ville” to NBC’s “Back to You,” in which Kelsey Grammar tries to rehabilitate his career as a news anchor, “Dirty Sexy Money” turns on a desire for redemption and a need to set the past right. In this case, it’s Nick’s desire to avenge the murder of his father, who died in a suspicious helicopter crash. In “K-Ville,” it’s a battle to set the storied city of New Orleans back on its feet.

In NBC’s “Life,” one of the more interesting cop shows to come along in a while, Damian Lewis plays a police officer back on the force after being wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, and determined to find out who set him up. Even the grotesque “Kid Nation” packs a bus-load of children off to restore a 19th-century mining town abandoned by adults. Everywhere, it seems, is a perception that something has gone wrong and needs to be returned to an original state of, if not innocence, then a little closer to what it once was.

So it’s noteworthy that the CW, best known for a youthful viewership and shows like “America’s Next Top Model,” appears to be the most sensitive to something awry in the culture, and a need for at least a slight retreat — even when, as in the case of the entertaining “Gossip Girl,” it glamorizes as it dissects.