Imagine if you’d just bought a new novel, or even borrowed one from the library, and about 40 pages in, just as the story was starting to come alive and you’d bonded with the protagonists, the pages suddenly went blank and a sign appeared saying, “this novel has been canceled due to insufficient popularity.”

It would be a bit annoying, wouldn’t it? But that, more or less, is what happens to a lot of television programs at this point in the fall season. It just happened to “Smith,” a series on CBS starring Ray Liotta as the head of a group of criminals who shared the distinction of actually behaving like criminals — i.e., they weren’t lovable, and appeared ready to kill on a moment’s notice. The show also featured one of the more convincing femmes criminales on television, namely Amy Smart, an actress who never let you doubt for a second that though her hair was blonde and her legs were true, her heart was constructed of nothing but pure ice.

This wasn’t a titillating Sharon Stone-style performance, either, complete with blatantly erotic cigarette smoking and uncrossed legs. It was simply a convincing portrayal of a sexy sociopath, part of an otherwise male team, who, at the vital moment, would use her looks to distract a security guard or beguile a driver whose truck was packed with valuables. I wanted to see more of it (and her), and now it’s gone.

But does anything really vanish anymore? Chances are that more episodes of “Smith” (only three aired) will wind up on DVD or on the Internet, or magically reappear in a different time slot weeks from now. I’d say more about it, but under the circumstances there isn’t much point. Perhaps you’re one of the people who saw it and switched channels. If you were a fan, you already know what I’m talking about.

So as a consolation to the “Smith” team, which must be feeling pretty lousy right now, I offer this short poem by Lawrence Durrell written in 1943.It’s a tad enigmatic but not entirely inapplicable to our bold new digital age:

Nothing is lost, sweet self,
Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard. Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the
unbeckonable bird!

Arianna Huffington, who can quote an impressive amount of poetry off the top of her head, once told me she had often been tempted to drop the odd couplet into one of her syndicated newspaper columns but was afraid American readers would find it pretentious. I apologize for not having that problem.

Anyway, perhaps Mr. Liotta, Ms. Smart, and company will get wind of this and recite the lines to themselves as they contemplate the unexpected pleasures of unemployment or prepare for their next roles.

***

One program that will definitely stick around is NBC’s “Heroes,” the first fall series to be rewarded with a full-season order for 2006–07, and reportedly a monster hit among adults aged 18–49, pulling in 13 million viewers last week.

For me, “Heroes” is a perfect example of just how capricious the business of what becomes a hit and what’s hauled off the screen before it has a chance to even register can be. The show, I should explain, is somewhat comic-bookish in that it’s about a cool young Indian genetics professor from Madras who discovers that a disparate group of people — a cute American cheerleader, a geeky Japanese office worker, a heroin-addicted artist, etc. — are endowed with various magical powers, such as being able to stop time or “hear” what people are thinking. This is fortunate, since the world is on the verge of apocalypse and they may be required to save it.

I missed the pilot, but come the second episode, I dutifully took my place on the sofa, ready to absorb Hollywood’s latest red-hot offering. Perhaps it was the frozen Trader Joe’s Mahi-Mahi dinner we’d just eaten, or the fact that I was joining the series late, but I found the initial 20 minutes or so unusually hard to follow.

Someone disguised as a repairman was trying to kill the Indian genetics professor in the blue light of his improbably otherworldly Brooklyn apartment; the pneumatic cheerleader broke her neck but it snapped back into place instantly; a corpse stashed in a garage turned up in a car and the Japanese fellow teleported himself from Tokyo to Times Square, where he wandered around with a peculiar expression on his face, perhaps because he was about to envision the nuclear devastation of New York. (If he’d watched “Jericho” — another popular new series — he’d have known New York has already been nuked, along with most of the rest of the country.)

About 30 minutes into the episode, I began to feel uncomfortably hot but decided to ignore it. Within five minutes the discomfort was no longer ignorable. I got up and looked in the bathroom mirror: My eyes were bloodshot and my head looked radioactive. More worrying still, my heart was thumping in my chest at an alarming rate.What was going on? I mean, the show couldn”t be that bad, could it? Was I about to undergo some sort of genetic mutation myself? Would I soon be teleporting off the fire escape and foreseeing the end of the world?

Well, no. It turned out I was having an allergic reaction -— to the fish, not the program -—- efficiently dispatched with a single Benadryl. A week later I watched the third episode of “Heroes” and came through the experience unscathed. On the other hand, I would still have preferred to watch “Smith.” Originally put on “hiatus” by CBS, it has now definitively been canceled. More than eight million people watched the last episode, but that, evidently, wasn’t enough.

bbernhard@nysun.com