Alas, it's on WE tv, which only half of you with digital cable will find, mostly between channels 100 and 120, especially at 117, on whatever you call the TV dial these days. It's another frustrating result of the scattershot programming that remains years after Comcast bought most of the region's small cable operations but has refused to consolidate the channel lineup. High School Confidential will be telecast for the next eight Mondays from 10 to 11 p.m.

TV has never been the best Girl Scout campfire to gather around. Women in the '50s and '60s wound up on tranquilizers trying to mimic the impossible starched-blouse, family-sitcom lifestyles of Donna Stone, June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson.

Today's youth-obsessed TV has made grown-up women invisible, with a few exceptions for superheroes, ridiculously glamorous careerists, and hotshot doctors, detectives and lawyers who all wear low-cut tops. Now, it's girls who learn how to live from the tube, watching fashion addiction, money-grubbing, and the undressed, booty-shaking "empowerment" of Laguna Beach or the "Girlicious" season of Pussycat Dolls Presents.

High School Confidential is an antidote to all that, television that shows what real people have done and how it has worked out, and can help viewers make functional life choices. It also emphasizes that there's nothing new about adolescent struggle, and that the winds of maturity, if given a chance to build, can blow most dark clouds away.

When her daughter, Justine, was an eighth grader, first-time filmmaker Sharon Liese came up with the idea of following a dozen girls (with a couple more at the fringes) from the beginning of freshman year to graduation - and they all do graduate. You might think the kids in a suburban Kansas high school would be pretty homogenous, but their journeys are astonishingly varied.

"For most people, high school isn't really a walk in the park," said one of the girls, Lauren Burdette, who bore through on the most even keel and is now a sophomore at Penn.

She can say that again.

Despite naively heartfelt freshman predictions of a chaste and sober future, several girls get involved with alcohol and drugs, and most start having sex. Two of them (and one of their sisters) get pregnant. One has an abortion. One is hospitalized for depression, and another cuts her wrists. One girl gets a brain tumor. One parent dies; others separate and get new partners. At a more mundane level, girls struggle with, and eventually find, identity and self-confidence, which is the most fundamental chore of high school learning.

Each episode follows one, two or three of the girls through school. Don't expect the documentary artistry of Frederick Weisman or Albert and David Maysles. Liese's technique relies heavily on interviews, backed with footage from important events in the girls' high school lives (some of it shot by the girls themselves or their friends) and too many scene-setting shots.

But the lives shown here, in surprisingly frank profiles, are fascinating enough to sustain interest.

Burdette proves that high school needn't be all sturm und drang. Her goal, she says in the show, is to leave Kansas behind and "change the world." Guess whom the new president of Penn Democrats is backing for U.S. president.

"You need to get out of your comfort zone," Burdette said in an interview last week in her new city, where the diplomatic history major is struck at once by the poverty, the proximity to other important urban centers and the possibility of finding "so many connections" among the crowds "of really important people who work at this university."

She shows that this Confidential is not universal. An urban counterpart would likely cast a different light on high school life.

But High School Confidential does demonstrate generally, as Liese says: "Every girl is at risk for losing themselves, and every girl has what it takes to find themselves and save themselves."

And that can't help but provide caution and sustenance for every girl who watches.