Jonathan Storm: For your Thursday pleasure

One of the fundamental laws of television states that the two best new series each fall will be scheduled at the same time. But this is a strange TV year, what with the Hollywood writers' strike and turmoil at the networks.

Three series premiere tonight, two of them at 10. They're both fine, watchable and entertaining. Some people might even consider them the season's best new series, but your life would proceed just swell if you skipped them completely.

Though that might be hard to do. Both ABC's Life on Mars and CBS's Eleventh Hour have the comfortable feel of many shows that have come before them and lasted a long, long time.

Then there's NBC's Kath & Kim, inspired by a sitcom of the same name that has been playing to big audiences in Australia since 2002. Such popularity does not portend for the Yank version, about a dipstick mum and her bludger daughter, who don't know Christmas from Bourke Street, and constantly yabber and lair it up in woop woop.

Life on Mars (6ABC) starts with a bang, as Our Hero gets hit by a car and is magically transported to 1973. It has some bang-up supporting actors, too: everybody's favorite seedy outsider, Harvey Keitel, in his first regular TV series role; The Sopranos' Michael Imperioli, and gorgeous Gretchen Mol from 3:10 to Yuma and The Notorious Bettie Page.

Jason O'Mara, who shuts down his native Dubliner accent in favor of tough-guy American, stars as time-traveling Sam Tyler. You might remember him from HBO's Band of Brothers or ABC's Men in Trees. He's a manly man again here, even if he does wear bell-bottoms and big, pointy collars. Tyler operates in a foggy world: He's pretty sure this 1973 is the perception of a mind messed up by the auto encounter, as vague voices from the present occasionally pierce his consciousness.

The bafflement does not get in the way, however (this isn't Lost), and it's fun to hear him say things like "After all, you're just some bottom-feeding thug that crawled out of some dark pit in the recesses of my mind" and "Who dreams about being yelled at by a closet feminist member of the 1973 policewomen's bureau?"

The first goes toward his boss. Instead of a gangster or a repo man, this time Keitel plays a precinct lieutenant. But with his lousy haircut, white shoes and outlaw ways - he makes NYPD Blue's Andy Sipowicz seem like Little Bo Peep - he's still a sleazy dude. Imperioli's his right-hand-man detective until Tyler shows up.

Mol is the closet feminist known as No Nuts Norris in the squad room, where women are unwelcome and allowed only to tend to lost kitties and hysterical girlfriends.

We've come a long way, baby, in 35 years, and Life on Mars takes a detailed look at life without cell phones and successful women and various other modern miracles. It's hard to tell exactly how detailed, since ABC is saving money by not sending out DVDs to the critics anymore. We're forced to watch the frequently fuzzy action, sometimes in fits and starts, on the computer.

I watched Eleventh Hour (CBS3) and its pulchritudinous partners in all their glory on the 40-inch flat screen. Like Life on Mars, it's adapted from a British TV show and has a lead from across the pond. Rufus Sewell, a big star in Britain, plays brainiac biophysicist Jacob Hood, a super-big-shot government agent called in wherever people are dying because of weird science.

Many a cosmo will be consumed in discussion of who's handsomer, him or O'Mara.

Marley Shelton (Tobey Maguire's Lover's Lane honey in Pleasantville) plays his beautiful blond cohort, not really his partner but his protector, an FBI security specialist with her feet on the ground and a gun in her hand - while his head's in the clouds and the evildoers seek to do him in.

There's a lot of Scully and Mulder here, or David Addison and Maddie Hayes, or any other smart, good-looking TV or movie couple down the years who have been forced to work in a web of sexual tension.

And a lot of House and Numb3rs and CSI. Most of all, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, as a smart-guy misfit twitches his way to the answer of another strange case every week.

TV can be a cruel mistress. Last season, it took one of my many beloved, the quirky Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under), and crushed her in a dopey sitcom called The Return of Jezebel James.

Now another inamorata, Selma Blair (Hellboy, Pretty Persuasion), is plucked from the pantheon and forced into demeaning circumstances, in Kath & Kim, at 8:30 p.m. on NBC10.

Though just six years younger than Saturday Night Live slapstick veteran Molly Shannon, Blair plays her spoiled daughter. The lack of age gap is supposed to be part of the fun, as the two read gossip mags and gallivant about the mall, where Mom's boyfriend runs a sandwich shop.

There is a twinge of fun every now and then in Kath & Kim, even if most critics are so apoplectic at its crass stupidity they can barely write a sentence.

But they're on the right track. Blinded by the blood racing around my head and body, I kind of liked Jezebel James a little, too.

10 p.m. Thursday on 6ABC.

Eleventh Hour

10 p.m. Thursday on CBS3.

Kath & Kim

8:30 p.m. Thursday on NBC10.