• The Principal's Office, 9-10 p.m. Thursday, TruTv

• The Cho Show, 11-11:30 p.m. Thursday, VH1

Not for nothing do they call August the dog days. This is the time of year when your television set can give you fleas -- and you'll definitely want to keep a can of bug spray handy if you watch either of Thursday's series debuts, The Principal's Office and The Cho Show.

The Principal's Office, a supposed documentary series from TruTV (the reality-show ghost of the cable channel once known as Court TV), is pure canine despite delivering neither the bark nor the bite you might expect from a show that follows high school principals dealing with disciplinary problems.

At a time when the only news reports we hear from public schools involve teenage pregnancy pacts and plots to stage Columbinesque slaughter, the schools in The Principal's Office seem curiously untroubled. Kids smoking or sneaking away for lunch? That's all you've got? Socially reassuring, maybe, but not exactly compelling television.

In fact, the most interesting thing about The Principal's Office is the relatively draconian scale of the punishments. A 10-day suspension for setting off a stink bomb seems a tad medieval. And I found myself nodding in agreement -- well, maybe I was only nodding off to sleep -- when a kid busted for pinching his own nipples exclaimed in disbelief, ``Three-day suspension for this?''

`THE CHO SHOW'

Perhaps the kid should use his time away from school to apply for a job on The Cho Show, where perverse behavior seems to be the whole point. See Margaret Cho pose for her aged parents in nothing but body paint! See Margaret say the F word at a award banquet! See Margaret act like a 3-year-old at age 39!

To be fair, The Cho Show is not really a television program at all but psychotherapy. Cho is still seething with trauma from her TV experience 14 years ago, when network suits bullied her mercilessly about her weight and her ethnicity (they actually hired a coach to teach her to be ''more Asian'') while she was doing an ABC sitcom called The All-American Girl.

Cho has been lashing out at TV in her stand-up act ever since, and The Cho Show is the television equivalent of anti-matter: no scripts, no punch lines, just Cho hanging out with her self-consciously weird entourage. (It includes a dwarf assistant and a pack of super-flamer fashion consultants whose main job seems to be dressing her up like a trash bag and then assuring her it's glamorous.) What a waste of one of the most scandalously funny comedians in America! ''What are you going to do, ground me?'' Cho snarls after yet another attempt to outrage her parents. That would be a good start.

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