Fringe, 8-9:30 p.m. Tuesday,

WSVN-Fox 7.

Privileged, 9-10 p.m. Tuesday,

WSFL-CW 39.

If you think that air travel is a hassle these days, consider the flight from Germany that lands in Boston in the opening moments of Fringe: 200 passengers reduced to skeletons and puddles of melted flesh. I guess charging for blankets isn't such a big deal after all.

Living up to a first scene like that is no easy assignment, but Fringe is equal to the task. Mixing paranoia, bleak humor and post-9/11 exhaustion in a potent story-telling brew, it's one of the new television season's most promising dramas.

Fringe is told mostly through the eyes of Olivia Dunham (Australian actress Anna Torv), an FBI agent assigned to a federal task force created to find out what happened onboard the airliner. She's not a good fit; the task force's boss, prickly Homeland Security agent Phillip Broyles (The Wire's Lance Reddick), dislikes her for busting an old friend on what he views as an exaggerated sexual assault charge.

With little support from her boss, Dunham turns to a pair of outsiders, a scientist named Walter Bishop (John Noble, another Australian) who's been locked up in a mental asylum since his use of human guinea pigs in a Frankensteinish government weapons-research lab 17 years ago, and his misfit genius son Peter (Joshua Jackson, Dawson's Creek).

''Estranged'' doesn't begin to describe their relationship. ''He is without a doubt the most self-absorbed, twisted, abusive, brilliant, myopic son of a bitch on the planet,'' says Peter of his father. The old man, for his part, alternates periods of lucidity with obsessive rants about butterscotch pudding.

Their investigation nonetheless begins bearing strange fruit. The airliner murders are just the latest in a series of alarming and inexplicable occurrences, including artificially induced earthquakes and coma victims who awake to start spouting classified military information. ''Someone out there is experimenting, only the whole world is their lab,'' another agent warns.

Fringe was created by J.J. Abrams (along with two of his regular writers, Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci), long television's master conspirator theorist -- his shows Lost and Alias both take place in a world manipulated by secret cabals. So it's hardly surprising when Dunham learns that the Pattern, as the various sinister incidents are collectively known, is the work of an unknown Leviathan with tentacles reaching into the highest levels of giant corporations and the government itself.

But what makes Fringe different than Lost or Alias (or, for that matter, the old Fox hit The X-Files, to which it clearly owes some of its inspiration) is the palpable sense of fatigue and even hopelessness in an age where the cry of wolf! almost never seems to be a false alarm. ''We're supposed to protect a world where one breath of the wrong air can incinerate you from the inside out,'' broods one FBI agent. ``The truth is, we're obsolete.''

`PRIVILEGED'

A sense of exhaustion is endemic to Tuesday's other drama debut, The CW's Privileged, but unfortunately it's on the other side of the TV screen. JoAnna Garcia's overcaffeinated cuteness -- the sort of thing that made otherwise decent people want to run Sally Field through with a pitchfork back in her Gidget and Flying Nun days -- as a Palm Beach governess to trust-fund teen trash is nigh unbearable.

Garcia, the knocked-up teenage daughter of Reba, smiles, coos, scampers and makes funny faces approximately 200 times per minute, to the point that I was somewhat sympathetic when one of her bitchy little wards zapped her with a taser. I say somewhat because I was really hoping for the flesh-melting chemicals to leak over from Fringe. Please, somebody stop her before she acts again.

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