A guide to notable programs by BRUCE FRETTS. (Times are Eastern standard and are subject to change.)
SERIES
Infinitely more entertaining than the cute but forgettable 1992 movie it's based on, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (The WB, March 10, 8-10 p.m., then Mondays, 9-10 p.m.) is this mid-season's most distinctive and sharply written new show. Sarah Michelle Gellar (formerly All My Children's delightfully horrid Kendall) is Buffy, the plucky, perky, and pulchritudinous high school student who is also the only person who can save a small California town from a rash of demons and bloodsuckers. Aided by a rambling suitor (Nicholas Brendon) and a shy computer hacker (Alyson Hannigan), Buffy takes on the monsters with a combination of Valley Girl put-downs (''You look like DeBarge,'' she tells a vampire in '80s duds) and Xena-style butt kicking. High school provides its own horrors, like Cordelia (Malibu Shores' Charisma Carpenter), the dread Popular Girl who speaks primarily in insults (''Nice dress. Good to know you've seen the softer side of Sears''). Not since 1989's bleak comedy Heathers has the juxtaposition of adolescent angst with maimings and murders been such a good time. -- Kristen Baldwin
Beavis and Butt-head aficionados will be familiar with Daria Morgendorffer, the smart, cynical teen who serves as a sardonic superego to B&B's wobbly ids. Now she's the star of her own cartoon series, DARIA (MTV, Mondays, 10:30-11 p.m.). The deeply alienated Daria, her yuppie fast-track parents, and her cheerful little sister, Quinn, have moved to a new suburb. It's great to have this sort of female sensibility on TV, since producer and cocreator Susie Lewis Lynn knows that beneath Daria's sniffy skepticism lie resentment, intelligence, insecurity, and despair -- welcome antidotes to MTV's generally airheaded atmosphere. (The debut episode featured a fine series of jokes constructed around the concept of manifest destiny -- educational!) What Daria lacks is animation deserving of the term; it's likely the show's stiff, waywardly synched images are supposed to be junky, but that doesn't make them any less annoying. -- KT
After seven seasons of consistently high quality -- and consistently increasing ratings -- LAW & ORDER (NBC, Thursdays starting March 13, 10-11 p.m.) gets rewarded with a four-week sojourn in ER's Must See Thursday slot. To mark the occasion, L&O's producers have cooked up a juicy three-parter about the murder of a film-studio executive, which takes NYPD detectives Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) to Hollywood. Their no-BS attitude makes an amusing contrast to showbiz pretentiousness, as they deal with the dead woman's officious assistant (Janeane Garofalo, in an impressive dramatic performance), a highly suspicious personal trainer (Jeffrey D. Sams), and a voracious studio veep (Townies' Lauren Graham) who develops the hots for Curtis. The tripartite plot nicely breaks up L&O's traditional cops-first/lawyers-second structure. These episodes also delve more deeply into the characters' personal lives than usual, examining Curtis' troubled marriage as well as the tension between Assistant DA Ross (Carey Lowell) and her defense attorney ex-husband (Keith Szarabajka). With ER, NYPD Blue, Murder One, and Homicide all on hiatus, Law & Order now qualifies as the best drama on television.
