Hurry! Only Two More Months to Catch Mystery Channel 68!

It seemed as though it might be some kind of government thing?not a plot so much as a tactic. America suffers the worst attack in its history, morale is low, and suddenly, in a scaled-down tv landscape, a strange and wonderful new UHF channel appears with programs so unmistakably American that they seem to emanate from a kind of parallel universe. One where Sept. 11 never occurred?where it never could have occurred.

It's been a little like living in a Philip K. Dick novel, what with Dobie Gillis and Ben Cartwright and Hekyl and Jekyl appearing on the small screen again, alongside Teenagers from Outer Space and The Giant Gila Monster. Plus more contemporary ur-American fare like modified pickup-truck racing and Adrenaline TV, which features whitewater rafting and para-skiing. Apart from a few infomercials, the shows make you wonder when and where you are (Raleigh, maybe) and whether 68 really used to be the Home Shopping channel. Maybe that was in a bad dream?

The former WHSE changed format on Oct. 1 and more and more people are stumbling across its delights?Clown Town, for example, which a coworker describes as "the scariest clown show I've ever seen"?and telling friends about it. But the channel's not in the tv listings in the Daily News, or the Post, or the Times or even?gasp?the New York Metropolis. What gives?

It turns out that the bulk of the new programming on channel 68 comes to us from Fort Worth, from a company called American Independent Network. AIN, which started broadcasting in 1994, has about 50 affiliates around the country, in places like Knoxville, Fresno and Albany, GA, as well as DC, Las Vegas and Hartford. Channel 68's actually located in Newark, and is watched by about 1.5 million people in the New York area. But it's only a temporary affiliate of AIN. The station, which changed its call letters to WFUT last Thursday, was among 17 English-language stations in various parts of the country recently purchased by Univision, a Spanish-language tv network whose current local channel is 41.

Univision plans to make these 17 stations into a new network, which will be called Telefutura. Univision has a policy of not speaking to the press, which in practice didn't mean they wouldn't speak to me, merely that their spokesperson didn't want to be identified. This anonymous person told me that channel 68 will go Spanish on Monday, Jan. 14, so all us English-only speakers (pobrecitos!) have only a short time to enjoy our old movies, cartoons, American International Wrestling, etc. The anonymous spokesperson also told me that she couldn't tell me anything about what the new network's programming would be?like how it would differ from current Univision programming, for example. "Nobody knows yet," she said. Seems the future's just as murky in Spanish as it is in English.

Fred Hutton, AIN's director of programming, was more loquacious. We speculated as to why Univision had chosen AIN, which bills itself as "family-oriented," to fill the gap before Telefutura was up and running. Hutton thought it might be because some of the other stations in the big Univision buy, like one in Arlington, VA, were already running AIN at the time of purchase. He also told me that AIN provides programming to WB, UPN and PAX stations, among others, across the country, and that many AIN stations do provide their own local news, sports, children's programs or what have you. In other words, our New York viewing experience has been rather uniquely hermetic and cloistered. But popular: Hutton told me the network's been getting happy e-mails and letters from this area, including Long Island. "Some people like the newer stuff," he said after we discussed Adrenaline TV. "And apparently some people are just happy to see Dobie Gillis back on the air again."

So why can't you get a schedule for the best tv in the city right now? Earlier this week, for example, channel 68 showed The 400 Blows (twice) and this Thursday they'll be screening the original D.O.A. (AIN's master schedule also shows intriguingly titled shows like State Police, Beer with Mike and Awesome Adventurer that may or may not run locally.) God knows it's hard to turn the tube off and go to work when a Martian teenager is wielding his disintegration-ray device against a wealthy, predatory, swimsuit-clad blonde, whose skeleton (all that's left of her) promptly crashes into the roiling, boiling waters of her swimming pool. The anonymous spokesperson assured me that papers are receiving the schedule, but choosing not to print it. Maybe because not everyone can get 68. Or maybe it's a conspiracy.