AND THEY'RE OFF ... 'LOST' MAY LEAVE VIEWERS THAT WAY, TOO.

Byline: - David Kronke

Quick quiz: Attribute the following statement: ``You keep wandering to someplace trying to get somewhere and there might not be anything when you get there.''

A) Samuel Beckett.

B) A contestant on an NBC reality series.

If you guessed A), no points for you. If you guessed B), you cheated by looking to see the byline of this review was attributed to a TV critic, so no points for you, either.

``Lost'' is one of those ``casting-is-everything'' reality series. The premise is intriguing enough - dump a bunch of accidental tourists in the middle of nowhere somewhere on the planet, and watch as they figure out how to acclimate to their surroundings. But the contestants (who will appear in three episodes, and be replaced by a new group of aspiring wanna-be's for the next three) feel like the generic-label version of reality-TV contestants, not the higher-priced brand-name real thing.

NBC requested that critics not reveal where on the planet tonight's participants were deposited, but that's not really the point, anyway. Suffice it to say they were dumped in a location largely populated by nomads not bound to strict strictures of geography in the first place, a pretty ingenious gambit that might be hard to replicate in many future contests.

Here's the deal: NBC dumps three teams of two in some remote, rocky locale; the first couple to reach the Statue of Liberty wins. (Given the halting starts of tonight's contestants, you might expect Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison to win.) They're given their own cameraman (which makes motorcycle getaways impossible, a fact that comes into play immediately tonight), as well as precious little money, a few geegaws with which to barter for services with the dupe-able happy natives, camping supplies and coupons for fast-food companies cynical enough to pony up for some product placement.

Let's handicap our contestants: There's a heterosexual couple, Lando and Carla, who are agreeably determined and no-nonsense except for a bewildering prayer they give to ask their Lord to forgive them for maybe ``stealing'' some money they found on a pile of rocks. There's a sisters-aren't-doing-it-for-themselves team: Tami, a mother of four smack-dab in the center of her middle-age crazy, and Celeste, a wimpy model who when she's not about to lose her cookies is declaring, ``I'd do it if it weren't on TV,'' as if that's some sort of high praise. They're the most hapless in tonight's episode.

Most hapless, that is, if you don't count Joe and Courtland (``I think we're in Asia,'' one says; ``I think we're in Argentina,'' the other responds, with virtually no evidence to back up either observation). Joe's gay and unabashedly vocal about that fact - his strategy is, ``There's a gay bar everywhere, so all I gotta do is show up, meet my people and start cutting some deals'' - well, heck, Joe's vocal about everything. The producers missed a priceless moment when they omitted the moment Courtland realized he wasn't going to get a second of screen time without exerting some very precious energy.

Precious, because our hapless heroes are plopped in a desert and have no clue as to which direction civilization may lie. Joe and Courtland spend a couple of days before even figuring out which country they're in, mainly because Joe won't give the locals a second's breathing space to get in a word. Tami and Celeste are content just to whine about how difficult it is trying to get famous on the TV without puking. Lando and Carla approach their task with a fairly unerring efficiency, and don't spend a lot of time discoursing ad nauseam to their cameraman, mercifully unlike the others, who incorrectly assume because a camera is recording their thoughts they automatically must be fascinating.

``Lost,'' for some reason, requires two narrators, a man and a woman, to explicate some pretty obvious information for us viewers. Tonight's episode featured so much wandering lost in the desert they had to resort to a flashback to the contestants attending a survival camp.

Beyond that, it has two drawbacks - one, having teams of two makes for not a lot of the social friction that the reality genre trucks in as its bread and butter; and two, episodes end with no sense of closure; no one's voted off or anything, they venture so far and a narrator tells us of the putative thrills awaiting us in the next episode. Nonetheless, its clever and simple setup and relative lack of kowtowing to viewer prurience makes it a nominally intriguing addition to the now-overloaded reality genre.

``LOST''

What: ``Survivor'' meets ``Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?''

Where: NBC (Channel 4).

When: 8 tonight.

Our rating: Two and one half stars

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Photo:

Tami and Celeste, a mismatched team if ever there was one, enjoy a rest after hiking through the middle of nowhere on the first episode of ``Lost,'' a new reality series that begins tonight.