That said, several new fall series have violent or racy pilots, and the eventual fate of these shows may serve as a benchmark for the next stage of the standards debate. The first episode of ABC's ''Lost'' features stunningly gory images of a plane crash and its aftermath, including a man being sucked into a jet engine. The ABC teen dramedy ''Life as We Know It,'' adapted by two ''Freaks and Geeks'' creators from a British series about male puberty, opens with funny but frank dialogue about sex by the three central characters, all male high school students. ''Jack and Bobby,'' a family drama on WB from the creators of ''West Wing'' and ''Everwood,'' starts with a plot line about marijuana addiction in which the mother, played by Christine Lahti, lights up 15 minutes into the pilot. And yes, she inhales.

These three shows will all make it onto the air. But many fear the onset of a kind of television self-censorship, in which writers -- anticipating resistance from standards and practices departments, which are anticipating inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission -- don't even pitch their most challenging shows or plot lines. ''I know a lot of working writers on network shows, and I think most of them are worried about what's going to happen,'' says Shawn Ryan, executive producer of the unapologetically graphic cop show ''The Shield'' on FX. ''If they're doing something that's pushing the boundaries, are ABC or NBC or CBS open to doing that? Or will the networks say that in this environment it won't be worth trying? Those are the stories you'll never hear, the censorship behind the scenes, before the shows are even made.'' One veteran producer, who declined to be named because of previous encounters with networks over sensitive content, said: ''Fear has crept into the artistic community. Everything is under the microscope. The creative process has always been fragile. It's about taking chances and being brave. But if you give the networks an excuse, they won't take a chance.''

Greg Berlanti, executive producer of WB's ''Jack and Bobby'' and ''Everwood,'' says that writers and producers can feel ''squeezed from both directions,'' working within network limitations while trying to capture viewers whose expectations have been raised by basic and pay cable. ''I don't want to exploit just to grab an audience,'' he says. ''But as a show runner, I'm a lot more threatened by the kind of stories people can tell on cable, in terms of how contemporary and edgy they are, than I am by the Janet Jackson debacle.''

Cable networks are not regulated by the F.C.C., which means they are not held to the same public decency standards as broadcasters, and they are exempt from the possibility of sanctions. That's why HBO's ''Deadwood'' and ''The Sopranos'' are allowed to depict graphic sex and violence -- and why ''South Park,'' on Comedy Central, can portray facial gunshot wounds, not to mention Saddam Hussein enjoying a homosexual relationship with Satan. Still, members of cable's creative universe find themselves deeply vested in the struggles of their network brethren. Many cable writers and producers came from on-air networks, and some aspire to return there someday, even if they view their current jobs as the medium's last bastions of artistic integrity. Some cable writers even fear that the F.C.C. might one day seek to expand its oversight into cable.

Writers frustrated with the industry's new conservatism tend to blame election-year grandstanding -- the same, familiar variety that is assumed to have motivated Dan Quayle's 1992 criticism of ''Murphy Brown.'' ''People who know more than me say this sort of thing comes around every four years,'' Mr. Ryan says. ''But this feels different.'' A new administration might change that. Then again, as one network executive puts it, ''What politician is going to vote against decency?''

And writers are suspicious of media consolidation as well. Until the mid-1990's, most broadcast networks were independent companies. Now, every broadcaster and virtually all cable networks, basic and pay, are part of larger conglomerates. That means that small issues -- a gunshot wound here, a bare buttock there -- can grow tangled up with larger ones. ''Quite frankly, there's much more to this than Janet Jackson,'' Mark Burnett says. ''This depends upon what current approvals a corporation is seeking in Washington. There are factors with licenses, business mergers and other things most people aren't even aware of.''