"Nobody knows nothing." That's the screenwriter William Goldman's famous line about Hollywood. It's so frequently quoted because it's so manifestly true.

None of the highly paid experts --not the studio bosses or the network executives or the producers -- has any consistent idea what will or won't work when it comes to movies or television.

Since September 11th, the Hollywood cognoscenti have declared that what American audiences want right now is old-fashioned heroism and traditional family values.

But if that's so, why are two of the most interesting and successful new TV series of 2002 the very epitome of anti-heroic?

Both shows are on cable, and both remind us why American audiences continue to defect from network television to cable. Because that's where risks are taken.

On the FX channel, there's The Shield. The Shield is an extremely dark police show in which no one is entirely good. In the final scene of the first episode -- so far the best episode by far -- the show's star shoots and kills a fellow cop.

The other interesting new TV hit is The Osbournes, on MTV. This is the documentary series about the Beverly Hills household led by the preposterous old heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne. I can't imagine there has never been more bleeping of curse words on any program ever. Dad swears at the 2 teenaged kids, mom swears at dad, the teenaged kids swear at pretty much everyone.

So the incredible success of The Osbournes would seem to refute the new conventional wisdom about the ascendance of old-fashioned all-Americanism.

But in fact, The Osbournes, as transgressive as it seems, is in fact about as old-fashioned and all-American as television gets.

Consider the premise: a family of clownish outsiders move into a Beverly Hills mansion with a fancy swimming pool and expensive gadgets they can't get to work. As my TV executive friend Jeff Wachtel pointed out, The Osbournes is a real-life remake of the ultimate all-American situation comedy created back when Ozzy Osbourne was a small boy in the north of England: that is, it's The Beverly Hillbillies redux. Ozzy even has a rifle that's used for comic effect.

In fact, The Osbournes follows the tried-and-true archetypes of every sitcom generation. In Married With Children, the dysfunctional-family sitcom of the 1980s, the innovation was characters who actually said to each other the harsh, crude things that real people (theoretically) imagined saying to their own children and spouses. The Osbournes takes that high concept and turns imaginary over-the-top vulgarity into reality programming.

And, as in all hit sitcoms from The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy to The Simpsons, we come away from each episode of The Osbournes meant to understand that despite everything, these wacky people really do love each other.

For better or worse, American pop culture has its traditions. And those traditions are being observed.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.