As I don't need to remind you, these are strange and anxious times. When a child feels anxious, he grips his special blankets with the satin edging, or hugs her familiar old stuffed brown dog. And when adults feel disoriented or discombobulated, they may turn to certain kinds of soft, familiar, warm, high-carbohydrate foods -- mashed potatoes, chicken pie, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf.

Well, it turns out our culture has its equivalent of comfort food as well. And this season, Americans are -- no surprise -- gorging on the tried and the true, the unchallenging and very smooth.

What are the best-selling albums right now? Well, for one, the deeply easy-to-like Garth Brooks… and Enya, the modern musical equivalent of getting a nice well-oiled massage.

In movie theaters, the big hits are the familiar, the filling, and the easy to chew -like Harry Potter. And the animated Monsters, Inc. Which is proof that comfort food culture can be very, very good.

Television, not surprisingly, is where the phenomenon is most starkly manifest. To an unprecedented degree, almost every new program is limping along this season - on the networks and in syndication.

The only new primetime series that's a real hit is a show on the WB network called Smallville -- a comfort-food name if there ever was one. It's the fantasy story, yet again, of Superman as a boy in his archetypal all-American small town.

The comfort-food network for a while has been CBS -- aggressively unhip, with a substantially older audience. And which network suddenly has momentum? CBS. It had all the big surprise ratings successes the last few weeks. And every one was a pure piece of very familiar, comfort-food culture: The I Love Lucy 50th Anniversary show...the Country Music Association Awards show… and, most amazingly and unexpectedly of all, a show last week that consisted of old clips from the Carol Burnett Show.

This shift in Americans' cultural diet right now is completely understandable. And untroubling -- as long as it's temporary, and doesn't become an all-encompassing cultural regime. I think by next spring I'll be more than ready for energetic, ambitious, disturbing films like Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, which was supposed to be coming out now, but was delayed for post-9/11 reasons. And the comfort-food era will have to be over, won't it, by next September? Because that's when the Sopranos finally begins its fourth season.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.