What's Unavoidable, Unmissable and Uncovered This Fall

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A fair point. But the overblown moniker also perfectly captures Eugene, a Homer Simpson with dreams of Homeric glory. To him, his plan is not just brilliant but also noble. Logue plays him like Jackie Gleason doing Don Quixote, with such cocky, naive brio that you can't hold the guy's larcenous vision against him. "So what if we're not conventionally handsome--or educated--or sober?", he asks his crew. "We have dreams too, don't we?" It remains to be seen if the bumbling Knights will get, as their quarry once sang, what they want. But this show promises to give fans of picaresque comedy what they need.

Her Ugliness Is Only Skin Deep UNCOVERED

She's the fresh face of the 2006 TV season. And what a face it is. Eyes barricaded by giant glasses, teeth encased in metal, hair tortured into an ungainly do, Betty Suarez does not look as if she should be an assistant at a high-fashion magazine. And that is why she's been hired--so that her boss, a tomcat publishing scion, won't sleep with her. To cast the lead of ABC's satirical soap Ugly Betty, producers turned to--this being Hollywood--a lovely young actress. America Ferrera, 22, may dirty up nicely, but she also gives Betty a bright-eyed, infectious buoyancy. "Betty knows she is smart," she says--revealing her own perfect teeth--"but she knows her faults." Executive producer Salma Hayek (who has a recurring bit part in Betty) praises Ferrera's effervescence. "This girl is a superstar because she shines," says Hayek, who first saw Ferrera playing a Rubenesque teen in Real Women Have Curves. In Ugly Betty, Ferrera aims to prove that they also have braces.

BOOKS

King of the Mountain UNAVOIDABLE

In literature, nothing succeeds like failure. Maybe that's why Charles Frazier's 1997 novel Cold Mountain, about a Confederate deserter's miserable journey home, surprised almost everybody by selling 4 million copies and winning the National Book Award. Frazier's publisher is betting it wasn't a fluke: Random House spent $8 million to buy his new novel Thirteen Moons, which comes out in October.

This is not Return to Cold Mountain. Our hero is Will Cooper, an orphan who takes charge of a remote trading post on the edge of Cherokee territory in the early 19th century. Will forms bonds with two Cherokee father figures: a wise, stoic named Bear and a violent but fascinating nut job, Featherstone. He also forms a less filial bond with an elusive half-Indian damsel named Claire. Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details--he has a scholar's command of the physical realities of early America and a novelist's gift for bringing them to life. Thirteen might just turn out to be his lucky number.

The Greenspan Of the Gridiron UNMISSABLE

Michael Lewis writes about sports with the dry, quantitative eye of a former bond salesman with a master's degree from the London School of Economics--which he was, and has. "An NFL football field is a tightly strung economy," he writes. "Everything on it comes at a price." You would think that angle would suck all the fun out of his storytelling, but it only enriches it.