Video: The Blackboard Jumble

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Peluce's character is so precocious, in fact, that he might skip a few grades and go right into the senior class at Crestridge High, where the calendar reads "Autumn 1982" but all available evidence indicates a stopover in the late 1950s. Crestridge is the sort of happy-go-lucky institution where Shelley Fabares ought to be the homecoming queen and Beaver Cleaver the hall monitor. It serves, however, as the unlikely temple of learning for Matthew Star, who is, literally, a space case. Matt (Peter Barton) is, as the opening narration informs, "a typical American teen-ager." It's just that he also happens to hail from Quadris, a distant planet racked by civil war. He has come to earth to hone his telepathic powers in preparation for the day that he and his guardian (the splendid Louis Gossett Jr.) will return home, unseat the usurpers and restore rightful rule to Quadris.

Matt's telepathic powers are useful for getting him out of all sorts of scrapes, including fitful pursuit by the dark forces from Quadris. One of this legion actually enrolls in Crestridge and shows her otherworldly qualities by unnatural rigidity of posture, persistent dilation of the pupils and a refusal to use contractions when speaking Earth talk. For all his telekinetic talents, though, the weirdest thing about The Powers of Matthew Star (NBC, Friday, 8-9 p.m. E.D.T.) is its portrait of adolescent America, all milk snacks and malt shops and homecoming games. Barton is so reminiscent of Donny Osmond that the viewer keeps waiting for him to levitate a can of Hawaiian Punch while whistling God Bless America. These shows may be aimed primarily at teens and preteens, but it is only from the canny nonsense of Square Pegs (CBS, Monday, 8-8:30 p.m.) that such viewers are likely to get a buzz of recognition. Weemawee High, happily, is not in the same time warp as Crestridge; in fact, it might pass for any local school where the students have actually heard of New Wave and use "punks" to mean musicians, not young criminals. Weemawee is a cockeyed canvas of persuasively contemporary adolescence across which Producer Anne Beatts (a former Saturday Night Live writer) and a talented team, including Director Kim Friedman, scrawl assorted sassy jokes, some shrewd send-ups and a few cultural graffiti.

Their heroines are two earnest outcasts, victims of the teen-age uglies (Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Linker), who devote most of their time to unsuccessful assaults on the In crowd. "You know," says the school New Waver admiringly, "I really like you two. You've got no style.

It's a totally different head." The girls grapple with such peers as Muffy Tepperman, the perennially earnest go-getter who organizes a dance so the class can adopt a starving Guatemalan child; Jennifer DeNuccio, a prototypical Valley Girl ("Like ... pass me out the door"); and a drama teacher who wants to stage a show called A Cafeteria Line and exhorts his aspiring actors to "share a trauma with me." Beatts, Friedman and their writers pack solid laughs, a little sentiment and sidelong satire of such youth-oriented enterprises as Grease and Fame all into a fleet half-hour. So far, Square Pegs is the sweetest surprise of the season. —By Jay Cocks