Anthology series, such as Fox's new "Tribeca," have never been an audience magnet for network television, which explains their absence from the tube over the years.

Besides television classics like "The Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," the medium has rarely produced anthologies that have fully realized the potential of the form. Such shows have seemed preoccupied with fitting stories into small, user-friendly packages rather than developing the stories themselves.

Too many times, anthologies on television have been science fiction or fantasy -- "Amazing Stories," "Tales From the Crypt," "The Hitchhiker," and when things were getting really bad, they brought back "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

Now here's "Tribeca" (Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. on the Fox Network), a dramatic anthology series that succeeds without aliens, cackling cryptkeepers or Hitchcock.

The show is named after a neighborhood in New York City and revolves around the people who inhabit it. Rarely has television captured the feel of big city life like "Tribeca" does. The creators of the show seem to realize that the ordinary world contains more fascinating locales than anything in the Twilight Zone.

The show does have two recurring characters that the stories involve on a regular basis: a patrol cop (Joe Morton) and a restaurant owner (Phillip Bosco). Yet the stories revolve around the residents we meet on a weekly basis, including an angry homeless man, a troubled detective and a womanizer.

There are times when the show occasionaly slips into sentimentality, the dialouge drifting from realistic chatter into long-winded soliloquies. Yet underneath this veneer is stark realism, as well as a realization that the characters' troubles can seldom be solved in a one-hour program. Many of the episodes do not so much as "end" as they do "let go," disallowing neat and happy endings that city life so seldom provides.

Much of the praise for that must go to series creator and co-executive producer David J. Burke, who brings the same sense of character development and realism that propelled his last series, CBS's "Wiseguy." Much of the attention concerning the show has gone to co-executive producer Robert DeNiro, but Burke's style is evident in the programs' interesting characters and situations.

"Tribeca" is a triumph, proving that television doesn't need to resurrect Hitchcock to produce a fine anthology -- it just needs some originality.