LOS ANGELES - The premiere dates for the fall 2004 television season are starting to fall into place.

NBC will get a jump start on the fall, starting several new shows in late August rather than in September, the traditional month for premieres.

First up will be Hawaii, a breezy, old-fashioned cop show featuring Michael Biehn, Eric Balfour, Sharif Atkins and Ivan Sergei. The series will start with a preview episode Aug. 30 before moving into its regular 8 p.m. Wednesday time slot two days later. Father of the Pride, a computer-animated sitcom, will premiere Aug. 31 at 9 p.m.

Other new NBC shows include LAX (Sept. 6), a comedy-drama about Los Angeles International Airport, starring Heather Locklear and Blair Underwood; Joey (Sept. 9), the highly anticipated Friends spinoff; and Medical Investigation (Sept. 9), a drama about a team that prevents disease outbreaks.

The WB Network’s fall-debut schedule, only partially announced, will include the Sept 12 premiere of Jack & Bobby, a teen drama about two brothers, one of whom will grow up to be the president of the United States in 2040. Returning shows Steve Harvey’s Big Time and Charmed will also have their season debuts that night.

At ABC, the fall season will begin with the reality show The Benefactor on Sept. 13. The rest of the season will premiere several weeks later, including the Southern comedy Rodney (Sept. 21), with Rodney Carrington as a working-class dad who decides to become a stand-up comic; Lost (Sept. 22), an action-adventure series from Alias creator J.J. Abrams; life as we know it (Sept. 23), a male version of My So-Called Life; Complete Savages (Sept. 24), with Keith Carradine as the gruff dad of five rambunctious sons; Desperate Housewives (Sept. 26), a comedy-drama about suburban life; Boston Legal (Sept. 26), a spinoff of The Practice with James Spader, William Shatner and Mark Valley as ambitious lawyers; and Wife Swap (Sept. 29), a reality show in which women swap households for two weeks.

NBC screened the first episode of Father of the Pride for a roomful of critics this week at the semi-annual Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles. Potential advertisers had reacted badly to clips shown in New York in May, and NBC’s decision to screen a full episode may have been a way to stop the negative word-of-mouth.

Pride is an ambitious sitcom from DreamWorks, the company behind the Shrek movies. John Goodman, Cheryl Hines and Carl Reiner provide the voices of white lions who work for Las Vegas performers Siegfried and Roy. The series was almost derailed in October 2003, when performer Roy Horn was badly injured by a tiger. But Horn asked NBC to continue with the series.

The episode shown to critics was amusing, with most of the laughs coming from the over-the-top portrayals of Siegfried and Roy (with voices by actors Julian Holloway and David Herman), and from Reiner’s portrayal of an aging lothario of a lion, Sarmoti (a real lion in the stage show, whose name is an acronym for "Seigfried and Roy, Masters of the Impossible"). But parents should be warned: Despite the cute computer-animated animals, the humor is distinctly adult, which is why the series will be shown at 9 p.m.

The episode screened for critics involved attempts to get a pair of pandas to mate.

Star Trek fans were already concerned that UPN was planning to dump the latest incarnation of the franchise, Star Trek: Enterprise, which has gotten low ratings in its three-season Wednesday-night run.

Now comes word that UPN is moving the series to a time slot that has killed many science-fiction shows in the past.

As of Aug. 6, Enterprise will move to 8 p.m. Fridays. Ever since The X-Files moved to Sunday nights in 1996, no science-fiction series has been successful on Friday nights, because many members of their target audiences are out that night.