“Morals,” about a New York City vice squad’s wacky adventures in the skin trade, originally included such colorful phrases as “pussy posse” and frequent uses of the words “whore” and “penis.” Critics who saw the pilot were appalled and CBS persuaded producers Stephen Bochco and Jay Tarses to compromise their art and dial back the bachelor-party language. “It’s not gonna be confused with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show’,” says CBS Entertainment president Leslie Moonves. “But people will be notified about what kind of show this is.” They should also be notified that the most offensive thing about the show is that it isn’t funny.

“Millennium” makes “Public Morals” look like “Sesame Street.” Viewers definitely should be prepped for this one. Something like, Warning! Program contains severed heads, strippers and live burials. Created by Chris Carter (“The X-Files”), the series is built around a murky, conspiratorial concept with paranormal overtones. An ex-FBI guy named Frank Black (played by B-movie icon Lance Henriksen) relocates to Seattle to raise his family and “do a little consulting,” which turns out to mean hunting down messianic murderers for a shadowy organization called “The Millennium Group.” True to his name, Black has the power to see into criminals’ hearts of darkness and read their twisted minds. He’s “the man with the X-ray eyes,” and thanks to his clairvoyance, local cops unearth a gay hustler who’s had his eyes and mouth sewn shut and been buried alive in a box along with the severed head of a dead stripper. (Don’t you hate when that happens?)

“It’s not meant to be gratuitous,” Carter says in defense of his hard-core imagery. “I want to see someone having a responsible reaction to the violence I read about in my daily newspaper.” He says he’s competing for the public’s waning attention span with movies like “Seven” and “Silence of the Lambs,” which besides being “so much more violent than anything I could do on TV” also win Oscars. To its credit, “Millennium” does look more like a movie than a TV show, but Henriksen is no Anthony Hopkins and Carter has a penchant for pretentious mumbo jumbo about the end of the world, forecast by millenarians as the Year 2000. The “X-Files” mantra is “The truth is out there.” At the beginning of “Millennium” the words on the screen are “Who cares?” When viewers get over the shock tactics, they may ask themselves the same thing about these two shows.