ON PAPER, “Aliens in America” has all the necessary prerequisites for being the most painfully unfunny, most offensive and least minority-friendly show on TV.

Set in a nearly all-white suburban America: check.

Set mostly in high school: check.

Includes a former star of “Caroline in the City” (that’s right, we knew who she was and we said it): check.

Core concept is the humor that arises when a foreigner comes to the U.S.: check.

The fear of terrorism is an unspoken source of much amusement: check.

The show is appearing on a second-string network: check.

Said foreigner (played by Adhir Kalyan) has a ridiculous accent and dresses like he just stepped off the set of Osama bin Laden’s latest video release: check and check.

So imagine our surprise when the pilot episode of the CW show airing on Oct. 1 didn’t turn out to be a post-Sept. 11 “Perfect Strangers.” Instead, it was funny, touching and among the most culturally sensitive and culturally literate shows on TV.

It starts off with a friendless, remarkably untelegenic (for a TV sitcom) high-school kid in Wisconsin (played by Dan Byrd). He’s saddled with: an obnoxious, xenophobic and popularity-obsessed mother living vicariously through him; an emotionally absent father concerned only with making a quick buck; and a vapid, voluptuous younger sister who’s just beginning to embrace her destiny as the school slut. In other words, the stereotypes in the show aren’t the ones Americans have of Muslims or South Asians, but the ones much of the rest of the world has about Americans. It’s a brilliant move.

Enter the Pakistani kid. When our lonely geek’s mother enrolls the family in a student-exchange program, she expects the new addition to their home to be a hunky blond Scandinavian Thor type who’ll carry her son along into high-school stardom. What they get instead is a slight, brown-skinned boy in a white kufi who, as one high-school teacher puts it, “practices Muslimism.” Well, the show just writes itself from there, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the pilot episode ends up hinting at some deep issues, like the concept of being “normal” in America, about what it’s like being an outsider in your own society (“Aliens” is plural for a reason), and poking fun at Westerners’ hysterical fear of the sight of Muslim men praying—all without beating the viewer over the head with the message. Muslims and Asians everywhere can put down their pens and save the paper they were going to use for their letters of protest to the CW. If anyone should be complaining about this show, it’s people who live in Wisconsin. •