Here we are in mid-October, when the commotion caused by all the new fall premieres ought to be settling down. Instead, it feels like September was just a warm-up. (Things sure were simpler for a TV critic when cable channels made only one or two new shows a year and kept them out of the networks&rsquo; way.)</p><p>Let&rsquo;s begin with the best drama pilot I saw over the summer. It&rsquo;s premiering this week, not on NBC, but on a cable channel owned by NBC. <strong>&ldquo;White Collar&rdquo;</strong> (9 p.m. Friday, USA) stars Matt Bomer and Tim DeKay in a buddy series that channels the story line of &ldquo;Catch Me If You Can&rdquo; but reminds me of &ldquo;The Rockford Files&rdquo; and most of the other shows on USA that I like.</p><p>Brilliant white-collar felon Neal Caffrey (Bomer) doesn&rsquo;t believe in violence. You won&rsquo;t see him squeezing pay-phone money out of someone, as Jimbo Rockford once did, by threatening to &ldquo;crack you open like a piggy bank.&rdquo; Caffrey would rather hack his way into Verizon&rsquo;s East Coast switchboard, and probably do it in less time than it takes to find a pay phone.</p><p>FBI agent Peter Burke (DeKay) is the one who caught him, and as Caffrey nears the end of his prison sentence, it occurs to Burke that he&rsquo;s a lot smarter than any of the Ivy League idiots who surround him at the bureau. </p><p>Burke also discovers that Caffrey has emotional as well as criminal intelligence. Caffrey even seems to have better chemistry with Burke&rsquo;s wife (Tiffani Thiessen) than he does. After Burke gives him a peasant&rsquo;s wage to live in New York City, Caffrey charms his way into a rich lady&rsquo;s spare bedroom. That the rich lady is played effortlessly by Diahann Carroll is just one of many appealing choices the producers of &ldquo;White Collar&rdquo; have made.</p><p> This is an escapist crime drama in the same vein as all of USA&rsquo;s other escapist crime dramas &mdash; &ldquo;Monk,&rdquo; &ldquo;Psych,&rdquo; &ldquo;Burn Notice&rdquo; &mdash; but there&rsquo;s no sin in that. In fact, if USA keeps building them, and people keep watching them, pretty soon USA and NBC will need to trade places on the channel lineup.</p><p><strong>&ldquo;Occupation&rdquo; </strong>is a war drama not like other war dramas. Set in Basra, Iraq, just after the invasion, the four-hour miniseries (airing in its entirety at 7 tonight on BBC America) follows three British Army comrades as they form unexpected ties to that volatile region, only to have those bonds, and the bonds among them, tested by violence, ego and the simple fact that Iraq is not their home.</p><p>Stephen Graham, Warren Brown and one of my favorite British TV actors, James Nesbitt, co-star as comrades in arms who decide to return to Basra after their tour of duty &mdash; one to help the Iraqis back on their feet, another to fleece the U.S. government, the third to pursue a love interest. Each of these storylines is interesting enough on its own, but the way &ldquo;Occupation&rdquo; looks at Iraq through the eyes of non-Americans only enhances the drama.</p><p>Be warned, though. You might want to kick on the closed captions to watch &ldquo;Occupation,&rdquo; so as to follow the mumbly accented dialogue.</p><p><strong>&ldquo;Lock &rsquo;n Load&rdquo; (7 p.m. Wednesday, Showtime) </strong>is another envelope-pushing reality series from Showtime. This one features actual customers of the Shootist, a combination gun store and pistol range in suburban Denver. The Shootist&rsquo;s high-octane sales whiz, Josh T. Ryan, lets us peer in on his often-amusing transactions via hidden cameras planted around the store. It&rsquo;s &ldquo;Taxicab Confessions&rdquo; meets the Outdoor Channel.