There's a certain connectedness in the fact that HBO's big production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America debuts after the season finale of Carnivale. Both works traffic in hallucinogenic visions and the blurring between fantasy and reality, both center around outsiders struggling to survive overwhelming hardship, both feature a seemingly conservative (but at root hypocritical) human monster in the center of the action.

My reason for even bringing up the surface similarities between Kushner's Pulitzer-winning two-night drama and a pulpish cable fantasy soap is to note how much the stuff of revelation has become a part of our teevee entertainment. After watching grubby Ben Harper battle ineffectively against his assigned role as prophet warrior, do we still have room for poor dementia-ridden Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) and his aural visitations by the angels? Once we've experienced Brother Justin's travails in a Depression Era asylum, what do we do with scabrous AIDS-ridden Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) babbling on the floor to the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep)? First half of Angels (first broadcast last Sunday, with the second half scheduled for this coming weekend) ends with a winged messenger crashing through the ceiling of Prior's city apartment? Fine. So how's that wacky God gonna appear to Joan of Arcadia this week?

But if the supernatural visitations of this ten-year-old play have become commonplace in the intervening years, the character drama hasn't. Kushner's dialog - packed with unapologetic extended dramatic monologues and poetic flights of fancy - moves from yowls of rage to laugh-out-loud gotchas, and the actors in Mike Nichols' teevee adaptation handle the kaleidoscopic structure without any flubs. I especially enjoyed Jeffrey Wright's unreal travel agent in his interactions with mentally ill pill popper Harper (Mary-Louise Parker); there's a vivid wit and sadness to the scenes they have together that's truly striking.

As a six-hour-plus dramatic extravaganza, Angels isn't easy to summarize. The multi-layered plot circles around a cluster of characters:

former Joseph McCarthy hatchetman Cohn, stricken with AIDS but unwilling to acknowledge the fact (to Cohn, to admit what he has is to give up years of accumulated political power);

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