In the blistering heat of the past month, when almost every action seems to involved sweat, it comes as a relief to find any good excuse to stay inside and enjoy the air conditioning. This week, there's not one but two‹a pair of series as light and fizzy as low-calorie wine spritzers.

      A few years back, Michael Moore crafted the sly documentary "Roger & Me", a satirical jab at General Motors Corp. and its policy of layoffs. Now he's back with the same Detroit Tigers hat, the same rotund shape, the same biting sense of humor‹and a new television program all his own, a newsmagazine of sorts. TV Nation has no studio set, no satellite hookups, just a camera, a microphone and a wildly irreverent view of the world.

      Once again, Mr. Moore sharpens his deadpan and targets the odd, the pompous, the unjust and the just plain unexplainable. At Love Canal‹now "Black Creek Village"‹TV Nation finds 150 once-contaminated houses now being sold as attractive starter homes for young couples. In New York City, TV Nation looks at the penchant of taxi drivers to avoid African American passengers and asks, "Would cabbies pass by an Emmy-nominated black actor to pick up a white murderer?" (The answer is yes, consistently.)

      Mr. Moore's first-person essay style of journalism is long on dry wit and wry conversations with folks on the street. His pieces (and those of the other correspondents) are part travelogue, part investigation, part hilariously tongue-in-cheek quests. He travels to the former Soviet Union to find the missile that's pointing at his old hometown of Flint, Mich. He asks the Russians if they could just point it somewhere else. "Here's a map to the stars' homes," he says, unfolding the street guide for an official. "How about the home of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme? Could you point it there instead?"

      Perhaps the pointed social commentary in the Roger & Me mode is a report on the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement. When Mr. Moore realizes he has no budget for his show, he decides he could produces the whole thing for peanuts down in Mexico, as "the first TV show of the free-trade era." They make the TV sets down there, he says. Now there'll be a TV show. He traipses from one huge U.S. factory to the next‹Whirlpool, AT&T, Converse‹where some 500,000 American jobs have gone to Mexican laborers who'll work for 75 cents an hour.

      The charm of TV Nation is the way Mr. Moore champions the little guy, the underdog, fighting to make sense of a vast and often incomprehensible world. Deft and understated, TV Nation may become that rarest of species, a television program both funny and important.