People Just Strange Enough to Be Real March 19, 2000 A university professor who designs slaughter houses. A Sunday school teacher who believes his wife is a witch. An academic who becomes obsessed with giant squid. The characters who populate ''Counterculture Wednesdays,'' a pair of reality-based programs shown on Bravo, are not the sort of people who usually appear on television. Oddballs, eccentrics and obsessives are the stars of ''First Person,'' a series of portraits by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, and plain old folk are the lead characters in ''Talelights,'' a hitchhiking travelogue conducted by the network journalist Jay Schadler. Taken together, the programs offer a rare look at people whose consuming fascinations and complicated lives are just strange enough to be real. The subjects of ''First Person” include a woman who cleans up crime scenes, a C.I.A. agent known as a master of disguise and a cryonics activist who froze his mother's head in the hope she would someday be revived (and reassembled). Mr. Morris, whose theatrical work includes ''The Thin Blue Line'' and Mr. Death, says he thinks of the series as a sort of nonfictional ''Twilight Zone.'' The point, Mr. Morris says, is to find deeper meaning in stories that often sound torn from the tabloids. ''A friend of mine once said that for me to be interested a story it had to involve questions you'd encounter in a first year philosophy course,'' he says. And while Mr. Morris takes obvious pleasure in the oddness of his subjects -- he couldn't resist, for instance, titling the episode about the cryonics activist ''I Dismember Mama'' -- he hopes the series isn't viewed as a freak show. ''It isn't oddity for the sake of oddity,'' he says. ''If there isn't some emotional depth, if there isn't a real character involved in thoughtful stuff, I'm not interested.'' In fact, Mr. Morris says he has a great deal of affection for many of his subjects. This is perhaps most apparent in his profile of Temple Grandin, the autistic professor who has designed a third of all slaughter houses in the United States. ''What this half hour has attempted to do is look at Temple not as a person with such-and-such a disease, but to look at her as a person period,'' he says. Mr. Morris has completed 11 of the programs and says he has ideas for at least 50 more. ''I'd like to do all kinds of different stories, including stories that are not at all freaky in nature,'' he says. ''I'd like to do people who are well known, even people who are involved in perfectly respectable occupations.'' In the program ''Talelights,'' Jay Schadler lets his diverse subjects choose him -- by picking him up on the side of the road. Mr. Schadler began interviewing motorists while hitchhiking three years ago on assignment for the ABC program ''Prime Time Live.'' ''I stuck out my thumb outside my house in Plum Island Massachusetts and 10 days later I wound up at Santa Monica Pier,'' he says. ''I came back with this incredible archive of authentic voices and real people. In network news, we give so much lip service to that, but this was the real thing. I wanted to keep doing it. In fact, it was the only thing I wanted to do.'' Introducing himself and asking permission ''to take pictures'' as he slides into the front seat, Mr. Schadler gets footage with the help of a tiny camera mounted on a suction cup that fastens to the interior of a windshield. He has encountered teenage orphans, single mothers, a racist truck driver and a homeless comedian. The experience has been nothing less than revelatory. ''I've been doing network news for 20 years and I've never come across a better way to listen to peoples stories,'' he says. ''I found out how amazing real people really are. I do believe the most interesting, twisted wonderful stories are just around the corner and in our lives. They're the story of your neighbor and your friend. I've discovered there are no ordinary people.''