Some Englishmen are ready to save American summer television. Again.

"So You Think You Can Dance" is a reality competition a la "American Idol."

That's logical enough: The same producers launched "Idol," three summers ago.

"We came over very arrogantly," Nigel Lythgoe recalls. "We actually believed it would be as big a hit as it became."

What they didn't predict was the staying power.

"Around the third season the (ratings) were actually going up," Lythgoe says. "We thought, 'Wow, why haven't we started to slip the way people says we would?' "

Now "Dance" tries for more of the same.

The first phases — shown in the two-hour opener — were "Idol"-like, with open auditions. "You can't believe the number of belly dancers that we saw," Lythgoe says.

Some of those auditioning were excellent, albeit specialized, Lythgoe says. "We saw break dancers, we saw hip-hop dancers, classical dancers ... when someone does eight pirouettes on his head, you have to be impressed."

The next phases — with Lauren Sanchez, a Los Angeles news anchor as the show's host — will require broader skills.

The show will choose 16 dancers, eight male and eight female, judged by a panel of choreographers. Each week, each person gets half the score from a solo routine; the other half is the tough part.

The dancers are paired off and given a dance — a tango or waltz or whatever — to learn.

"They have to learn it in two days," Lythgoe says. "It's not like trying to learn a song in two days; here you have to coordinate it with someone else."

Lythgoe — who created the show with Simon Fuller — was a dancer himself a generation ago. He figures the contestants will be a tad different from the "Idol" singers.

"I do think they're more resilient," he says. "They've had a certain amount of training."

He's seen this reality-competition trend from its British beginnings. Before "Idol," there was "Popstars," creating a group from scratch. And Lythgoe was the acerbic judge.

"He had been the original 'Mr. Nasty' on 'Popstars' in Britain," Simon Cowell wrote in "I Don't Want to Be Rude, But ..." (Broadway Books, 2003).

Then Fuller, who created the Spice Girls, created "Pop Idol" in England and proposed "American Idol." A team of three Simons — Fuller, Cowell and Jones — went to the United States to pitch it to networks.

The pitches flopped. Recalling one session with an unspecified network executive, Cowell wrote: "The meeting was awful, the climate was awful, the man was awful."

The show's dark, British tone seemed to upset American programmers. "American Idol" was approved, Cowell says, mainly because Rupert Murdoch — who was born in Australia and prospered in England — owned Fox.

In the sleepy summer of 2002, Fox suddenly had a show with young pop singers being berated by Cowell, one of the judges.

"When we first came here, Simon Cowell was booed," Lythgoe says. "He still is ... but the second year, you'd get some nods of agreement."

Cowell became a celebrity. So did the other judges, Paula Abdul (yes, Lythgoe says, she'll be back next season) and Randy Jackson.