For years, USA was best known for Gilbert Gottfried, the grating comic who leeringly introduced R-rated movies aimed at 13-year-old boys up past their bedtimes—and little else.
   “Monk” officially changed all that, and with last year’s moody, oddball crime series “Touching Evil,” USA suddenly announced itself as an actual (if very occasional) destination for quality TV.
   With the terrific new sci-fi mini-series “The 4400”—not to be confused with “The 700 Club”—that burgeoning reputation should be cemented. 
  The show—which has its two-hour premiere on Sunday at 9 p.m., then airs in hour-long installments over the next four weeks—borrows liberally from other sci-fi series but still manages to seem startlingly intelligent and original.
   “The 4400” begins, by way of a prologue, with a series of disappearances—presumably alien abductions, since all are accompanied by a blinding light from the sky. 
  Maia, a young girl, is taken while picking flowers in the California woods in 1946 (in a scene reminiscent of the famous Lyndon Johnson ad imagining nuclear apocalypse).
   Richard, a black soldier serving in the Korean War in 1951, vanishes just after getting pummeled for having a relationship with a white woman. Orson (“Law & Order” vet Michael Moriarty), a wealthy, happily married middle-age lawyer, disappears from his office building in 1979. 
   In 2001, a bright light shines down on Kyle and Shawn, teenage cousins enjoying a night of drinking, leaving Kyle in a coma and Shawn simply gone.
   Fast forward to “present day,” when a mysterious comet explodes near earth. (The special effects may be brilliant or laughable. On the preview tape, nearly all were incomplete; the words “VFX: curiously bright comet,” for example, take the place of what will, one imagines, be a shot of a curiously bright comet.)
   When the smoke clears, 4,400 people who have vanished over the decades have miraculously returned, all the same age as when they disappeared, and none with any memory of what happened—and no idea that any time has elapsed.
   It’s a classic sci-fi setup, but rather than playing out like an episode of “The X-Files” or “The Twilight Zone” stretched to hellish length, the first two hours of “The 4400” do a remarkably compelling job of examining the human ramifications of these events.
   There are traces of humor to be found: Richard, the African-American soldier, flips through a news magazine and blurts out, “The Secretary of State is colored?” Shawn, who is very white, corrects him: “Black.”
  But for the most part, the struggle of the returnees to readjust to society, to figure out where they fit in an unfamiliar world, is remarkably moving. Their parents have died, their children have grown up, their spouses have aged and remarried—all in what, to them, has only been an instant.
  Of course, this is a sci-fi series. Slowly, as the 4,400 try and inevitably fail to rejoin society, they begin to discover that they possess strange telekinetic or psychic abilities—which can veer dangerously out of control.
   Assigned to investigate what happened to the group and why they all seem to be heading to Seattle—perhaps Starbucks is behind it all?—are two federal agents, Tom Baldwin (a bland Joel Gretsch) and Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie), a poor man’s Mulder and Scully. Like their “X-Files” predecessors, Tom has a personal stake in finding the truth while Diana is a no-nonsense scientist.
   The stories of the 4,400 are fascinating. The stories of these two are not. 
  Whenever the series cuts away from the saga of the returnees to delve into the personal lives of the agents, the show comes grinding to a halt.
   But the rest of the characters that make up this haunting, gripping premiere are worth watching, as they struggle and rage against a world that no longer accepts them. 
   And hey—4,400 out of 4,402 ain’t bad.