There’s no performance quite on par with Damian Lewis’s star turn as the quiet, decent company leader in "Band," but the three leads all take advantage of their showcase roles to craft characters that transcend both war movie cliches and the actors’ own mixed backgrounds.

This is an absolute: Top of the Lake is great.

It's the first outright catastrophe of FX's post-"The Shield" era.

It's the best-looking pilot of the season--maybe the best new show, period--even though it may not look that good in the future.

It's so small and spare and simple, and yet it can be incredibly effective at what it does. Nice to have it back.

Now that Sutter and company have finished the long and difficult task of fixing what wasn't working, I want to know everything it has to offer--even if some of those things may give me nightmares.

It is slow, and it requires work and careful observation, but when it achieves its breakthroughs, the effects can be as extraordinary and dynamic as any other drama on television.

Because Dexter's victims are always so evil, we're inclined to root for him, but moments like that--or one in where Dexter admits he doesn't really care about saving innocents, just scratching his itch to kill--gives the show more moral complexity than you would expect, and it's the better for that.

All the gunplay, pedal-to-the-metal action and cartoon villains cheapen any serious talk of what's going on in the city.

It's at once a simple, R-rated office comedy about a bunch of people who would have nothing to do with each other if they didn't work together, and a pretty wicked satire of the quest for fame at all costs.

Thanks to committed performances from Cumberbatch and Freeman, and clever writing from Moffat and Gatiss, most of it works splendidly.

Chiklis always sells his end of it, and when he has a great actor opposite him, you don't really notice how puzzling the story arcs would get.

Season five is a definite improvement on season four, but only to a point. There aren't as many different stories rattling around, but the show's still so crowded that it has to bounce from scene to scene, subplot to subplot, so quickly that very little gets a chance to breathe.

At a time when every TV comedy seems content to look and sound like every other TV comedy, any show that tries to break the mold deserves to be applauded. And a show like Sports Night that's snappy, well written, thought-provoking, and sometimes funny and moving at the same time deserves no less than a standing ovation. [22 Sept 1998, p.59]

It's a smart mix of soap opera, music and political intrigue.

In season two, the strengths of Treme remain strengths, while some of the show's weaknesses have been much improved.

So the atmosphere and central performances feel worthy of telling one story over 13 hours. My concern is whether the story can say the same.

The ideas behind most of these developments are fine, but they get thrown at the viewer so haphazardly as to require dramatic organ music when each is introduced.

Fey's parts of the premiere are terrific, and next week's episode is an even better--and sillier--showcase for her.

With this cast, and the writing of Fresco and company, I expect Ted season two to again hit the heights of that first season. But these two episodes are a reminder of how hard it is to pull that off.

Though there isn't anything appreciably wrong with the third season, it's hard to fight the feeling that maybe Dexter is a concept that has reached its expiration date.

The darker and more complicated life gets for the Sons, the better the TV show tends to be. And based on the four episodes I've seen, Sons is still at the incredible level it achieved a year ago, when it became one of the best dramas on television.

By reattaching his misery to 9/11, and by reminding us that everyone around him still shares in the miseries of that day, Rescue Me has lit a new fire under both the man and his show.

Nurse Jackie season 4 is all consequences, all the time--and is much, much more satisfying overall as a result.

Downton in season 3 is still a soap opera (as it was in season 1, as well), but it's a smarter one; it's harder to see the puppet strings Fellowes is pulling this year to get to his desired outcomes.

A show this whimsical needs a few anchors to avoid floating away altogether. Emerson is one, and the hands-off Ned and Chuck romance is the other.

The premiere doesn't necessarily have the sort of mythical, spine-tingling moments that the first season provided from time to time, but the acting remains strong (particularly by Chandler and Britton, the First Couple of primetime) and it feels like an episode of Friday Night Lights in a way that very little of season two did.

If the world that Simon, Burns, Wright and company drop us into can be confusing at first (mirroring, as they intended, the confusion that Wright felt at the time), it's a fully-realized one that's both thousands of miles away (literally and figuratively) from the Baltimore of "The Wire" and one that will feel very familiar to anyone who spent a lot of time watching McNulty and Bunk drink at the train tracks.