Sunday's season premiere sustains the quality of the first season, continues the story line in a completely credible way, and then opens up even more possibilities for future plot developments.

Self-delusion can grow fairly tiresome, in life and on TV, but what makes Amy sympathetic is that even though she almost convinces us at times that her personal fairy tale actually makes sense, we are always aware of her basic decency and, more important, her vulnerability.

Louie is the gold standard of contemporary TV comedy.

Fellowes does know how to write some tasty dialogue, especially for Maggie Smith....The other performances are equally winning, but beyond that, you can't help feeling these actors are having a jolly good time with all this overblown fluff. And so will you.

There are a couple of bush-league moments in the show....[But]those are minor quibbles, made even more insignificant by the extraordinary performances of Danes, Lewis, Patinkin and Baccarin.

The ensemble cast is terrific and the direction lean and perfectly pitched at every turn.

Sherlock is an electric marriage of great writing with great performances.

The dialogue in the first two episodes of the new season crackles with brilliance.

A gorgeous new documentary series on the Discovery Channel.

The series is so good that it isn't seriously harmed by its few minor flaws. Much of the dialogue is brilliantly written, revelatory and credible.

It's as great as ever.

The characters bring us into the action and, once there, we want to follow every development.

Based on the premiere, the season may wind up being the show's best so far, but even if it doesn't, Mad Men beats almost everything else on TV.

The trick to Archer is that you have to listen--and watch--carefully. What can be seen and heard on the surface is outlandish, but the real genius of the show is to be found in its seemingly offhand sight gags and throwaway lines.

Don Draper's journey has been and remains maddening, in a very good way as far as what makes a great TV show.

Like "Justified," it's impossible to point to one element as the primary reason it works so well.

Girls represents an exciting moment in television history because, like a handful of other shows (MTV's "Awkward," most notably) it not only makes great use of the medium but has the creative guts to realign it for a new century and a new generation.

There isn't a better cop show on TV right now than Southland.

Top of the Lake is Jane Campion and her cast at the top of their game.

Great historical documentaries not only enlighten us about the past, but tell us things about our own times as well, either directly or implicitly. Prohibition, the latest project by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, states the implicit links between the passage of the 18th Amendment and contemporary politics so loudly, you'd have to be drunk on bathtub gin not to get the message.

The portrait of Belafonte that emerges from the film is also the portrait of the times of his life, the times of the nation's life in the past 60 years.

The reason the show feels so real at every turn is that it is a perfect balance of dramatic realism and gentle humor.

There have been many great "Masterpiece" offerings over the decades, but I can't think of a single one that is as much out-and-out fun as Sherlock, a modern-dress Conan Doyle that crackles with superb writing, brilliant performances and snappy direction, and does it all while somehow managing to be oddly faithful to the original source material.

They [Rayna and Juliette], and the other characters, are anything but [one-dimensional cliches], thanks not only to the writing but also to the performances of the colorful and capable cast.

The emotional authenticity of Downton Abbey continues to make it a classic.

The entire constellation of impetuous, ambitious, determined and insecure young urbanites in Girls is realigning in the new season, but at no point in the four episodes sent to critics for review do you feel that any of it is artificial.

On the one hand, our love of the characters makes it more than possible to overlook the sloppiness of the scripts. On the other, though, it's because we do know these characters so well that we notice the inconsistencies in the first place. Again, none of this detracts significantly from our enjoyment of the series.

It's in dire need of tighter editing, most of all. Yes, the images from the '30s are powerful, but after a while, their power is diminished by repetition.