This season's "Sopranos" is quite simply dazzling in its inventiveness, its reach, and one other aspect -- its capacity to pound audiences emotionally as the series has never before done.

The new season returns with a full roster of the vivid characters who have distinguished the series from the outset, and in ways more important than the cultural detail for which Mad Men has been rightly praised. They're smart, they're self-seeking, they're recognizably human.

There is no mystery about the potency of this series, slathered in wit, powered by storytelling of a high order.

Once you watch the first episode, it's going to be hard standing the wait for the next.

A tartly written number, (by Paul Feig) that is amusing and frequently hard-eyed in its look back at certain not so dear old school days. [27 Sept 1999, p.A32]

All are reintroduced in a premiere episode that lumbers along, overpopulated, burdened by the weight of its ambitions, flattened by misbegotten detours--but one, nevertheless, that surges to life in the end.

For their part, Messrs. Levitan and Lloyd set their ambitious sights on a rare kind of comedy, and they have, it appears, found the gold.

Slick and entertaining.

Taken together there is in these 5 1/2 hours, breathtaking in their scope and detail, nothing approaching a dull moment.

Its vivid, cliché-free writing has always been In Treatment's singular strength. That's even truer in its riveting new season--no small accomplishment.

What distinguishes this drama from countless mysteries about missing young women gone to terrifying deaths is the unrelenting focus, complex and haunting, on the family left behind. A riveting tale with a hunt for the killer that's no less compelling.

The vibrant brew of upstairs-downstairs relationships is more savory now, the characters more complicated.

It's not often that television with a scope so novelistic--so ambitious--comes along, and not often, either, that it yields drama so sterling.

It's best to get quickly past the confused and shapeless first episode and on to the rest, where the characters become individualized.

Season three's In Treatment [scripts are] entirely original. That may partly account for the so-far stagey quality of the episodes involving Jesse (Dane DeHaan), a 16-year-old gay male adoptee confronting a birth-mother problem....There is, otherwise, little that can detract from this series now roaring back with its old miraculous suspense and flinty intelligence.

Nagy's showy ventures in stylization, the raucous jokiness substituted for story are heavy encumbrances for this tale.

This three-hour production, starring most of the cast of the 2004 Broadway revival, flies by with lightning speed--and that cast led by Ms. Rashad, superbly authoritative, impossibly attractive as Lena, is no small part of the reason. Ms. McDonald is heartbreaking as Ruth, desperate to understand her husband's descent into misery, and Mr. Combs, who portrays that husband, delivers a sterling performance.

Mr. Gervais has in no way lost his touch.

Rectify is an ambitious and eloquent series, vivid in its portraiture of family and local citizens who don't know quite what to make of Daniel (a proclivity the film seems to share)--assurance enough of an engrossing six hours.

This immensely absorbing drama is worth any trouble it takes to catch up with its singular pleasures.

This hour [is] packed with Mr. Brooks at his most endearing.

The unit's work was top secret, its members' experiences, recounted in this film, fascinating above all for what they tell about the determined inventiveness, the all-out ambition to try everything, characteristic of that war effort.

There is scarcely a central figure in American film, whether Cecil B. DeMille, Darryl Zanuck, Frank Capra, William Wyler, Orson Welles or a legendary star--that list is far too long to recite--who doesn't come to life here, in fresh perspective. It's entertainment for grown-ups all right, and you won't find that at the multiplex.

It's clear that all that has made "24" so huge and deserved a success is on display again in these first smashing episodes.

It's quickly clear that this skillfully sustained, sharply plotted series is a fighter saga you'll want to follow to the final bell.

The cast is crowded and uniformly splendid. There's little about this captivating fusion of music, dance and potent storytelling of which the same couldn't be said.

It is, in short, a busy, fearlessly idealistic president (Martin Sheen) who struts through the neatly packaged, frequently deft and invariably predictable first episode of NBC's The West Wing, If the series continues at this level -- continues, that is, being handsomely produced, polished and thoroughly unexceptional in its content and aspirations, it should stand a very good chance of winning a bunch of Emmys. [22 Sept 1999, p.A32]

The Americans unfolds a thoroughly seductive tale of sleeper KGB agents.

Mad Men is infinitely more concerned with entertainment, an effort at which it succeeds, thanks mostly to its first-rate cast, disarming humor and period detail.

Alert to every deranged impulse of his clients, Mr. Silver brings his lessons home with vigor and wit.

There's plenty of life and overall quality to sustain this series for a long time to come.

The show's astringent tone, its excursions into low comedy--scenes like the one where everybody trying to diaper the baby ends up throwing up on her, and similarly stomach-churning fun--all work to counter the sentimentality of themes like this one. They work only in part here, and in this case that's all to the good. The show is meant to be a comedy, and it is--a smart and witty one--but there's no missing, either, under all that grotesquerie, its hard-core sweetness.

There's promise, plainly, of rich developments ahead.

A series about a high-school girl that's neither maudlin nor alarming nor conceived with intent to preach or to shock. It's further distinguished by its focus on entirely recognizable teenage pains, as endured by an entirely recognizable teenager, Jenna. Its other distinction: strong echoes of an older kind of storytelling, the sort whose characters grow and acquire depth.

It's an old story rolled out with all the power of the new--meticulously plotted, irresistibly suspenseful.

It's a testament to the crackling intelligence of the script (written by Mr. Boyd) that the nature of that menace hangs elusively in the air until the end.

Clearly, the creators of Filth (Amanda Coe, writer, Andy De Emmony, director) had their problems settling down to a comfortable tone for this figure who was, after all, famous entirely for her career on behalf of censorship. Julie Walters, who portrays her with grand and ebullient sympathy, shows evidence of no similar problems.

Four episodes of Life on Mars have by now aired, each livelier and more confident than the last and--despite its mush of a lead character--justifiably so. That's no small triumph.

They [the Loud family] are to the contrary enlarged, explained, their family loyalty honored, in a film that ends up packing an emotional punch that's as surprising as it is eloquent.

Moment after moment the drama deepens, the rich complexity of Ford's characters make themselves felt in all their strangeness and variety.

A marvelously complex atmosphere of wartime tension hovers over the peacetime lives of these characters--no small saving grace in a script that includes the hunt for yet another tiresome serial killer/rapist with strange sexual tastes, now a staple of British television mysteries.

Ms. Jones's president is compelling--a force to contend with. Much the same can be said of the new 24 itself--a force now returned in strength and, once again, highly addictive.

Its capacity to maintain an unyielding grip on your attention becomes similarly evident fast, as does one's strong sense that that grip isn't going to weaken anytime soon.

Thoroughly sharp, seriously compelling.

She's not funny, the aide is told--a line that elicited in this viewer a stream of unstoppable thoughts about what was not funny about this show, which is a lot, all of which ended up pointing, inexorably, to its writers. What saves the show is Ms. Louis-Dreyfus's Selina.

It requires a certain patience to stay with "Thief."

It's an unpretentiously low-down sitcom about a female odd couple--morally speaking, that is--with characters sufficiently odd, plots that unfold with sufficient zest, to lure a viewer in.

A suspense story enriched by its psychological dimension and three quietly compelling performances.

A wide-ranging work and a compelling one.

Prattle is, in any case, a minor note compared with the crackling pace of the first script, its evocative mood of menace at every turn, each police car racing to destinations that will reveal who knows what tragedy or unspeakable sight.

The new Killing appears to have taken a sharp turn from the kind of emotional life that enriched the last season, with its drama of a disappeared daughter. In its portrait of family grief, beautifully nuanced to the end, the series landed a dramatic punch more potent than that of the key question, "Who killed Rosie?" Itself a mystery of considerable power, and one that the latest chapter of The Killing will have to go some way to equal.

Whatever the complaints about the movie, it brings home, as few films on such themes ever do, the terrors of accusation and conviction.

For the time being it's a hard slog.

The Killing returns with all its powers intact, its uniformly superb performances--not least Ms. Enos's Detective Linden and Mr. Sexton's Stanley.

There's a lot going on in Bent. A lot of absurdity, a lot of characters, and that vital thing, a lot of talent.

[The wife is] not to be ignored. The same holds true for these two splendid hours of entertainment.

The standard caution is relevant -- debut episodes tend to be highly polished. All the more reason to enjoy the hilarious scenes and fine ensemble cast here.

Its unyielding moral passion, exemplified in the character and pursuits of its hero, Detective Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones), is the life force that propels this powerful--and powerfully violent--tale of New York City, 1864.

Thomas Jane and Tanya Skagle's performances aside, Hung remains, despite all efforts to inform it with larger meaning, trapped in being all about just what that title says.

The arrival of one pure and unadulterated drama about a passion as old as man is something to celebrate. That's particularly true when that drama is as spellbinding in its satisfyingly gaudy way, as Revenge turns out to be.

A fact-based film of exceptional power.

It promises to be a journey that should draw plenty of viewers.

The only suspects of interest in this crime series are the producers and writers who threw this hapless business together and called it "Prime Suspect."

"Justice" chugs along nicely, its plots gratifyingly tense, its dialogue sharp and uncluttered.

Its semi-psychic hero is intriguing enough and confident enough--not everybody can sneak a hypnosis-inducing trance into an exchange with a reluctant witness as deftly as he can--to bring viewers under his spell.

Forget the preposterousness of the plot -- it's easy enough to do -- and enjoy the suspense, of which there's plenty.

HBO's Bored to Death sneaks up speedily, an eight-part comic enterprise that's soon transformed into flat-out inspired comedy.

Highly compelling most of the time.

There are precious few signs of trouble or uncertainty in the polished, instantaneously seductive finished product on display in its first episode.

This series, about an underground British antiterror team that has joined forces with U.S. Special Forces veteran Damien Scott (Sullivan Stapleton), does succeed in wresting plenty of high-level suspense out of these low-aiming scripts--no small miracle.

Smarter and snappier than one might have expected from a familiar sitcom premise.

These are, in short, characters with a long literary-and Hollywood-pedigree. Which makes all the more impressive the vividness and mystery they bring to this series (adapted by Andrew Davies from a 1936 novel by Winifred Holtby)--thanks, needless to say, to extraordinarily seductive performances.

If the quality of this one, so irresistible in its vitality and suspense, does fail to hold up, its creators will have delivered, at the least, one remarkably fine hour.

It promised, in short, steadily absorbing plots and skilled writing, and these the series has delivered ever since.

House of Lies about the thievery of management consultants, manages to turn a theme with reasonable comedic potential into a vehicle for 16-year-old males, though dressed up as satire for sophisticates.

It's Mr. Sutherland's portrayal of the father--unyielding in his effort to break through to his mute child and grasp what he's trying to say with his numbers--that is the heart of this story, the power likely to sustain this promising enterprise.

The real Messrs. Gervais and Merchant haven't lost their touch with self-humiliating characters.

Golden Boy is packed with fine performances, but no amount of actorly talent could have done for this series what its intelligently twisty plots, its nuanced dialogue bearing a distinct resemblance to human exchange--even from the mouths of TV police detectives--has done.

Mike & Molly may not at first seem to offer much (other, that is, than streams of fat jokes), but it boasts a cast with distinctive looks and a capacity to deliver quick comedic jabs that can make you howl. That these come unexpectedly in the midst of endless gross clatter is one of those mysteries of the creative process best not to dwell upon.

As the premiere episode nears its end, the plot begins thickening agreeably with so many secrets, dark revelations, shocks and betrayals it all begins to seem familiarly and comfortably absorbing.

The main deadly force in Eli Stone is its scripts, which are ever so spritely in tone, ever so dumb in essence.

An intriguing look at Americans with their own ideas of the purpose-driven life.

Its smartness comes shining through despite the claptrap (none worse than the parade of sex scenes, soft-porn variety, whose noisiness is exceeded only by their unconvincingness); its story, littered with intriguingly repellent characters, like Kai Proctor (Ulrich Thomsen), local evil tycoon, grows ever more enticing.

The only bright light in this grimness is Mr. Piven's Ari--ever his electric self even in the middle of heartbreak (he's separated from his wife). Long may he shine.

The problem is--as is ever the case in sitcoms with no future, and this is one of them--vapid writing and characters drawn according to formula.

What this comedy has is the charm of its brash comic energy. That it's an energy located mostly in a single character, and not the main one either--officially, anyway-makes little difference.

The lineup of episodes has been rich in their revelations, moving in their testaments to the lives of the employees and, especially, to the meaning to them of their daily labor. There is above all no simulated emotion in what those workers say, no artifice—a new and revolutionary turn for the genre.

"Shark" suffers from a variety of flaws too numerous to detail here, not least its sentimentality, its wooden characters, its tin-eared dialogue.

To watch Mr. Pacino's Spector pull himself back from the edge to shout, bitterly, that of course he knows this is only a rehearsal--he'll go on, awkwardly, to assure the shaken defense team that they've done well--is to feel the full force of the intelligence behind this drama.

A film that so deepens the dimensions of the known-all thanks to a masterful performance by Rob Lowe--it has the force and mystery of a new story.

This series... is, for all its noise, sharply plotted, visually rich, heavily informed by intrigues and intriguing characters

There's more than enough absurd charm in the show, meanwhile, to make the wait worthwhile.

Government agents loll around the beach, exchanging the kind of banter for which television writers would, in a just world, be sent to some quiet place to reflect on their idiocy. All this, amid the plotting of incoherent designs to trap drug dealers, and plenty of sand and dazzling blue skies--elements that have on occasion succeeded in mitigating the flaws of some deadly TV series. This deadly series isn't one of them.

The film draws effectively on the power of two seductive performances--those of Nico Evers-Swindell as William and of Camilla Luddington as Kate Middleton....It's a familiar story and an entertaining one.

It is, in its artfulness and drama, a smashing pilot and--from the evidence of the next episodes--a reliable indicator of the quality to come.

It's clear that Mr. Sorkin's main interest in The Newsroom runs to concerns other than characters and storytelling.

This is a different series, one whose good start has to do with its capacity to be affecting, which it is in its picture of loss and longing--a sense this young Carrie projects persuasively.

The new Melrose Place may not be the old, but it is, all told, instantly engaging and--from the evidence--likely to remain so.