You won't find a better rendering of time and place anywhere else on the sprawling TV landscape. This is still the real deal, through and through.

So far it's the televised documentary film of the year, with its truths stranger than fiction from opening move to checkmate.

The 90-minute HBO documentary, one of the very best in a long line of standouts, is in no way a pity party for Flood.

Viewers craving a satisfying gourmet meal rather than another summertime "reality" Moon Pie are urged to make The Hour a Wednesday night ritual for the next six weeks.

The fun is in the snappy dialogue and the impeccable actors delivering it.

It's compelling, enthralling and steeped in current realities.

It's HBO's most mature half-hour series ever, rising above the material worlds of Sex and the City and Entourage to offer a road worth taking in pursuit of a "higher self."

In the end, it may be the most fun you'll ever have with a Ken Burns film.

It has Emmy caliber performances from its two leads and an authenticity that won't quit.

FX sent the first five half-hours for review, and they're all gems.

Gilligan and company keep on pushing Breaking Bad to new highs.

The drought-stricken, spirit-sapping Great Plains of the 1930s get the lyrical and learned Burns treatment.

Watch at whatever pace you'd like--immediately. Given its quality, I think you'll be drinking it all in sooner rather than later.

It keeps going about its business, getting better than ever each season with a restrained but gripping approach that's also sure to wear well decades from now.

Although its principal supporting players are first-rate, Rectify would be lost in transition without Young’s stellar work in the lead role. It’s a fearless, fully immersed, Emmy caliber performance tinged with sadness, searching, primitive pleasures and even a little comedy.

Louis C.K. shoots from the lip and keeps scoring. The beauty is the seeming ease with which he does this. And the knowledge of how hard it really is.

It sometimes lapses into the abundant cliches of its genre. Pound for pound, though, you won't see many better dramas this season. Gloves on or off, it keeps scoring points.

[A] very amusing and splendidly acted comedy about what happens when an American television network mucks up a long-running, award-laden British hit.

Comedy Central's The Daily Show at last has a worthy rival in the "fake news" game.

Traffic Light is winning and amusing without being loud and loutish.

The disparate detectives of The Killing may have their own means and methods of getting to the bottom of this. But the overall air of believability is palpable from the start. All the better for taking a deep breath and diving right in.

Dexter likewise remains in solid shape, with new characters generating some additional heat while its namesake keeps plying his trade.

Not everything is letter-perfect about The Big C. But Linney sure is--and that's more than enough.

A summertime winner here on the strength of strong acting, engaging writing and an immediately gripping premise.

Grammer's performance is thoroughly engaging and convincing. And the events swirling around him never fail to snap, crackle and pop.

Vietnam In HD is vivid and compelling without being intrinsically political.

It's a genuinely chilling four-hour adaptation of the tireless horror-meister's 1998 bestseller.

The real joys of Smash are its performances and production numbers, some fantasized, others part of the bare bones auditioning process.

In the end, fans of well-paced political potboilers will find much to like about Game Change. As will those who simply want to be entertained by a crackling good melodrama.

For now, The Killing has made a very good re-start.

It's a thoroughly entertaining romp, with the television industry as a combination Tilt-A-Whirl/merry-go-round.

Authentically grimy, solidly built and well-paced, Hatfields & McCoys is violent without being gratuitous.

Girls above all is about uncomfortable creatures. That can be a helluva thing to watch at times. But still very see-worthy.

The first two hours of Last Resort are bracingly strong on pulling power.

It's both a promising and foreboding series, with class warfare an ever-present force that wants no part of any idealized forms of truth, justice and the American way.

Through it all, though, Downton Abbey is still superior entertainment on a grand scale.

References to Beyonce and Michelle Obama are worked in without reaching too hard. And the "black experience," although hardly monolithic, resonates in ways that make this version quite special and different.

No cameras were allowed for this [interviews with the band], making it sometimes difficult to decipher just who's talking during the otherwise brilliantly edited archival footage assembled by filmmaker Brett Morgen

The Americans enthralls with its complexities, simplicities and overall derring-do.

It's the strongest medical series since House arrived on Fox for an eight-season run that ended last spring. The genre badly needs a transfusion. And at last, here's a strong one.

It’s terrific fun as well as involving drama.

It's coarse and sometimes dirty to the touch, but pretty damned hilarious at crunch times. FX just might have the standout new comedy series of this season.

Vikings enthrallingly captures the world of Norsemen and oarsmen, circa 793 in the Eastern Baltic but soon heading West to England.

HBO subscribers thereby are the beneficiaries of a film with star power and staying power. It won’t surprise you with its outcome--or for the most part, how it gets there. But it may well have more of an impact than anticipated.

Maron, 49, seems to be effortlessly gliding through his angst, laughing only rarely while giving viewers far more reason to do so.

Potentially the best new comedy series of this season.

It's FX scoring again with another out of the box, jump-in-your-face series that most assuredly isn't for everyone but most definitely knows what it's doing.

The thrill of discovery is long gone for True Blood. But the thrill of a new season is still very much in play. The first three episode of Season 4 had just enough pulling power to keep me in the fold.

Coal has the right stuff, putting viewers of a mind to hurt for these men--who hurt right back.

Happy Endings quickly gets its game in gear and emerges as ABC's best new sitcom since Better Off Ted unfortunately failed to find an audience.

Cinema Verite's strength is in dramatizing the off-camera seductions and betrayals that led to the Louds being vilified in many quarters before the entire family went on The Dick Cavett Show to both tell their side of the story and confront filmmaker Craig Gilbert.

Kurt Sutter, SOA's creative mastermind, has kept the scripts tight and the action invigorating.

Too Big to Fail effectively follows the money while humanizing most of the moneychangers.

Fox seems to be on the right track, though, with a lead character who has ample potential to gawkily bloom and grow.

A smart, sedate Canadian production imported by ABC for a summertime run.

It's all a lot to swallow, let alone digest. But Game of Thrones nonetheless is an undertaking worth applauding for its audacity if not always for its overall senses of direction or cohesion.

Entourage looks as though it still has enough juice--comedy, drama and Drama-wise--to make its last season a keeper.

Fans of the fantastical can do far worse than Once Upon A Time, which manages to both stir the pulse and please the senses with its beautifully imagined medieval times.

The best new crime drama of the fall season doesn't necessarily have to be an original idea. It just has to have the right people in place.

Season 2 so far is still a watchable feast of decayed human flesh and frayed nerve endings.

Despite its lead characters' fragile makeups, Free Agents is a niftily scripted, bracingly grownup comedy when in the hands of its two leads.

It all makes for a promising start on a network whose best comedies invariably wind up on Thursday nights. Whitney is already there, and looks as though it just might belong.

Living in the Material World falls short of Scorsese's terrific two-part PBS film, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

As a fan from the start, I didn't love it, but liked it well enough.

Life's Too Short is an acquired taste worth acquiring.

You should give Luck a chance to slowly pay off. It proudly depicts a gritty/picturesque world that the ABC Family channel's Wildfire only airbrushed during its 2005-08 run.

It's all quite sturdily built and well-acted, with characters one cares about.

Comic Book Men is a pleasant surprise and an overall splash of fragrant cologne on the smell test-flunking reality genre.

So far this is solid and very picturesque entertainment, with a strong sense of foreboding built in.

It's a distinctive, signature series from a decidedly singular voice.

Despite some shortcomings, Hemingway & Gellhorn rates as time and money well-spent.

TNT's brighter, shinier Dallas makes an impressively staged re-entrance Wednesday night.

Filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (The Black List, The Latino List) might have done well to just keep the camera on [Carmen Dell'Orefice] and let everyone else hit the cutting room floor. But other former supermodels are quite interesting as well, among them Isabella Rossellini, Jerry Hall, Paulina Porizkova, Carol Alt, China Machado, Marisa Berenson and Lisa Taylor.

Revolution, which has the overall look and feel of a big budget feature, delivers some consistently terrific action scenes.

Major Crimes has the makings of a very sturdy reboot outfitted with a built-in philosophical debate over how justice is served. Supporting characters are newly invigorated, particularly Bailey's Provenza.

Whatever your religious beliefs--or lack thereof--The American Bible Challenge is good for the soul. It's also the best new game show in years.

Although Buscemi remains firmly in charge of this lead role, he's not the most interesting principal anymore. That pendulum swings to his wife of convenience, Margaret Schoeder (Kelly Macdonald).

This is way too well-made a series to be dubbed a "guilty pleasure," even if a sizable percentage of the audience may watch purely for the visceral thrills of all that weekly bloodletting.

Game of Thrones seems to be getting better all the time judging from the four episodes sent for review. It’s just that it also seems to be taking longer and longer to get there in the interests of servicing all the returning and new characters in play.

The cast is engaging, the premise is intriguing and the genre long has been CBS' ratings-rich specialty.

A&E's Bates Motel is both mesmerizing and sometimes absurd in its rewind to Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) as a repressed 17-year-old.

In the end, Phil Spector succeeds on the strength of its two marquee thespians. Mirren is wonderful throughout, Pacino scores in double figures and they have enough scenes together to make it all well worth your while.

Weiner’s end-game for his leading man does not appear to be brightly lit. Nor is Season 6 of Mad Men off to a particularly sparkling start creatively while we wait for the worst to come.