It's messy and confusing, often complex and contradictory, and moves in fits and starts, sideways and backward. It's the most startlingly original program on television in years, maybe ever, and it's also one of the best. [28 Sept 2002, p.E1]

My Name Is Earl rampages like a bull in a politically correct china shop.

Invasion is an excellent show, the new season's best drama.

Sweet but never treacly, nostalgic but never dishonest, startlingly frank about race and always painfully funny, Everybody Hates Chris is the sitcom for which the networks have been yearning for the better part of a decade.

Pushing Daisies is by far the best new series of the fall season.

This dark gem of a show about a zombie apocalypse gleams with hellfire incandescence.

Telling its story from the perspectives of the police and the narcotraffickers, The Wire unfolds slowly, like an evil flower; more cerebral than slam-bang. At times it resembles a chess match as the adversaries plot moves and countermoves; at other times, a jigsaw puzzle, as the cops assemble a portrait of the gang from scraps of information. [1 June 2002, p.E1]

It flickers with longing and resentment, vulnerability and rejection, temptation and moral erosion. It is totally absorbing television. [5 Aug 2003, p.1E]

A gaspingly funny show that you ought to watch early and often.

Fearlessly funny and scathingly introspective.

My Own Worst Enemy is by far the best drama of the fall season, a bold and brainy spy thriller that practices a sort of armed existentialism.

The Pacific is as brutally simple and direct--and as oblivious to modern PC sensibilities--as the Marine's letter. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, this 10-part HBO miniseries is a loving but anguished tribute to the men who fought on the bloody island hellholes that comprised World War II's Pacific theater.

Boardwalk Empire plays much like Sopranos: The Roots, a malignantly alluring exploration of the emergence of organized crime in the United States. A checkerboard of hazy intrigue and garish violence, of ruthless ambition and easy sexuality, it's an epic tale told darkly and well.

The gloriously bloody and depraved spirit of the novels is intact and even enhanced.

Homeland is an absolutely riveting immersion in the paranoia and burnout of America after a decade of the war on terrorism.

Starz' new eight-episode drama is at once the most cynical and most captivating portrayal of American politics ever presented on television.

Repellent and fascinating, a stygian nightmare awash in sick lusts, it seems certain to attract large audiences and huge controversy.

The recipe may go back to your grandma or beyond, but that doesn't mean you won't eat two helpings and beg for more.

Creepy and cockeyed, unholy and unnerving, Top Of The Lake is riveting stuff.

With a charming and funny cast, there's lots to like about What I Like About You. [19 Sept 2002]

Padalecki and Ackles are hunky, funny and a joy to watch.

Sharply written and acted.

The show's witty, inventive writing would be fun even in the hands of a less capable cast.

It's funny and warm and I dare you to watch it without getting your pants charmed off.

Crumbs' approach to the foibles of the family, though not for the tender-hearted, is raucously funny.

Intense and fascinating.

Half the fun in this outlandishly funny sitcom is that Penny is so spacey that she doesn't appear to recognize what hard-core nerds Leonard and Sheldon really are--even the presence in their bathroom of Luke Skywalker No-More-Tears Shampoo doesn't tip her off.

Shark works some of the same ground as Fox's new legal drama Justice, but with far more wit and style.

30 Rock... is pretty darn funny, a bitterly merry comic jihad against corporate stupidity and mendaciousness.

It's the lack of moral clarity that makes Damages so spellbinding. Every character wears multiple masks; every action is cloaked in ambiguity and, often, outright duplicity.

A perverse pleasure to watch.

It's funny and smart, with affably quirky characters who aren't cut from cardboard.

Big Shots matches affecting characters with genuinely funny stories and dialogue.

It's hard to say which is more unlikely: That a corporate legal fang could be God's prophet; or that the Almighty would spread His word through visions of George Michael; or these matters could be blended into a daffily funny and affecting television show.

Samantha Who? is not only a sitcom but a pungently funny one about self-discovery, reinvention and the possibility that beauty may be only skin-deep, but bitch goes right down to the bone.

The excellent cast keeps drawing you back--especially Donald Sutherland as family patriarch Tripp Darling, whose evil glint makes even as benign a phrase as ''good morning'' sound like ''I'm going to put an ice pick through your eye.'' Even better is Krause's portrayal of Nick, layers of exasperation upon fascination upon temptation.

The show's intricate plotting and finely rendered characters will engage your brain, but there's plenty of below-the-shoulders action, too.

No television series has been built around a less likable character, or rendered itself so strangely, compulsively watchable as a result.

This tale of a lonely cop left behind by everyone--partners, friends, lovers, even the criminals he pursues--has a piercing melancholy that elevates it way above its fantasy trappings.

Schwartz's good eye for characters and cutting sense of humor--makes Chuck a thoroughly enjoyable romp.

This peculiar comedy-drama has some cockeyed wrinkles that make it interesting.

Innovative, daring and--most importantly--funny, Aliens in America is a fresh take on an old problem, the loneliness of being different.

Welcome to the tawdry, tantalizing and altogether terrific world of Gossip Girl.

Reaper is a hilariously fractured commentary on Gen Y.

In Californication, [Duchovny] gets to take full advantage of his low-key comic approach, and the result is irresistible. The rest of the cast matches him riff for riff, especially British actress Natascha McElhone as the disenchanted Karen and young Madeleine Martin as their 12-year-old daughter Becca.

McKidd and castmates Gretchen Egolf as his wife Katie; Reed Diamond as his brother Jack, a cop who used to date Katie; and Moon Bloodgood as his spectral fiance, Livia, play this with just the right mix of credulity and dry wit.

You just can't get through two minutes of Back to You without a belly laugh.

Intelligent and entertaining reimaginations of stupefyingly bad pieces of 1970s sci-fi hackwork.

The Company is a gripping requiem for the Cold War and the men who fought it.

Mad Men is a captivating experience.

It's a testament to the remarkable performance of Collette that it will never occur to viewers that Tara's behavior is anything but a mortal compulsion. Her remarkable moment-to-moment morphs from teeny-bopper slut to Stepford Wife to biker brute and then back again beggar the imagination.

True Blood is an unlikely but irresistible mixture of pungent political satire, observant pop sociology and lurid drive-in thrills.

Ellis has used Adams' works to create a wondrously full and nuanced portrait of the man, which is brought fully to life by Paul Giamatti.

A raucous, raunchy and utterly loving account of life at the bottom of the military food chain.

Mixing paranoia, bleak humor and post-9/11 exhaustion in a potent story-telling brew, it's one of the new television season's most promising dramas.

But for all the laughs, Being Human never loses sight of the menace of its characters.

Welcome to The Goode Family, a scathingly funny report from the front lines of America's culture wars.

This unsettling documentary series on the cable WE network, which follows a dozen Kansas City girls through four years in their suburban high school, suggests we've come a long, hard way from "Grease."

That single season will be hellacious fun. Stuffed with visual puns and sly homages to horror movies from Jaws to Poltergeist, Harper's Island relentlessly mocks film grammar with set pieces that take off in unexpected directions.

Sons of Anarchy is bloody, disturbing and maniacally addictive.

Original in concept, intelligent in execution, it's a scruffily Steinbeckian chronicle of life at the social and economic margins.

Roth makes for a tartly witty hero, the mysteries are intricately plotted, and the show makes the most of the weird dynamics of an office where the boss can ferret out everybody's secrets.

Cynical, sweet and inestimably funny, Glee--which debuted with a single sneak-preview episode last spring, but joins Fox's regular weekly lineup for the first time Wednesday--is by far the best show of the fall TV season that began rolling out this week.

Grimly funny, streaked with sentimentality and malice, Nurse Jackie is the medical miracle of television's summer season, a blue-collar hospital show without a McDreamy in sight.

Welcome to ABC's V, the final, the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season.

It may not be entirely fair to call a show as complexly layered as The Good Wife a crime drama, though at some basic level it is, with a bleakly luminous Juliana Margulies playing a novice criminal defense attorney who's painfully learning the sport of judicial hardball.

Everybody in Brothers is funny, but the unquestioned star of the show is Pounder, a rapturous mix of menace and guile in the struggle to keep her men in line.

Those patient viewers who do stay will be richly rewarded with a humanist story that gains traction as it goes--a vivid and intimate character piece meant to be savored like a spicy gumbo.

With enough chemistry between its stars to power a DuPont lab and a wise use of off-the-beaten-path South Florida shooting locations -- it goes for a fetid swamp over South Beach every time -- The Glades is thoroughly enjoyable.

For the first time since Married...With Children stood the genre on its head two decades ago, somebody has come up with a new take on the family sitcom, and the results are riotously funny.

Archer is a millennial (and very much R-rated) "Get Smart" that acerbically and hilariously plays on our post-9/ll fears that "U.S. government intelligence" might be a grim oxymoron.

Putting aside for a moment questions about whether it signifies the imminent collapse of Western civilization and even the human reproductive impulse, this version of Nikita can still provide a rollicking, if slightly psychotic, good time.

No Ordinary Family is no comic-book kiddie show but a perceptive and engaging comedy-drama about domestic dysfunction.

With dazzling action scenes and a pair of stars who ooze charm and sensuality, Undercovers easily overcomes its predictability.

Americans in their 20s have few good-time memories in their young-adult lives. If they can be coaxed away from their computers to the television screen, they may find themselves bonding with the characters of the well-acted and intelligently written My Generation.

A potent brew of family melodrama, crime-thriller tension and conspiratorial intrigue, Blue Bloods may actually bring some viewers back onto the sinking ship of Friday-night television.

Terriers, FX's comedy-drama about a pair of bargain-basement private eyes, is a piquantly funny sojourn among lovable losers.

Cathy's modest conception of throwing caution to the winds mirrors the strengths of The Big C, which is affecting precisely because of its refusal to assume epic proportions.

Neatly staged, with one surprise after another in a geometric progression of suspense, The Event's pilot episode leaves a lot of tantalizingly unanswered questions.

Damages returns to spiteful, vindictive and wildly entertaining life Wednesday night after resuscitation by satellite-television provider DirecTV.

Watching her construct a self from a handful of jagged fragments is a seductive pleasure.

If many of these plot and character elements are straight off the bargain shelf at the Boxing Melodrama R Us superstore, Lights nonetheless gives them new life--partly thanks to a superlative cast and partly because the show resists the biggest cliche of all: the boxer as innocent victim of poverty and circumstance.

Chronicling the opposite relationships requires Mad Love to bounce from light romantic comedy to murderously hostile wisecracks and back again, which it accomplishes with considerable deftness. The show's quick wit is matched with a talented cast, particularly Labine.

Sharply contrasting with the florid Borgias is AMC's emotionally spare and atmospherically dank series The Killing.

Murder and sexual predation sure look fun when they're done by pretty people in luscious gowns. Jeremy Irons is splendidly depraved as Rodrigo, and Holliday Grainger (Robin Hood) so sunnily sweet as Lucrezia that it's damn near impossible to hold a little arsenic against her.

Starz, however, has re-imagined the doings of Arthur, Guinevere and the gang as a bloody, bodice-ripping medieval soap opera, and the result is surprisingly satisfying.

O'Dowd and Garai are fascinating as they make their characters grow in opposite directions--he more steely, she more compassionate--over the course of the show.

HBO's drama Cinema Verite is a searing and irresistible look at the making of An American Family and an incisive dissection of the mendacity of what we so absurdly call reality TV.

Suits is far more than a whimsical caper show. Beneath its cuttingly funny dialogue lurk complex emotional edges.

Sins of fathers and mothers not only visit each of the characters, but infest them; the show shimmers with an inner core of volcanic anger that makes it far more interesting than your average family soap.

It's a stylish, elegantly plotted tale of a young woman's sociopathic thirst for vengeance.

There's nothing at all subtle about the gloriously absurdist Wilfred.

Torchwood: Miracle Day is smashing entertainment.

Derivative Pan Am may be, but that doesn't make it any less watchable.

Bello's performance as the weather-beaten Timoney, swabbing her emotional scars with alcohol, nicotine and invective, is easily the highlight of the fall television season.

The CW's tale of an evil twin and an even eviler twin, is devious doppelganger drama at its best.

Unforgettable is a quirky, captivating take on the police procedurals that have been a staple of the CBS schedule over the past decade.

The show shrewdly offers more than a monster of the week, with some absorbing subplots that continue from week to week.