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.