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.