what else can I do but yap excitedly and try to get you to watch one of the best shows on TV right now? The first four episodes of the new season will not disappoint fans.

Once Upon a Time is a smartly-crafted reward for fans of light fantasy, with the right mix of cleverness, action and romance.

It joins "Planet Earth" and "Life" to reign as a triumvirate in Best Buy showrooms. Nothing looks better, sounds better.

What makes Homeland rise above other post-9/11 dramas is Danes's stellar performance as Carrie--easily this season's strongest female character, who is also hiding some personal secrets of her own. The latter half of the first episode is exhilarating. I'm hooked.

Though imbued with epic sweep, Hell on Wheels is a western at heart, even if that heart is cold.

Community stands on its own intangible excellence.

Boardwalk Empire is doing what I wish Prohibition had done--it's tempting me to stick around for one more.

As television, Girls is disturbing, sharply honed and even wickedly funny.

Thanks to Louis-Dreyfus, and the show's remarkable knack for dialogue and timing, Veep is instantly engaging and outrageously fun.

Overdoing things is one of Murphy's trademark flaws, but this show has a captivating style and giddy gross-outs.

It's a beautiful downer of a show that becomes more revealing and absorbing as it moves along.

Thanks to Adams and Kreskoff's delightfully wicked power struggle, Hung feels fresher now than it felt last summer and more textured.

Sons of Anarchy may be wild fantasy and melodrama, but it is tempered by a feeling of verity.

Louie intelligently harnesses the dark cloud that follows a truly funny man everywhere he goes.

Hawaii Five-0 is a big bag of dumb fun, with a story told as tautly and smoothly as the surface of a Polynesian drum.

Without feeling like it's leading us on, Rubicon is a tightly woven and urbanely acted tale for people who like to mull.

The first six episodes (which I've watched, dutifully at times) draw you in but sometimes feel overstuffed, overproduced and weirdly gauzy where the series means to be an exercise in crisp, razor-sharp filmmaking.

Effortlessly smart, easy to like and exciting to follow.

There's exactly one hour left for a fall TV show that tells its tale in a deliberate, well-written and subtly acted way. That one hour belongs to Fox's Lone Star.

Buoyed by scalpel-sharp writing and even keener performances, The Big C (created by comedian and sitcom writer Darlene Hunt) walks a fine line of having it both ways. It's for people who are repelled by the warm-fuzzy, disease-o'-the-week dramas of cable television.

There's a tender and no-nonsense tenor to it, which is a welcome switch from most of reality TV's junky tropes.

This is not an angry documentary; it's just such a downer--and necessary medicine for those who've remained personally unaffected by events of the last decade.

The show is point-blank, but somewhat brilliantly so.

Using the audio from the radio episodes and then supplying a sort of 1960s-style Hanna-Barbera wash of cheap animation to more fully illustrate the inanity of their conversations, Gervais has landed on something quite special that can be scorchingly funny.

HBO's The Sunset Limited--faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2006 play and directed by its co-star, Tommy Lee Jones--more than overcomes the challenge of getting a satisfying piece of theater to work on a TV screen.

I trust completely the template laid out for The Killing by the original "Forbrydelsen" (which I've not seen) and the artistic instincts evident in the first three episodes.

The show is also refreshingly entertaining, even when it relies on familiar cliches of the singing-competition genre.

Beyond its breakneck speed and miles logged, Citizen U.S.A. couldn't be more easy or straightforward: From tiny ceremonies in county courthouses to massive arena-sized gatherings in big cities, Pelosi presents a surprising collage of that essential moment when people who've immigrated to the United States become official Americans.