I can't recommend the series highly enough, particularly for the phenomenal performances by Lewis and Danes.

It's raw, audacious, nuanced and richly, often excruciatingly funny.

There's plenty of action, suspense and sci-fi stuff in Torchwood: COE, but what makes it an unmissable event is how well it sets up its dilemma--a classic conflict over whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few--and how maturely it deals with both the morality and the politics of the premise.

It all makes for a rich, captivating series to look at. And listen to. Even, or especially, when it's not saying anything at all.

The changes that have come to Mad Men can be discomfiting to watch. But they're rich with possibility.

They have done what many well-intentioned socially minded writers have tried and failed at: written a story that is about social systems, in all their complexity, yet made it human, funny and most important of all, rivetingly entertaining.

It's worth the effort, not because The Wire is good for you but because it is fantastic entertainment.

Thus begins the final season of a cerebral space opera that asks what it means to be human.

This is law drama such as Boston Legal's David E. Kelley can only dream about.

Secrets, threats, Viagra--Big Love was always going to be interesting TV, but what makes it first-rate drama is how confidently it moves past exoticism to the ordinary universals of family life.

It's a drama that has chosen the slow burn over the flashy explosion, and it's all the hotter for that choice.

Rapper Sean Combs holds his own as ambitious son Walter Lee Jr., but Phylicia Rashad is devastating as a matriarch trying to hold her family together when a dream deferred turns dangerous.

Colbert is the series' rock, and a straightman contrast to the constantly yammering Person, his driver. As the stoic enigma and the hopped-up smart-ass speed through the desert landscape, you could almost take Kill for a surreal road comedy.

The early episodes of season three, though, find SoA retaining what there was to love about it--the well-drawn characters, including the strong women in SAMCRO and its orbit--while expanding the show as well.

A top-flight cast, including Lizzy Caplan and Martin Starr (and this season, Megan Mullally, stepping in for Lynch), who make the show's scripts play like improv. Above all, the show's ambition to be both raunchily funny and emotionally real to characters who are watching their dreams get older one day at a time.

This is the funniest sitcom pilot of the fall.

Like a good whiskey, it's rough and smooth in all the right ways. By a few episodes in, you'll want to order it by the case.

I've seen two weeks of the season, and so far I'm rapt. In Treatment may be in uncharted ground with its new, original stories, but it remains a show that rewards patience, and patients.

Watching Game of Thrones is like falling into a gorgeous, stained tapestry. This epic, unflinching fantasy noir takes our preconceptions of chivalry, nobility and magic and gets medieval on them.

By combining the traditional elements of spy dramas (and spy parodies) with office comedy, this look inside the halls of ISIS manages to be both an effective spoof and an effective character sitcom.

The BBC's The Hour, the best new show this summer.

Sherlock, which impresses again in the three-episode season that returns on PBS.

It's all breathtaking in much the way that you'd suspect.

It’s a sumptuous pleasure to go through one doorway and another, feeling all the while the dawning knowledge that someday we will turn a corner, and come to the last.

By the standards of most TV crime stories, the meditative Rectify may instead seem like too little. But it’s entrancing at showing how, in some circumstances, just getting through a day is drama enough.

Daisies has a timeless, picture-book look. It could be set today, in the '30s, in the '70s or in any other decade fond of saturated color. Like Chuck herself, it's a perfect candidate for a second chance: as glowing and lovable as the day we first met it.

The premise of ABC's Life on Mars is ludicrous but irresistible.

At least in the first four hours... the show reminds us of the intense thrills it can provide even without threatening to blow up the entire planet.

Big Love quickly settles you into its odd setting. The particulars of the Henricksons' lives--their intrigues and secrecy, yes, but also their familiar family dynamics and sincere faith--are presented, simply and unpatronizingly, as the reality of the show's universe.

The dialogue's still pulpy, but its action story is the bomb.

Shot intimately with handheld camera, it's a moving but unsentimental celebration of community, of pulling together not just because it's right but also because it's necessary.

The show is filled with Lettermanesque non sequiturs and '70s pop-culture arcana... but it has heart too.

The morals of this provocative show are as intriguing as its cases.

The realism doesn't extend to the exaggerated characters and plots, but if you focus on the sharp dialogue (and aren't an easily worried parent), these students earn a solid ... B.

The pilot... iis actually the least funny of the three episodes I saw; in the other two, "Sarah" and the other characters are much better developed and the stories hang together better. Still, it's an acquired tastelessness.

It's far-fetched. It's outlandish. You will think you are too smart to get suckered in by it, but give it a few minutes and you will be proved wrong.

It's also, judging by the pilot, flawlessly art-directed, full of well-chosen period music and--for a drama about a country searching for its bearings in its bicentennial year--a lot of fun.

The five episodes NBC sent out don't, to my eye, reach the heights Chuck hit toward the end of its season 2 run. But after a major change in the show's premise--rather than being a sad sack nerd dragged into the spy-life, Chuck is now a certified ass-kicker, thanks to getting some superpowered brainwaves--the show successfully changes gears while keeping everything that's best about it.

Packing a sharp designer shiv, this clever saga of haves vs. have-mores proves the East Coast can be as enjoyably sudsy as the West.

High School Musical 2's audience already knows how this movie ends. But they'll watch and re-watch because it has such an unembarrassed good time getting there.

It's true that Mad Men is deliciously curated, from the omnipresent cigarettes to the rocket-cone brassieres (and casual sexism) to the cool modernist sets. But the subtle, deliberately paced drama has a wider sense of history.

It's an uneven Coen Brothers--like mix of dark comedy and darker moral drama, but Cranston is amazing as a desperate, conflicted gangsta-nerd.

This My Name Is Girl concept may be outlandish, but Ex List is also fresh and raunchily funny (there's a scene in the pilot comparing feminine waxing choices to historical figures--the "Hitler," the "Gandhi") and Reaser is winning and adorable.

All this has the potential to be a little corny, but Ladies' is that rare show that manages to be uncynical without being cloying.

Interspersed with cover songs, Spectacle is an engaging showcase for a curious mind.

Bored to Death is good, very good--but it's pilot isn't, so it wouldn't be terrible to miss it or see it late.

I will say that the show really has a handle now on Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), who comes across as an overzealous but sympathetic bureaucrat, not a ninny. That it is doing an excellent job of finding things for its supporting characters to do, suggesting it may someday have the bench strength of a show like "The Office. "

While it's not as knock-your-socks-off as the pilot (while retaining some of the same problems), it continues to show why, at its best, this is the freshest and most joyful new show of the year.

Parenthood shows a funny, affecting, distinctive voice that you'll want to keep listening to.

As a whole, Treme is a kind of intimate, loose, indie-film version of TV, its various stories almost an anthology connected by musical moments.

The clever, engaging script and Blonsky's performance--plus the refreshing idea of a teen drama not entirely populated by assembly-line pinups--promise a summer diversion with a little more than usual dramatic meat on its bones.

The first episode is, maybe to grab the young-guy audience, heavier on the sexplay and lighter on the laughs. But two or three episodes in, the characters and dynamics come together, and the show really begins to kill. Literally and figuratively, but mostly figuratively.

The result is a new-style western that's both entertaining and as mesmerizing as Givens' cold-blooded speech to the crook with the scattergun.

Rubicon is not a show for the impatience, and it has the kind of ambitions that could set viewers up for a letdown. But so far, I admire its intelligence.

I hope it's not an old-man thing to say, and that you don't have to be an old man to appreciate it, but the truth that Men understands is that just getting through the day is drama enough. Here's looking forward to another year.

Like its characters themselves, Terriers has higher aims, but its appeal comes from being likeable and familiar. It balances its running storyline with individual cases, carried largely by Logue and Raymond-James' charm.

If The Walking Dead can build on its promise and run with these ideas, along with unflinching gross-out thrills, it can tell a doomsday story with all the things zombies crave: brains, guts and heart.

Some elements are so Showtime-comedy-like (the eccentric teen child, e.g.) as to seem a little repetitive. But the show depends above all on Laura Linney's performance, and so far it's entrancing.

It starts and finishes strong, and in between, it passed the most important test this non-boxing-fan could hold it to: when I finished one episode, I immediately wanted to put another in.

On paper, it sounds like another sitcom dedicated to the tired idea that relationships are forced on men like collars on dogs, the leashes held by annoying, fun-killing women. And yet I enjoyed the show more watching it than I find I am describing it.

The first two new episodes are better focused and often affecting but don't quite cohere, possibly in part because of the mop-up work left after the whirlwind of season four. The third episode sent to critics, however, is one of the strongest the show has done in a while, possibly since the excellent third season.

The Killing itself is a slow burn, or rather drizzle. Three episodes in, I can tell you that I'm drawn in by the characters and eager to see a fourth; I can't guess whether the story is finally going to be satisfying, and the show is deliberate and sparing in parceling out details on the case.

The second season, beginning in 2006, about a year after the last, will probably not change minds among lovers or haters. There's somewhat more capital-D drama to the early episodes.

If Downton's staging and dialogue can be too on-the-nose, the characters are still drawn with great subtlety.

Yes, satirizing the suburbs is an age-old theme in entertainment, but Suburgatory feels like it's thought through what specifically there is to say about the burbs of 2011. And so far, I like the way it says it.

There's a sweet, good-hearted minuteness of observation to the show, which manages to work in middle-of-the-night wakings and diaper changes without going for obvious gags.

Prohibition provides a detailed, engaging postmortem of a very, very bad idea.

Luck too is far from perfect, but I found a lot to love in its rough edges.

Awake manages something impressive: it focuses unflinchingly on the subject of loss, yet manages to be not a downer or painful to watch, but moving, absorbing and even hopeful.

A low-key but moving documentary about these two low-key people and their moving struggle.

The people around Jackie made me stick with this show even when its main storyline was going nowhere, but now that it's committed to really engaging with its title character, it's become appointment TV for me again.

It is, in other words, one more cable reality show about fabulous women. But in this case, the same old reality show is a refreshing change.

Nashville's was the one that made me most excited to see more episodes of the series and see how its world unfolds.

As a documentary, Vito is fairly straightforward, but by finding a thread connecting Russo's life, his passions and his times, it manages to be something more.

While it's a rough, sometimes grim, process, it feels that much more well-earned when, at the end of the first episode, one student, Bobby–who struggled to speak for himself in mock interviews–visits a future class to report that he's held a carpentry job for a month.

In its early hours, Last Resort lays in enough plot and character provisions to potentially last a long, long journey.

So far it works.... Asylum feels like a more focused, if equally frenetic, screamfest. It's also gorgeously realized.

The Witness films are interesting not just for the external drama but the internal stories of the photographers, who try to explain what led them to seek out this thrilling but potentially deadly work.

It's not a movie for music geeks, in the sense of unpacking the band's influences or closely analyzing how their songs worked. Instead it links the music to the members' stories, trying to capture how the electricity of the group's personalities created art. It's not a revelation, but it's an intimate story of the band.

The Dust Bowl is a powerful documentary about what human efforts can achieve and what short-term thinking can wreak.

House of Cards isn't wholly original. But it is supremely confident.

It's intriguing and promising that season four kicks off with another detour–this time into the past–that connects to Harlan County here and now.

Beyond the cat-and-mouse international intrigue, which deepens after the pilot, The Americans has an absorbing personal story to tell--one as familiar yet unusual as its aliens-among-us protagonists.

Over the first four episodes, Family Tree doesn’t have the gut-busting, excruciatingly funny moments of Guest’s movies--no Stonehenge here--but it adds a warmth to the usual pathos of his characters, and O’Dowd’s hangdog charm is a good match for the story.

Its stripped-from-the-tabloids approach is nothing new, but it's well done, and a little familiarity won't hurt the show's chances.

Like a successful patient, the show has learned and grown, becoming more reliably compelling.

The new episodes quickly jump back in, with higher stakes and sharper jokes, and creator Josh Schwartz hasn't let the strike stop him from developing Chuck's character.

There are signs that the premise may not sustain for long (the title, after all, gives it only a week), but it still shows that a good pratfall is the universal language.

Lie to Me's pilot is brisk anthropological fun.

If The Good Wife can maintain the first episode's tone, it will keep an audience even after political sex scandals fade from the news.

It's a promising comedy about a shallow man trying to make his life right, one bad deed at a time.

It's not essential anymore, but it's still welcome.

Curb, meanwhile, stopped being appointment viewing for me a couple seasons ago, but it threatens to become so again.

It's worth hopping on this poetic, profane story of frontier money lust before it rides into the sunset.

It's all delightfully phony, but will win your faith on charm and panache.

Imperfect but chilling.... In the end, Sleeper Cell is every bit as nailbiting as 24, with one crucial difference: neither the terrorists nor the Feds are supergeniuses.

While not perfect, [it] manages to be both exciting and--if not exactly realistic--then at least reality-grounded.

What Prison Break lacks in plausibility--basically, everything--it makes up for in plotting, pacing and panache.