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.