It's hard to know where to aim the praise first.

The NBC series certainly has been one of TV's most emotionally honest and stirring works, and it remains so as it enters its fourth season.

This extraordinary upstairs-downstairs drama, written by Oscar-winning "Gosford Park" screenwriter Julian Fellowes, is a dramatic, intelligent, soapy, comic, and wise piece of work, one that explores social shifts on the eve of World War I while delivering a remarkably engaging cast of characters.

Gabriel Byrne is in every minute of the show, delivering one of TV's most faceted and intriguing performances....All of the new characters promise to engage as their stories and backstories begin to unfold.

It offers a great cast, and some very tight, tart scripting. Each of the season's seven half-hours is a little sliver of pleasure.

A taut exercise in withheld disaster, Breaking Bad is riveting.

Ultimately, though, even with the fantasy, Game of Thrones feels like a historical medieval saga. It's a royal, and royally good, round of musical chairs.

Of all the drama pilots I watched, this was my favorite.

I love the suburban satire, which is old territory made fresh again. [Jane] Levy, from "Shameless," is tart and sympathetic, and [Cheryl] Hines is a revelation as a rabidly superficial mom.

The script is tight and ambitious, as it attempts to anatomize corruption in the big city.

Dern is fantastic as Amy--you cringe as her histrionics drive people away, and cringe again as she tries to suppress her feelings behind a veneer of New Age peacefulness.

I don't know if it will catch on - westerns can be a hard sell - but it's another fine AMC choice.

The NBC sitcom is so unpretentious and original, it will probably win you over on its own sweet merits.

'Extras" is far less terminally existential than ''The Office," less depressing to watch.

Fiendishly excellent.

From the brilliant performance by Michael C. Hall to the dryly witty scripting, Dexter secures a position near the top of another year's best list.

Dexter is a masterfully creepy-funny serial-killer series, and it continues to both frighten and amuse as it enters its fifth season.

This season as much as last, In Treatment brings us into more intimacy with its characters than almost any other series on TV.

A really extraordinary new drama.

Mad Men returns for season 2 in excellent form: There's a rich and active subtext in this series, you just have to discover it.

Mad Men remains TV at its most artful. Like Don Draper, it's beautiful, stealthy, troubling, and, above all, addictive.

When people ask me to recommend good TV, they never seem to have heard about it. Yup, Breaking Bad is that series.

This knockout adaptation of the Lorraine Hansberry play is a model of both the pure power of stage acting and TV's potential to bring us up close to that acting without deadening it.

HBO's Generation Kill is remarkable.

The writing remains remarkable, as it toggles between the rhythms and cliches of 1950s movies and the timeless resonance of mid-20th-century theater. You rarely find such economical and evocative scripting on TV.

Beyond the formulaic outline, White Collar, is actually one of the best new shows of the season.

This is the kind of TV that viewers ask for but rarely get, driven by characters who are more than the sum of one or two qualities and who harbor depths that are revealed slowly, subtly, and authentically.

The show isn't easy to warm up to, to be honest; it's draped in--and at times stifled by--meticulous period detail and too-perfect lighting, especially in Scorsese's premiere. But in episode two, the characters and the script begin to prevail, and the drama becomes more emotionally distinct and fascinating.