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

This is a great piece of TV work... Right from its opening minutes, after a flight to Australia has crashed on the shores of nowhere, ABC's Lost simulates the kind of dread we don't expect to find on the small screen. [22 Sept 2004, p.E1]

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.

The show doesn't seem to have lost any ballast moving forward from the intensity of season one.

The show beautifully depicts a massive game of musical chairs, a world at war with doom ever present just across the border.

AMC’s Mad Men returns for season 6 with two hours that are as rich and as deftly literary as anything in the history of the show. The premiere operates like a series of exquisitely written theatrical set pieces, one after another that add up to a moving, ironic, and often comic group portrait.

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.

A smart, exhilarating, well-written hour that, if anything, is a little naive about the folks who run our nation's most important office. [22 Sept 1999, p.E1]

Along with its refreshing cast, led by Keri Russell, the WB's Felicity is blessed with a sweet realism that captures the emotional roller coaster that is freshman year in college. It also offers an appealingly non-gritty look at New York City, as seen through the eyes of optimism and innocence...The show transcends formula by staying steadily focused on its characters' shifting emotional realities, and by avoiding the issue-of-the-week plot twists of a series like "Beverly Hills 90210." [29 Sept 1998, p.C1]

No, The Sopranos is not the equal of Scorsese's masterpiece ["Goodfellas"], but it manages to bring a new spin to the words "dysfunctional" and "family," and it deserves its place alongside other HBO gems like "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Sex and the City." [9 Jan 1999, p.C1]

In its own affectionate way, Freaks and Geeks puts a pimple into the TV-ized approach to adolescence. This delightfully observed 1980s-set dramedy is high school as many of us remember it, with Twinkie-pounding bullies and Army-jacket wearing druggies and pale nerds with speech impediments and "Star Trek" fixations. It's high school unplugged, a sort of "Dazed and Confused" for the small screen, and it is one of the fall season's most likable new shows. That NBC has thrown "Freaks and Geeks" into the wilds of Saturday night - it premieres tonight at 8 on Ch. 7 - is only further evidence of network nitwitness. [25 Sept 1999, p.C1]

Can Alias work on a weekly basis? While the Alias pilot plunges forward effortlessly, it also leads to some fairly complicated twists involving Sydney's father (Victor Garber) and the nature of her agency. These twists could make future episodes overly layered, or too dependent on backstory. Also, any CIA suspense series, with or without a flashy pilot, faces the challenge of coming up with 20 or so fresh espionage plots each season - no easy task.

A wonderful, imaginative mess brimming with possibility. About a dysfunctional family of space cowboys, the sci-fi series arrives not fully formed, like an elaborate photo that's still clarifying in developing fluid. While many shows burst onto the scene with slick pilots and quickly deteriorate into mediocrity, I'm thinking Firefly is on the opposite creative journey.

It's an extraordinarily appealing series, one that's so much more than its easy label as a teen private-eye series. [22 Sept 2004, p.D12]

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.

There may be a smaller number of top-notch newbies this season, but Raising Hope, a celebration of parenthood and childhood, of small joys and big struggles, is certainly one of them.

[The] sentimental streak in the show is compensated by Frank's coldness and the scrappy urban realism, translated so effectively from the British original.

Based on the first three episodes, I'm thinking season 2 is going to be even better and certainly more consistent.

The Killing quickly hooks you with its steadily unfolding story line. Created by Veena Sud, based on a Danish TV hit named "Forbrydelsen," the show draws you into the tragedy of the crime, and then makes you crave its solution.

With none of the conventional plot techniques TV viewers are accustomed to, it is a collection of rich moments and poignant characters that loosely adds up to something quite powerful.

With season two, the drama has fully come to life, with moments of savagery, hypocrisy, and bittersweet loyalty that make it a must-see show.

The Hour is not "Breaking Bad" good, or "Mad Men" good, but it's close.

The unfolding of the Parade’s End narrative has been directed (by Susanna White) and written to challenge--sometimes too much so. While you always understand the connections among the characters on “Downton,” you have to piece them together yourself in Parade’s End.... It’s the kind of demanding storytelling that differentiates “The Wire” from most other crime series.

As a weekly series, the effects need to remain impressive and the writers need to avoid falling into "Lost" and "Walking Dead" band-of-survivors rehash.

This is a classic guilty pleasure, with campy twists and a fabulously diva-esque performance by Stowe.

After the forced opening minutes, it's the best multi-cam-com of the season.