In the run-up to the show it all sounded a bit hard to get your head around, but in the flesh the show zinged, at least this first week.

The dialogue is "Deadwood's" calling card, with its mixture of gutter and Elizabethan grace. It layers Milch's broader, working theme -- the coming-together of various organisms to create a single, functioning one.

It knows the buttons it wants to push (fear of flying, fear of abandonment, fear of the unknown) and pushes them, repeatedly, like a kid playing a video game.

It's very well-acted and meanwhile, when it can stand it, kind of tender, although it's far more interested in "Curb"-like moments of uncomfortable confrontation.

The show thus far feels more observational than story-driven; it relies on our desire to listen to Rock talk. And we do want to listen, because Rock is hilarious.

From the start, it's mostly on Hall to seduce us, and he's so artful with the material that he consistently elevates it.

This kind of straight, no-chaser approach to patient care is what makes House a satisfying riff on any number of doctors I've seen on TV and know I will never have taking care of me. [16 Nov 2004, p.E1]

It's promising material, even if you rarely get to experience it without the sudden intrusion of a Counting Crows-like dirge or the strange sensation that Sarah Jessica Parker is wondering, in voice-over, whether she has what it takes to be a brain surgeon. [25 March 2005, p.E29]

The show isn't brilliant, but it is audaciously alive.

A loud, believably unbelievable ghost story, a different ghost from classic lore guest-starring each week.

Watching "My Name Is Earl," you feel like you're in a movie, or at least a movie trailer. In ways more good than bad, it's immediately comprehensible.

An ostensibly ridiculous but subtly intelligent soap.

Unlike "Lost," which ended its first season twisted around itself with mystery and mythology, "Invasion" doesn't seem poised to madden you that way. Its ambition is smaller and more self-contained; weirdness will visit a town and change relationships among an extended, and messy, family.

"Top Chef" seems like a no-brainer, an extension both of the interactivity of TV cooking and the art-and-craft side of reality shows, in which people are actually making things as opposed to just asses of themselves.

The show is actually good, quietly so, in that way sitcoms rarely are quiet anymore.

"Kidnapped" is stylishly executed TV brain food, a little too moody for its own good but otherwise fine pulp.

"Longford," perhaps, could as easily have been a stage play — a taut, four- or five-person one. But the filmmakers artfully weave in documentary footage of the period to remind us of the personal suffering and public hand-wringing the killers caused.

It feels as if you've happened across a British sitcom or a rerun of "MADtv."

It's rather old-fashioned, except that there's something real about the chemistry.

The result is a show that tilts toward the familiar except for the man in the middle of it. Rapaport... is a fresh choice as a man-boy whose wife and kids dance circles around him.

Rather too slick for its own good.

Feels like an indie feature idea crammed into a sitcom.

"Free Ride" is a bit more than passably good, but like "Arrested [Development]" it feels hard to love.

Almost immediately you can tell it's a kind of fantasy camp for "Sports Center" junkies.

The show... doesn't seem to be aiming for anything higher than a comfortable middle ground, bypassing a chance to watch Goldblum send up our preconceived idea of Goldblum.

Steinberg is a polite, solicitous host -- too polite and solicitous.

Sometimes "John From Cincinnati" is a muddle, at other times rich drama and divine comedy. And sometimes it's all of that at once.

"Inconceivable" is a much more tentative exercise than "Nip/Tuck," offering only the mildest hints of comment on the world it depicts, of affluent people going to great lengths to bear children.