The most engrossing new drama of the fall season.

It's a breath of fresh air even for those of us who find our allergies stimulated by the countless particles of whimsy suspended in its thick atmosphere.

Their new show has both the nerve to link up twentysomething malaise and 21st-century terror-angst and the good nature to make the proposition look endearing.

The show is sometimes sweet and wry, sometimes crass and vicious, and, though often subtle, it embraces that embarrassing title and flings itself boisterously into a hacky premise

Back to You doesn't have a mandate to be inventive--to try new comedic beats or to attempt daring flights of absurdity. It just needs to be uninventive in a snappy way, a feat readily accomplished.

Sarah Corvus has arrived to haunt and to taunt, to give our plucky heroine a sinister contrast that the show can't do without.

The tempo, thus far, is notably deliberate; the show's got mortality on its mind.

The writing is as crisp as Brooks' perfect raincoat, and the partners share a father-son chemistry unseen elsewhere in the franchise, and anyone exhibiting the faintest traces of Anglophilia will delight to see the crown prosecutor and the defense counsel talking trash in the changing room while donning and doffing their barristers' wigs.

Costello, unlike public television, asks viewers like you for nothing but your attention, which he rewards with intimate assessments of songcraft and the underappreciated architects of modern pop.

Now comes Grey Gardens, largely enjoyable in spite of being almost entirely superfluous.

At its best, Glee is not just entertaining but elating, dramatizing Breakfast Club-quality teen angst with the aid of tight production numbers covering new and classic popular songs.

Falco has the strength to sell the overwrought cliches and to force each important moment to its crisis.

The show gets under the skin, somehow, with its loose Web-clip vibe and looser philosophy of life.

Covert Affairs is a zippy character study, and it puts Perabo's features to playful use in the earliest moments of the pilot, filling the screen with them in a context where they're begging to be studied.

The pacing of the show's jokes, which heralds a welcome respect for the quickness of the audience, helps all the humor pop. Of course, good-old dumb physical juxtapositions don't hurt, either.

Steadfastly crass in content, The League is generally subtle in execution.

In the suspenseful early hours of The Killing, Rosie's family goes about its bereavement in muted tones, and a subplot about a mayoral candidate drawn into the crime's eccentric orbit flashes with potential, and, primarily, our expectations for cop shows are teased, gratified, and artfully upended.

Appropriate to the pace and the space of series television, it welcomes you into its intrigues at a walking pace.

Pan Am's easy whirl fits the bill, when its chatter is snappy and also when it's not.

What Surburgatory lacks in novelty, it compensates for with a steady stream of gags, splashes of nuance (and nuance's vivid opposite), the comedic flow of Ana Gasteyer and Chris Parnell as the Altmans' neighbors, and an undercurrent of sweetness.

Boss is electric with self-importance, and that is in itself is a hoot, given its particular combination of thematic pomp and expressionistic pulp.

Over three nights and five and half hours, Prohibition provides a very fine analytic survey of the noble experiment, and most criticisms of it are quibbles.

Doors are opening. Mind the gap.

Clever with its gaudiness, the new soap opera proceeds as if that invitation is gilt-edged, tackily engraved, and sealed inside an oversized envelope with a kiss of frosted-pink lipstick.

A brisk film extracted from the campaign-trail saga of that title--has delivered to Julianne Moore the meatiest role of her career.

Like "Alias" or "The X-Files," Jericho has enough wheel-within-wheels, double agents, and ad hoc alliances to draw in viewers who love a long-playing puzzle.

Even the most ardent fans of 30 Rock will concede that it doesn't look its sharpest as its third season opens. Only the most churlish will be much put out by this, though. A relatively flat episode of Tina Fey's backstage farce is still the fizziest thing in prime-time comedy.

In all, Oprah's Big Give is a triumph of virtue, which leaves only the question of who would want to watch it.