A fiercely controlled and inventive work of art.

[A] beautiful, intelligent, imperfect show.

It's King done right.

Like Bravo's fashion winner "Project Runway," the channel's promising "Top Chef" flaunts terms of art and insiderism to give it authority.

“Big Day” is marvelously cast, and the actors, especially Wendie Malick, manage, like the cast of “24,” to convey a sense of urgency that almost belongs on the stage.

Another well-plotted show by Donald P. Bellisario.

The comedy is nifty, light and kind, even as it tries to be real, slitting open the stand-up themes of marital sex, masturbation and dope smoking until it's dirty enough to convince you that you're not being condescended to, but smart enough not to be grim. That's a huge feat.

Like the fledgling “John From Cincinnati” but with fewer side effects, “Big Love” derives suspense, humor and thrills from HBO’s signature insight: that Americans are profoundly anxious about how their families are different from other families.

If "Laguna Beach" looked perpetually like late afternoon -- the mellow light of cocktail hour, the promise of a party -- "The Hills" looks like a workday.

“My Boys” is certainly a charming knockoff.

This peculiar series seals NBC’s new role as the skinflint’s HBO. The shows “30 Rock,” “Friday Night Lights” and now “Andy Barker, P.I.” are all so engrossing and so creatively untrammeled that it’s almost suspicious.

The idle, boozy time between one romantic relationship and the next turns out to be a sweet spot for a sitcom.

But the particular stories are not what “Six Degrees” is ultimately about. Instead the show’s forte, for viewers like me who don’t mind piety on television, is its ambience of faith.

“Ugly Betty” is a sweet, funny show. It’s worth watching. And we’ll see.

There’s plenty to laugh at here.

An eclectic, speedy and fun-enough cartoon.

A quest romance in which Middle Earth is essentially Route 66, that national treasure, and some of its burned-out byways.

This first episode doesn’t offer enough payoff for those first scenes: far too much Hauser and running, and too little Boulet and talking. But the opening scenes give proof of intelligence, and the series might yet display that intelligence more effectively, and give Mr. Anderson room to play.

When this complex question about memory, identity, reality and generations of women supplies the suspense of the film, “Life Support” really gets good.

The film is bereft of feel-good scenes and drug-movie clichés.

If “This American Life” is all like this [opening] segment, it will be an immaculate and historic documentary series, with or without the storytelling pretext.

It’s pretty easy to loathe this stuff if you like your comedy more ragged, drug-addled and confrontational. But there’s an easygoing red-state pleasantness to it too, a celebration of timeless and consoling suburban inertia.

As with “Laguna Beach,” however, MTV seems to have deployed every camera at Viacom just following the cast members around town in case something exciting -- a cellphone call! - happens.

Leverage winds up seeming merely anachronistic, wrapping up with a cute resolution each week, the swine in handcuffs, not torn from the private hockey rinks of their Aspen vacation homes.

Still, if it's not funny, why give "Crumbs" any attention at all? Because it's an unusual experiment: not only is the show set among a fraction of the American gentry that few would consider relatable, but it also exhibits more gravitas than any sitcom in television history.

Those who don’t like a rogue's progress, preferring to cluck from a distance over the skeevy habits of today’s rich bachelors, should skip "Sons of Hollywood."

As a self-aware show, perhaps too self-aware, Nashville attends closely to the money-country nexus, mindful that it’s not your daddy’s, nor Robert Altman’s, "Nashville."

"Treasure Hunters" is too flimsy a pillar to help structure NBC's reality-television future.