A rich, intelligent and often moving miniseries.

In Keenan and Lloyd’s world of dizzy, barb-tossing sophisticates, this group is confident and well-armed: Channing’s patented ladies-who-lunch tartness, Winkler’s nervous defensiveness, Burrell’s blasé arrogance, Marshall’s droll delivery and Gorham’s frustrated sensitivity all mix like a well-shaken cocktail, even if it’s the kind that gets tossed in somebody’s face.

It’s easily the most interesting of the three [new alien shows], taking the emotional chill and confusion that accompany a family divorce... and lacing them with a narratively complementary dose of body-snatching paranoia.

So far, Everybody Hates Chris has felt like a textbook example of how you fold a comedian’s sensibility into a familiar TV genre.

[Merchant and Gervais'] meetings are gemlike exchanges of deadpan incompetence and hair-pulling frustration, worthy of the bygone era of comedy teams.

At times it plays like a hybrid of the ticking-bomb thrills from ["24"] and the moral thorniness that undergirds HBO’s excellent crime series The Wire.

[An] exciting, interesting series.

This kind of brittlely accurate performance is something to watch in the hands of an actress like Bening, who seems incapable --even during the film’s most blackly humorous moments -- of a false, Fatal Attraction–like note.

The looseness of the interchanges gives the humor an anti-writers’-room freshness without losing the harshness we’ve come to expect in this Everybody Loves Raymond/Arrested Development age of clashing relatives.

It’s something of a feat that the makers of Big Love are willing to put the ugly side of this phenomenon up against the mainstream sheen of Bill’s setup, and -- thanks in great part to the marvelous acting on display, from Paxton’s rugged haplessness to all three women’s unique variations on maternal stress and wifely sensuality -- still offer up a family to root for, warts and all.

Insanely watchable.

You might think you’ve seen this story before, and yet you haven’t seen it quite this way.

Don’t mistake the slick-but-not-stupid Life on Mars for brain-bending sci-fi or Austin Powers-style farce. Aside from the psychological stress of its star... this is actually at heart an old-school cops-and-robbers show, with that dash of Twilight Zone to give it 21st-century cachet.

A weirdly appropriate and hilarious symbol of our times.

Where does that leave Season 6, then, when the show has stemmed major disasters for five years running and its intensity level of choice is 11? As well-oiled as before, actually, and, judging from the four hours airing over Sunday and Monday, unafraid of edging its parallel-universe America ever closer toward a world war nightmare of mass hysteria.

The Sarah Silverman Program is a welcome outlet for Silverman’s brand of outlandishness, blessedly stingy with its desire to breach mores, and much more concerned with decorating its late-night comedy turf so that it can welcome any kind of unexpected laugh: shock, parody, irony, insult humor or absurdity.

This is a meaty show about the complex allure of easy wealth and the traps it sets for one’s personal morality.

With everyone's motivations in this handsomely mounted but adrenaline-fueled series so on-the-surface, Dormer's enigmatic, time-halting loveliness [as Anne Boleyn] is a boon for The Tudors, and damn near worth losing your head over.

A tightly woven, watchable melodrama that connects an eclectic but friendly bunch of women through maybe the only thing they could possibly have in common: being married to the military.

Mad Men may thrive on a certain heartless suspense, but it's definitely got a brain, one that's interested in how our lives are a battle between the narrative we imagine for ourselves and the path we happen to be on.

Close’s burnished enigma characterization works beautifully because Damages, which will spend its 13-episode season detailing the six months that led to the opening shots of a blood-covered Ellen escaping a murder scene, is more a well-oiled genre exercise than the stuff of rigorous personality study.

Although it manages to be suspenseful about the journey of its jumbled characters, it is an unrelenting examination of the search for the hidden recipe of me, you and us that makes for a strong marriage, and that's something you ultimately have to steel yourself for in a weekly series.

It's actually a kick to watch. Its joys are broader and self-consciously zanier than the CW series.

Kevin Smith directs the pilot episode with his typically expert comic timing. But he also handles the dark action bits nicely. Because even though Reaper is generous with its humor, it’s not entirely wink-wink.

It's a whimsical, romantically inventive and darkly funny pop-up hour about a man (Lee Pace) whose touch can bring the dead back to life (but also, yikes, vice versa).

What's unusually gripping about Five Days is that its tension isn’t derived from depicting the majority of its cast as shifty-eyed suspects, but rather as floundering, flawed human beings unsure of how to move on with their lives.

Beyond its title, I have no quibble with this well-made, sly, heartwarming and at times giddily funny show.

It affects a frisky aura of gamesmanship with its tight-knit friends (played by Lucy Liu, Frances O'Connor, Miranda Otto and Bonnie Somerville) as they send their distress-text signals to each other, meet up, hash out their obstacles--cheaters, competitors, cads and the clock--and plan their counterattacks.