Invasion is an excellent show, the new season's best drama.

Sweet but never treacly, nostalgic but never dishonest, startlingly frank about race and always painfully funny, Everybody Hates Chris is the sitcom for which the networks have been yearning for the better part of a decade.

Pushing Daisies is by far the best new series of the fall season.

This dark gem of a show about a zombie apocalypse gleams with hellfire incandescence.

What a strange but stunning achievement Twin Peaks is... For television, Twin Peaks may be the summit of off-the- wall originality. [8 Apr 1990, p.H4]

This wonderful half-hour pilot has distinguished this show as the very best of the crop of new series this fall. The writing, by the bawdy, brilliant Susan Harris, who was lured back to television by the promise of doing a show with the kind of characters seldom seen on the tube, is on a par with her wittiest days as the creator of "Soap". [14 Sept 1985, p.D5]

Superb in nearly all regards, from sharp, insightful writing, to a marvelously textured performance by star Keri Russell, to its movie-like pace and photography. [29 Sept 1998, p.1C]

It's messy and confusing, often complex and contradictory, and moves in fits and starts, sideways and backward. It's the most startlingly original program on television in years, maybe ever, and it's also one of the best. [28 Sept 2002, p.E1]

With smart dialogue, intriguing plots, an explosive cast and an inclination to peer into life's dark corners, it is the most captivating new program in years. The Shield slams home like a bullet; wear your body armor. [11 Mar 2002, p.E2]

The writing is boosted by first-rate acting all around, especially Hall as the severely repressed David and Griffiths as Brenda, whose moody character unfolds slowly and unexpectedly. [2 June 2001, p.5E]

This is L.A. Law, which not only is the best offering of the new television season, but the best pilot for a new show since Hill Street Blues' debut six TV seasons ago. It will, as they say, make you laugh; it will make you cry. It brandishes a superior cast and a wit and style that elevate it immediately into the rarefied Hill Street/St. Elsewhere atmospheres -- shows whose structure of interwoven story lines that dangle from episode to episode it shares. [14 Sept 1986, p.K1]

News bulletin: We've finally found the weapons of mass destruction, or at least one of them. The jokes fly like shrapnel in Fox's dangerously hilarious new sitcom Arrested Development, and, like shrapnel, they often draw blood...A scathingly, unnervingly comic riff on stupidity and greed in the corporate world, Arrested Development is something like a National Lampoon's Wall Street Vacation, painting its targets variously as buffoonish or malefic, but always hitting them dead-center. [2 Nov 2003, p.3M]

Gilmore Girls is by far the most entertaining comedy-drama on the fall schedule and it should appeal to both The WB's core teenage audience and their parents; it doesn't talk down to either side of the age divide. [5 Oct 2000, p.1E]

A gaspingly funny show that you ought to watch early and often.

Fearlessly funny and scathingly introspective.

My Own Worst Enemy is by far the best drama of the fall season, a bold and brainy spy thriller that practices a sort of armed existentialism.

The Pacific is as brutally simple and direct--and as oblivious to modern PC sensibilities--as the Marine's letter. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, this 10-part HBO miniseries is a loving but anguished tribute to the men who fought on the bloody island hellholes that comprised World War II's Pacific theater.

Boardwalk Empire plays much like Sopranos: The Roots, a malignantly alluring exploration of the emergence of organized crime in the United States. A checkerboard of hazy intrigue and garish violence, of ruthless ambition and easy sexuality, it's an epic tale told darkly and well.

The gloriously bloody and depraved spirit of the novels is intact and even enhanced.

Homeland is an absolutely riveting immersion in the paranoia and burnout of America after a decade of the war on terrorism.

Repellent and fascinating, a stygian nightmare awash in sick lusts, it seems certain to attract large audiences and huge controversy.

Starz' new eight-episode drama is at once the most cynical and most captivating portrayal of American politics ever presented on television.

The recipe may go back to your grandma or beyond, but that doesn't mean you won't eat two helpings and beg for more.

Creepy and cockeyed, unholy and unnerving, Top Of The Lake is riveting stuff.

Boreanaz oozes the perfect mixture of angst and irony. He's darkly foreboding when necessary, and then slips into the glib, smart humor that's the hallmark of the Buffy franchise. [5 Oct 1999, p.1E]

A drama so well written and artfully executed that if tonight's debut were expanded just a bit, it could stand as a feature film. [22 Sept 1999, p.1E]

Telling its story from the perspectives of the police and the narcotraffickers, The Wire unfolds slowly, like an evil flower; more cerebral than slam-bang. At times it resembles a chess match as the adversaries plot moves and countermoves; at other times, a jigsaw puzzle, as the cops assemble a portrait of the gang from scraps of information. [1 June 2002, p.E1]

It flickers with longing and resentment, vulnerability and rejection, temptation and moral erosion. It is totally absorbing television. [5 Aug 2003, p.1E]