If many of these plot and character elements are straight off the bargain shelf at the Boxing Melodrama R Us superstore, Lights nonetheless gives them new life--partly thanks to a superlative cast and partly because the show resists the biggest cliche of all: the boxer as innocent victim of poverty and circumstance.

Chronicling the opposite relationships requires Mad Love to bounce from light romantic comedy to murderously hostile wisecracks and back again, which it accomplishes with considerable deftness. The show's quick wit is matched with a talented cast, particularly Labine.

Watching her construct a self from a handful of jagged fragments is a seductive pleasure.

Sharply contrasting with the florid Borgias is AMC's emotionally spare and atmospherically dank series The Killing.

Murder and sexual predation sure look fun when they're done by pretty people in luscious gowns. Jeremy Irons is splendidly depraved as Rodrigo, and Holliday Grainger (Robin Hood) so sunnily sweet as Lucrezia that it's damn near impossible to hold a little arsenic against her.

Starz, however, has re-imagined the doings of Arthur, Guinevere and the gang as a bloody, bodice-ripping medieval soap opera, and the result is surprisingly satisfying.

HBO's drama Cinema Verite is a searing and irresistible look at the making of An American Family and an incisive dissection of the mendacity of what we so absurdly call reality TV.

South Riding has everything you could want from a Masterpiece event: perfect period details, a forlornly gray surf, a swelling soundtrack, disputes over crunchy-gravel real estate, whistling trains and black-tie dinners in hotels, a believable and compelling story involving multiple characters and plots and a faithfulness to its original material that allows for a textured, even sorrowful, bleakness.

There's nothing at all subtle about the gloriously absurdist Wilfred.

Suits is far more than a whimsical caper show. Beneath its cuttingly funny dialogue lurk complex emotional edges.

Sins of fathers and mothers not only visit each of the characters, but infest them; the show shimmers with an inner core of volcanic anger that makes it far more interesting than your average family soap.

Torchwood: Miracle Day is smashing entertainment.

Damages returns to spiteful, vindictive and wildly entertaining life Wednesday night after resuscitation by satellite-television provider DirecTV.

The CW's tale of an evil twin and an even eviler twin, is devious doppelganger drama at its best.

Unforgettable is a quirky, captivating take on the police procedurals that have been a staple of the CBS schedule over the past decade.

It's a stylish, elegantly plotted tale of a young woman's sociopathic thirst for vengeance.

Bello's performance as the weather-beaten Timoney, swabbing her emotional scars with alcohol, nicotine and invective, is easily the highlight of the fall television season.

Derivative Pan Am may be, but that doesn't make it any less watchable.

The show shrewdly offers more than a monster of the week, with some absorbing subplots that continue from week to week.

Half a century and half a dozen wars later, it may seem that there's nothing left to say about Vietnam. But Vietnam in HD proves that there is, and says it dazzlingly, horrifyingly well.

For now, Alcatraz is a sinister bag of sinister pleasures.

Smash doesn't dabble in sociology: It's pure greasepaint melodrama. Sneer all you want, but if you sneak in a secret smile now and then, that's OK, too.

The sordid ugliness that festers inside Magic City's voluptuously beautiful wrappings makes irresistible television.

It is a powerful and often heartbreaking piece of filmmaking that ponders just how thin our veneer of civilization really can be.

Hit & Miss, once you get past the successive bombshells of its opening minutes, is a painful yet endearing drama about trying to build a family in a landscape blighted by loneliness and rejection.

Political Animals can be slightly murky when it comes to invoking issues and ideologies. But when it comes to the microlevel of politics, the misdirection and machinations politicians employ to satisfy their own ambitions and thwart those of others, Political Animals is peerless.

O'Dowd and Garai are fascinating as they make their characters grow in opposite directions--he more steely, she more compassionate--over the course of the show.

Guys With Kids is a perfect confection of witty dialogue and slapstick action.