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

Watching Better Off Ted is a bit like reading old Dilbert comic strips--amusing, but the punch lines seem awfully familiar.

As drama, unfortunately, it's often punchless, with a meandering narrative which, it's obvious from the first moments, cannot be contained within a single two-hour show.

The new CBS cop drama Vegas--a cross between Gunsmoke, The Untouchables and a Sheriff Joe Arpaio reality show--is wildly entertaining.

This sitcom is a loving embrace of convulsive domestic eccentricity.

It's a testament to the remarkable performance of Collette that it will never occur to viewers that Tara's behavior is anything but a mortal compulsion. Her remarkable moment-to-moment morphs from teeny-bopper slut to Stepford Wife to biker brute and then back again beggar the imagination.

Mixing paranoia, bleak humor and post-9/11 exhaustion in a potent story-telling brew, it's one of the new television season's most promising dramas.

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

30 Rock... is pretty darn funny, a bitterly merry comic jihad against corporate stupidity and mendaciousness.

Pillars does a surprisingly good job of maintaining story coherence. It also avoids what might be called the Fairytale-Princess Fallacy of costume dramas; the muck and brutality of the Middle Ages are on full display.

Welcome to ABC's V, the final, the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season.

The Company is a gripping requiem for the Cold War and the men who fought it.

Sheen and Cryer breathe some life into this thing, but a mercy killing might have been simpler. [22 Sept 2003, p.4E]

Ben and Kate is sometimes shrill, sometimes belligerent and sometimes (well, a lot of times) merely stupid. It is never funny.

No television series has been built around a less likable character, or rendered itself so strangely, compulsively watchable as a result.

Original in concept, intelligent in execution, it's a scruffily Steinbeckian chronicle of life at the social and economic margins.

Neatly staged, with one surprise after another in a geometric progression of suspense, The Event's pilot episode leaves a lot of tantalizingly unanswered questions.

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

If not exactly compelling, the pilot episode is engaging and often quirkily funny.

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.

Putting aside for a moment questions about whether it signifies the imminent collapse of Western civilization and even the human reproductive impulse, this version of Nikita can still provide a rollicking, if slightly psychotic, good time.

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

The show's boorishness is exceeded only by its dissimulation; not one frame of this thing--from the diners who seem not to notice that their table is surrounded by camera crews to the melodramatically villainous managers--is remotely believable.

Cathy's modest conception of throwing caution to the winds mirrors the strengths of The Big C, which is affecting precisely because of its refusal to assume epic proportions.

This truly hideous sitcom offers a postmodernist take on the 1960s comedy That Girl, in which Marlo Thomas starred as an aspiring actress afflicted with insufferable cuteness.

Thomas Jane exudes a convincing odor of despair as Ray. So does Jane Adams as Tanya, one of his former one-night-stands who abandons her abysmally failed career as a poet to become his pimpette. If anything, they're too convincing; the humor in Hung tends to get blotted out by the melancholia.

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

Beneath its estimable comic trappings, Go On is something larger: a meditation on what makes life worth living.