This tale of a lonely cop left behind by everyone--partners, friends, lovers, even the criminals he pursues--has a piercing melancholy that elevates it way above its fantasy trappings.

With dazzling action scenes and a pair of stars who ooze charm and sensuality, Undercovers easily overcomes its predictability.

The reshot pilot episode that will be broadcast Tuesday is no longer irritating, but neither is it distinctive, just one more humdrum cop drama, notable only for wasting a high-powered cast that includes Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos) and Aisha Hinds (True Blood).

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.

That's a lot of stories to tell, and the sweeping Hell on Wheels does a good job of chopping them into bite-size pieces.

Shraeger is played with breezy, cynical wit by Amber Tamblyn (who may have her own secrets; she's looking rather more bosomy than she did a few years back as God's BFF in in "Joan of Arcadia"). And she gets capable backup from a cast that includes Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau.

Happily, Golden Boy not only manages a fairly original take on cop shows but actually turns out to be surprisingly intriguing.

Mike & Molly unquestionably has a lot of funny moments. But realizing you've just been laughing at 22 consecutive minutes of socially unredeemed fat jokes may leave you feeling as if you've just eaten a 36-inch anchovy-and-pineapple pizza: bloated and yucky.

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

Like its ancestor, the new Dallas is self-consciously a trashfest, an endless cycle of betrayals, confrontations, reconciliations and re-betrayals.

However badly you thought American race relations were going, Black. White. will make you feel worse.

Surreal and then some.

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

OK, OK, A Gifted Man, is not as bad as all that [Friendly-ghost mothers-in-law? Friendly-ghost proctologists? Friendly-ghost telephone solicitors?]. But it's not good, either.

Drugs. Pratfalls. Bodily excretions. Sexual crudity. Shock-jock ethnic humor. Four-letter words flying like lead in a matineee Western. Character development and story? Not so much.

CBS' new comedy-drama The Ex List is a descent to the most profound levels of Chick Flick Hell, where the damned and those with Y chromosomes cry out in agony through all eternity.

Though it's intended to be a female buddy show in which she plays off Sasha Alexander's coolly uppercrust medical examiner Maura Isles, Harmon definitely gets the upper hand--at least in the pilot episode.

Royal Pains has some moments of genuine wit--a lot more of them after Costanzo shows up.

It's hard to say which is more unlikely: That a corporate legal fang could be God's prophet; or that the Almighty would spread His word through visions of George Michael; or these matters could be blended into a daffily funny and affecting television show.

Though dazzlingly plotted and acted, the show is not easily watched.

Worst Week certainly has some genuine laughs, but they run out well before the pratfalls and pee-pee jokes do.

Crisply written and acted, grafting some Enron-era scandal onto a morality tale that goes back to Faust, 666 Park Avenue gives good goosebump.

The Unit hits more false notes than an American Idol tryout.

Watching this dismal intragenerational cluster of families is sort of like seeing a Roots for the cannibal gangs in The Road.

Like True Blood, Banshee can be preposterously entertaining, or perhaps entertainingly preposterous.

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.

Welcome to The Goode Family, a scathingly funny report from the front lines of America's culture wars.

That single season will be hellacious fun. Stuffed with visual puns and sly homages to horror movies from Jaws to Poltergeist, Harper's Island relentlessly mocks film grammar with set pieces that take off in unexpected directions.