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]

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]

The thrill of Homicide comes in listening to some of the snappiest dialogue on television. David Mamet should admire Attanasio's lines. The show -- filmed in Baltimore -- looks good, but it sounds better. [30 Jan 1993, p.E1]

In a season of too many three-child sitcoms, Frasier reminds viewers how good an adult sitcom can be. In its own way, Frasier is a family sitcom, one with meaning for middle-aged children. The father character brings a dark, but not oppressive, tone to the show, and Mahoney offers a performance full of pain and bitter humor. He gives Frasier a weight that other sitcoms, even Cheers, rarely have. [16 Sept 1993, p.G1]

A striking, crisply edited show. The raw language, the series' other point of controversy, gives NYPD Blue an authentic flavor. Here is a series about bruised people, seemingly beyond redemption. This is the way they would talk. [21 Sept 1993, p.E1]

Sharply written and acted.

The show's witty, inventive writing would be fun even in the hands of a less capable cast.

Padalecki and Ackles are hunky, funny and a joy to watch.

It's funny and warm and I dare you to watch it without getting your pants charmed off.

Crumbs' approach to the foibles of the family, though not for the tender-hearted, is raucously funny.

Shark works some of the same ground as Fox's new legal drama Justice, but with far more wit and style.

A perverse pleasure to watch.

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

Intense and fascinating.

Mad Men is a captivating experience.

It's the lack of moral clarity that makes Damages so spellbinding. Every character wears multiple masks; every action is cloaked in ambiguity and, often, outright duplicity.

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

In Californication, [Duchovny] gets to take full advantage of his low-key comic approach, and the result is irresistible. The rest of the cast matches him riff for riff, especially British actress Natascha McElhone as the disenchanted Karen and young Madeleine Martin as their 12-year-old daughter Becca.

The engaging, honest commentary is just what a DVD set should provide, and once again The Office extras don't disappoint.

You just can't get through two minutes of Back to You without a belly laugh.

Welcome to the tawdry, tantalizing and altogether terrific world of Gossip Girl.

McKidd and castmates Gretchen Egolf as his wife Katie; Reed Diamond as his brother Jack, a cop who used to date Katie; and Moon Bloodgood as his spectral fiance, Livia, play this with just the right mix of credulity and dry wit.

Schwartz's good eye for characters and cutting sense of humor--makes Chuck a thoroughly enjoyable romp.

Reaper is a hilariously fractured commentary on Gen Y.

Half the fun in this outlandishly funny sitcom is that Penny is so spacey that she doesn't appear to recognize what hard-core nerds Leonard and Sheldon really are--even the presence in their bathroom of Luke Skywalker No-More-Tears Shampoo doesn't tip her off.

The show's intricate plotting and finely rendered characters will engage your brain, but there's plenty of below-the-shoulders action, too.

Intelligent and entertaining reimaginations of stupefyingly bad pieces of 1970s sci-fi hackwork.

The excellent cast keeps drawing you back--especially Donald Sutherland as family patriarch Tripp Darling, whose evil glint makes even as benign a phrase as ''good morning'' sound like ''I'm going to put an ice pick through your eye.'' Even better is Krause's portrayal of Nick, layers of exasperation upon fascination upon temptation.

This peculiar comedy-drama has some cockeyed wrinkles that make it interesting.

Big Shots matches affecting characters with genuinely funny stories and dialogue.

Innovative, daring and--most importantly--funny, Aliens in America is a fresh take on an old problem, the loneliness of being different.

It's funny and smart, with affably quirky characters who aren't cut from cardboard.

Samantha Who? is not only a sitcom but a pungently funny one about self-discovery, reinvention and the possibility that beauty may be only skin-deep, but bitch goes right down to the bone.

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.

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.

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

This unsettling documentary series on the cable WE network, which follows a dozen Kansas City girls through four years in their suburban high school, suggests we've come a long, hard way from "Grease."

Ellis has used Adams' works to create a wondrously full and nuanced portrait of the man, which is brought fully to life by Paul Giamatti.

A raucous, raunchy and utterly loving account of life at the bottom of the military food chain.

Sons of Anarchy is bloody, disturbing and maniacally addictive.

True Blood is an unlikely but irresistible mixture of pungent political satire, observant pop sociology and lurid drive-in thrills.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

But for all the laughs, Being Human never loses sight of the menace of its characters.

Roth makes for a tartly witty hero, the mysteries are intricately plotted, and the show makes the most of the weird dynamics of an office where the boss can ferret out everybody's secrets.

Grimly funny, streaked with sentimentality and malice, Nurse Jackie is the medical miracle of television's summer season, a blue-collar hospital show without a McDreamy in sight.

Cynical, sweet and inestimably funny, Glee--which debuted with a single sneak-preview episode last spring, but joins Fox's regular weekly lineup for the first time Wednesday--is by far the best show of the fall TV season that began rolling out this week.

Archer is a millennial (and very much R-rated) "Get Smart" that acerbically and hilariously plays on our post-9/ll fears that "U.S. government intelligence" might be a grim oxymoron.

It may not be entirely fair to call a show as complexly layered as The Good Wife a crime drama, though at some basic level it is, with a bleakly luminous Juliana Margulies playing a novice criminal defense attorney who's painfully learning the sport of judicial hardball.

For the first time since Married...With Children stood the genre on its head two decades ago, somebody has come up with a new take on the family sitcom, and the results are riotously funny.

Everybody in Brothers is funny, but the unquestioned star of the show is Pounder, a rapturous mix of menace and guile in the struggle to keep her men in line.

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

Those patient viewers who do stay will be richly rewarded with a humanist story that gains traction as it goes--a vivid and intimate character piece meant to be savored like a spicy gumbo.

With enough chemistry between its stars to power a DuPont lab and a wise use of off-the-beaten-path South Florida shooting locations -- it goes for a fetid swamp over South Beach every time -- The Glades is thoroughly enjoyable.

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.

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.

Terriers, FX's comedy-drama about a pair of bargain-basement private eyes, is a piquantly funny sojourn among lovable losers.

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.

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.

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

Americans in their 20s have few good-time memories in their young-adult lives. If they can be coaxed away from their computers to the television screen, they may find themselves bonding with the characters of the well-acted and intelligently written My Generation.

A potent brew of family melodrama, crime-thriller tension and conspiratorial intrigue, Blue Bloods may actually bring some viewers back onto the sinking ship of Friday-night television.

No Ordinary Family is no comic-book kiddie show but a perceptive and engaging comedy-drama about domestic dysfunction.

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.