From the moment I saw the pilot of Girls, I was a goner, a convert.

Louie is the anti–Anger Management: bizarre, inventive, and bold.

A triumph of writing, directing, and acting.

There’s a solid, patient, confident quality to this movie that’s rarely seen in modern mainstream cinema. It’s better than most American films playing in theaters, and better than most of HBO’s films, too.

At its best, Futurama blends raised-eyebrow postgraduate-thesis humor and fifth-grade-lunchroom spit-take humor. That’s not a combination you see every day--and as a bonus, Futurama stirs in unironically beautiful, at times thrilling visuals.

The best of the new fall sitcoms.

Splendid television.

Episodes is great--the sharpest sitcom debut this year. Among other excellent qualities, it's actively funny, with none of the dramedy lumpiness that spoils other half-hour offerings (bad camp, faux-energy badinage, heavy-handed sentimentality).

Sherlock is a wonderful series. Just thinking about it makes me smile.

This series is Burns doing Guthrie, bringing a lifetime of experience and craft to bear on a story of people struggling through hard times. He's picking up a guitar and telling us a story--a great one.

For all its gore, gunfire, and criminal nastiness, it's a joyous show; even when the characters are scowling, the show seems to be grinning at you.

It lets you simultaneously laugh at and with the characters, and feel justified for laughing, then ashamed, and then the pendulum swings back again; this is a much messier and more fascinating set of reactions than what sitcoms typically evoke.

The physicality of the visuals and the performances helps power Game of Thrones past any rough patches--not that there have been that many.

Oh My God is animated by deep skepticism and an appreciation of joy, qualities that don’t normally mix in comedy and that might seem, in a different context, incompatible. But they aren’t incompatible--not here, anyway.

I suspect it might be a classic that deserves a spot in the pantheon of great, long-delayed follow-ups, though I need to watch the whole thing again and live with it and then write about it again to be sure. That I’d want to rewatch the whole season immediately is, of course, another, possibly higher compliment.

Entertaining... What [Nagy] has done is tailor this tabloid material to several different narrative tastes, which alternate as the movie shifts from love affair to temper tantrum to gunfire to murder trial and back again.

State of Mind will be worth a careful watching as much for the writer as for the star.

It relies on intelligence and resourcefulness rather than divine providence.

Dark comedy suits insouciant Duchovny.... Here he delivers a tousled sort of aw-shucks Huck Finn, lighting out for erotic territories. McElhone, à la Rene Russo, manages to convey the notion of adult womanhood without being either drippy or schoolmarmish about it.

Like any good reality show, Kid Nation's strengths are in its characters, and the most remarkable aspect of these characters so far is their intellectual superiority to adults on reality shows--they use big words and make funny jokes!

San Francisco shifts shapes nicely, and there’s sufficient tension in the pilot to keep our nerves strung out, and since executive producers Kevin Falls and Alex Graves are West Wing veterans, it’s no surprise that the characters pass for adults.

Pushing Daisies will drive you crazy or make you smile.

With a calculation of word and image that’s almost elegant, Five Days gives us sociology and anthropology instead of shock and awe.

Laura Harris as Jill Bernhardt, the platinum-blonde district attorney, Paula Newsome as Claire Washburn, the surprisingly jolly medical examiner, and Aubrey Dollar as Cindy Thomas, the impossibly young newspaper reporter, do not add up to a Kaffeeklatsch or a therapy group. I’m not saying that they don’t occasionally discuss emotions (usually Angie/Lindsay’s), but it’s more grad-school seminar than touchy-feely hot-tub hangout.

Project Runway appears to have saved itself (and its audience from boredom) by showcasing a crop of designers that is--as Gunn has not unjustly declared--"the strongest group ever."

In these last innings, as The Wire ties up its gnarled threads, it also makes its most daring departure yet, introducing yet another institution, and a brand-new cast of characters to disappoint us.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles is mostly chase scenes. And very nicely staged they are, by director–executive producer David Nutter (Supernatural, Smallville), an adrenaline junkie equally adept at terrorizing a classroom, blowing up a city, rebooting a cyborg, or time-warping a bank vault.

The resulting series features trick photography, murder, romance, and--much like the Fox "Terminator" series--more clever ideas and witty jokes, not to mention cool jazz, than the audience expects or deserves.