Boardwalk Empire has been the glittering light at the end of HBO's tunnel for so long now that you might wonder if it--or any other show--could possibly live up to the hype. Amazingly, it does.

It has plenty to say about the things humans are capable of and, like most great series, it rewards the careful viewer.

There's not a bad performance to be had in Rectify, which even features Hal Holbrook as Holden's former lawyer. But it's Young, whose character veers from a deceptive lethargy to moments of dry humor, who carries every scene he's in as he finds ways to allow us glimpses of the man still imprisoned behind the mask.

I wouldn't want to miss a word.

While I'm thrilled to have something as deep and juicy as The Wire back after so long a break between seasons, I'm afraid that the show's very best years may be behind it.

The Shield, which, based on the three I've seen so far, looks to be going out the way it came in: fast and furious, bloody but unbowed.

This new-to-you season of "Friday Night Lights" is more than worth the wait.

Matthew Weiner's stylish soap opera continues to be both stylish and sudsy in about equal parts, and, as always, I'd be happy to spend most of my time at the office with Don, learning the secrets of advertising and ignoring his mess of a personal life, if not for Don's precocious daughter, the inimitable Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka).

Personally, I have even less interest in boxing than I do in those other worlds, so when I say I swallowed most of the 13-episode first season of FX's new boxing drama, Lights Out in a couple of marathon gulps, it's saying something.

It remains, stubbornly and triumphantly, what it was: an unhurried exploration of the aftermath of a city's catastrophe, told through the experiences of those who didn't have the luxury of shutting off CNN when they'd had enough. And all set to some extraordinary music.

Prohibition is barely more than a gulp next to Burns benders like "Baseball" and "Jazz," but it packs a punch, both as a cautionary tale and as entertainment.

They're fully realized characters, not freakishly talented pawns, and their stories--and choices--reflect a real-life awareness I only wish "Glee" could muster.

It's no mean feat, either, to follow three highly entertaining reinventions of stories involving one of literature's most adapted characters with three more even better than the first. But it must not be impossible, because Sherlock has done it.

As cool as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" but with less other-worldly problems - date rape, a missing mother and a murder mystery among them - Veronica's navigating the tricky waters of a town full of secrets, on a network that until this season wasn't known for creating shows this good. [22 Sept 2004, p.38]

This show is so deliciously perverse that washing up afterward just seems the natural thing to do. [6 Apr 1990, p.75]

This is extraordinarily ambitious and entertaining television, wherever its pedigree.

Both cinematically broad and heartbreakingly specific, a melding for once of the best that movies and television have to offer.

If you can make the time in a season where most programmers think we're all too busy shopping to be watching anything heavier than "Miracle on 34th Street" (the Natalie Wood version, of course), then "Sleeper Cell" delivers.

As taut and twisted a mystery as anything you'll find on television this summer.

Grammer and Heaton slip easily into characters who won't be easily mistaken for Frasier Crane or Debra Barone, the writing's professional, the supporting cast dependable (and in the case of Fred Willard, another "Raymond" veteran, dependably hilarious).

Geek TV is really the stories of people who've had greatness, not geekiness, thrust upon them, mostly in the form of unrequested superpowers. It should probably disturb me, but somehow doesn't, that the best of these, the CW's Reaper.

This season, having already offered up Lindsay's perhaps too-facile explanation for what makes Dexter tick, the writers seem to be digging deeper into Butcher Boy's psyche, even as his colleagues find themselves digging deeper into his after-hours work. And as his pretend life becomes more challenging, it can't help but become more real.

While the acting's first rate, it's the mystery that drives Five Days.

In a sign that Runway's producers now know where the show's strength lies, the designers' first-episode challenge doesn't, for once, center on materials scooped up at the supermarket or home center but on actual fabric.

I was kind of jazzed by the estrogen-fueled drama of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which, when you set aside the robots from the future, is really just a story about a woman (Lena Headey) trying to protect her only son (Thomas Dekker).

I still don't know where it's headed, but it feels, finally, as if we could be getting somewhere.

From the three episodes I've seen, I'd say that even after all this time, Jericho still has something to say.

Margulies, who appears to have buried Nurse Hathaway - and her scrubs--for good, is a crackling presence in the courtroom and just about everywhere else.