This is Cox's best gig since the end of "Friends" and she clearly knows it, attacking the material at full tooth-and-nail.

[The mockumentary style is] used not to excess but to success, which is just what this wise, clever and bighearted comedy ought to be.

A smart and funny sitcom....Heaton is splendid as Heck, with a high-profile supporting cast.

Unlike a raft of recent adult-themed cartoons, Ugly Americans offers surprising laughs with its premise, and it is profanely whip-smart in a way that recalls the network's much-missed "Drawn Together" series.

I wouldn't have predicted this, but it turns out that it's a whole lot more fun to watch people paint on deadline than it is to watch them make deadline clothing ("Project Runway") or cook deadline food ("Top Chef").

Thanks to Adams and Kreskoff's delightfully wicked power struggle, Hung feels fresher now than it felt last summer and more textured.

Louie intelligently harnesses the dark cloud that follows a truly funny man everywhere he goes.

Without feeling like it's leading us on, Rubicon is a tightly woven and urbanely acted tale for people who like to mull.

Buoyed by scalpel-sharp writing and even keener performances, The Big C (created by comedian and sitcom writer Darlene Hunt) walks a fine line of having it both ways. It's for people who are repelled by the warm-fuzzy, disease-o'-the-week dramas of cable television.

Sons of Anarchy may be wild fantasy and melodrama, but it is tempered by a feeling of verity.

Effortlessly smart, easy to like and exciting to follow.

The first six episodes (which I've watched, dutifully at times) draw you in but sometimes feel overstuffed, overproduced and weirdly gauzy where the series means to be an exercise in crisp, razor-sharp filmmaking.

Hawaii Five-0 is a big bag of dumb fun, with a story told as tautly and smoothly as the surface of a Polynesian drum.

There's exactly one hour left for a fall TV show that tells its tale in a deliberate, well-written and subtly acted way. That one hour belongs to Fox's Lone Star.

The film is made skillfully enough that it could conceivably captivate both the most obsessive baseball fan and somebody who doesn't give a hoot but has a healthy curiosity--and the gratuitous extra minutes aren't by any means intolerable.

This is not an angry documentary; it's just such a downer--and necessary medicine for those who've remained personally unaffected by events of the last decade.

There's a tender and no-nonsense tenor to it, which is a welcome switch from most of reality TV's junky tropes.

Using the audio from the radio episodes and then supplying a sort of 1960s-style Hanna-Barbera wash of cheap animation to more fully illustrate the inanity of their conversations, Gervais has landed on something quite special that can be scorchingly funny.

The show is point-blank, but somewhat brilliantly so.

HBO's The Sunset Limited--faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2006 play and directed by its co-star, Tommy Lee Jones--more than overcomes the challenge of getting a satisfying piece of theater to work on a TV screen.

I trust completely the template laid out for The Killing by the original "Forbrydelsen" (which I've not seen) and the artistic instincts evident in the first three episodes.

The show is also refreshingly entertaining, even when it relies on familiar cliches of the singing-competition genre.

Beyond its breakneck speed and miles logged, Citizen U.S.A. couldn't be more easy or straightforward: From tiny ceremonies in county courthouses to massive arena-sized gatherings in big cities, Pelosi presents a surprising collage of that essential moment when people who've immigrated to the United States become official Americans.

Gosh, that's a lot of derivative teen-movie influences for a half-hour show. Yet the swift pacing and simplicity of Awkward remind us that awkwardness can still be freshly painful and funny material, so long as there are still teenagers and high schools.

A lavish, exciting, well-acted and admirably thorough movie adaptation of Herman Melville's 1851 classic.

A surprisingly stylish and addictive new counterterrorism series.

The interplay between Arnett and Applegate has an instant crackle to it, especially when they argue about which one of them got the least sleep during Amy's latest tearful night. Just as one's interest in Up All Night's domestic cliches may flag, "SNL" alum and "Bridesmaids" co-star Maya Rudolph is here to lift the show up several notches as Reagan's boss.

The show seems somehow sleeker and better paced. Characters may now be people first and archetypes second. This has the subtle but immediate effect of making The Walking Dead less predictable and more frightening.