Take a look at the second season's first episodes, and you'll see it in a nervy concoction of writing and acting.

Creator Vince Gilligan's much-lauded meth lab saga Breaking Bad, which is back for what looks to be another superior season Sunday night on AMC, is one of those shows that comes from such a dark hole of the American cultural psyche that you sometimes have to wonder how it ever made it on TV.

Television's greatest drama series has only gotten greater.

Enlightened comes through with a triumphant eight-episode arc that broadens its characters, quickens the pace and finishes strong.

Homicide isn't only riveting drama; it's really about something, and it says what it's about in credible and haunting ways, sometimes with a dramatic jolt, sometimes with a painfully funny jab, almost always with compelling command. It is, in short, a killer. It's murder. That is meant as a compliment.

A captivating blend of the existential and the pulpy, the surreal and the neo-real, the grim and the farcical, Twin Peaks is new age music for the eyes, a show that careens off the wall and out into left field and yet supplies some of the basic satisfactions we humans have demanded of our storytellers since we first wriggled out of primordial goop.

What makes Homeland rise above other post-9/11 dramas is Danes's stellar performance as Carrie--easily this season's strongest female character, who is also hiding some personal secrets of her own. The latter half of the first episode is exhilarating. I'm hooked.

Sherlock is too often a petulant know-it-all, which grows tiresome and makes a viewer painfully aware that each episode is 90 minutes long.... Sherlock's redundancies are improved by a couple of longer story arcs.

Game of Thrones is like no other TV show around right now--brilliant, exasperating, enthralling, and, if you let it become so, hard work.

It joins "Planet Earth" and "Life" to reign as a triumvirate in Best Buy showrooms. Nothing looks better, sounds better.

what else can I do but yap excitedly and try to get you to watch one of the best shows on TV right now? The first four episodes of the new season will not disappoint fans.

With Boomtown, you are likely to feel a much stronger emotional investment than with lesser crime dramas. In the final moments of the premiere, the drama reaches a level that is almost poetically tragic and terribly haunting...Ambitious, artful and sometimes ingenious, Boomtown is the best and least compromised new network drama series since "ER," and in its own way, just as much of a breakthrough. [28 Sept 2002, p.C01]

Right now, the hype ain't justified.

The absence of gimmickry and the presence of respect for the story and the audience give The Wire organic advantages over nearly all other TV dramas, whether they deal with cops and crime or birds and bees. Which is to say: If you want to see the television of tomorrow, it's on HBO tonight.

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.

This new season starts off strong.

Mad Men is that rare thing that can be as infuriating as it is perfect. I’ve gone back and forth (and hot and cold) on it as much as a critic can; I warmed to it last season but feel a familiar chill this time.

So much in the Freaks and Geeks premiere is shrewdly, tenderly and sagaciously observed that one wonders whether there'll be enough material left for additional episodes. Probably. [25 Sept 1999, p.C01]

Yes, it's quite good. Sunday's episode is nearly flawless and a textbook example of how to launch an ensemble saga that may eventually embroider itself into a haunting tapestry.

As television, Girls is disturbing, sharply honed and even wickedly funny.

So rousingly well done that it seems to come from a different solar system than most contemporary episodic television shows, and yet too many rapturous panegyrics could spoil some of the fun. The two-hour pilot for the series...is so terribly and industriously entertaining that you hate to see the program lumped in with things that are supposedly "good for you." This isn't a John Chancellor commentary. This is living, breathing matter -- clever, thoughtful, ribald and hard-boiled. [15 Sept 1986, p.B1]

Try as I might, Mad Men fails to resonate, settle in, tell me something. It can no longer get out of its own way so as to allow its multiple story lines to experience actual forward momentum. (Only the calendar does that.)

Lost actually gives every sign of knowing where it's going and what it's doing. It's solid, suspenseful and fraught with frights. The Big Scary Monster may be a corny touch, but who's to say what does and doesn't exist on those mysterious uncharted islands where, for example, King Kong once holed up. Lost has the capacity to bring out the kid in adults and the adult in kids. [22 Sept 2004, p.C.01]

"Extras" lives up to expectations and to its own lunatic traditions.

The results are, of course, compelling but also assiduously sterilized.

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

But for all the noble collaboration, for all its division of writing and directing duties and its tactical approach to deployment of film crews, The Pacific becomes a very good miniseries that fails to arrive at a coherent, artistic sensibility.

It’s mainly an intelligent crime drama, and a real step forward for Sundance, which is bringing more original programming to its slate. As slow as it seems to go at first, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’re addicted.