Caryn James

This new series is less sappy than Providence and less graphic than C.S.I. And Ms. Hennessy gives Jordan an appealing, loose-cannon attitude, a long way from the buttoned-down assistant district attorney she played on Law and Order.

American Dreams is a frustrating mix, often sensitive and winning in its treatment of the Pryor family, and hackneyed in its reach for historical relevance.

Despite the echo of a hokey past, the quirky Now and Again is one of the season's most appealing shows, largely because it grafts its Frankenstein plot onto a romance: the hard-bodied hero has a mind that still yearns for his middle-aged wife.

Despite Joyce Eliason's pallid script, the director, Joyce Chopra, gets incisive performances from Eric Bogosian as the photographer who started Marilyn's career and Wallace Shawn as the agent who sent her to dozens of casting couches.

As chilling and gripping as any Stephen King film since Stanley Kubrick's classic movie of ''The Shining,'' this six-hour mini-series works the way the most enduring horror tales do, stretching back to Edgar Allan Poe: by blending supernatural events with purely human psychological terror. The first King work written directly for television , Storm of the Century includes knowing echoes of ''The Shining'' and of Shirley Jackson's story ''The Lottery.'' Nervous laughter is also built in, and jumpy viewers can use every bit of it.

The show is so gripping and often so dazzling in its visual command...Wonderland asks viewers to be discomfited week after week and trust that the effort will be rewarded. Even the toughest series tend to get soft over time, but for now the uncompromising Wonderland is worth every demand it makes.

A stylish mix of candid documentary film and talking-to-the-camera interviews, the show looks like "The Real World" for a reason; it has the same producers. Musical scenes of the auditions and of dance and vocal practices become sharply edited mini-music videos; another producer is MTV.

The real issue is that even for a sunny sitcom, the humor is tired.

Swift and engrossing. [20 March 2000, p.E1]

Oddly, its realism works better than its imagination. The series suffers greatly from the flaws of so many pet projects: a tunnel vision that assumes, rather than asserts, the fascination of its subject. If you're a space junkie -- automatically drawn to the scientific measurements, the code of personal courage, the final seconds of a countdown -- you may be enthralled. But if all that sounds too familiar, the series has a problem: it fails to generate the sense of wonder its creators take for granted.

What it lacks in depth and rigor, though, it makes up for with the wealth of fascinating photographs and videos, compiled without narration and with a graceful flow.

Though there are action heroines all over television today, Birds of Prey is much closer to the wit of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" than to the banal witchcraft of "Charmed," or the earnest, overpraised C.I.A. drama "Alias."

It takes a lot to make an I.R.S. agent the good guy in a series -- a lot of nerve, imagination and clever writing, a combination that sets the inspired Push, Nevada apart from every other new show of the season.

With a deep and perplexing hero, a wide social reach and uncommon eloquence, it instantly takes a place among the best dramas on television.

It comes as close to resurrecting the old show as you can without hauling Jerry Seinfeld himself back on television.

The series may not be original, but it is swift, engrossing and escapist. Sometimes that's all you want. [13 Jan 1997, p.C15]

If Queer as Folk worked better as drama, its characters would be more fully defined and would speak to both straight and gay viewers more easily. The series is not harmed by its gay perspective but by its limited aesthetic reach.

[Its] sharp writing elevates it above its strained concept.

The series is so derivative you can almost see its creators playing all the angles. It's "My Wife and Kids," but with a Latino family and not quite as upscale. It's "The Bernie Mac Show" but with a less brash father figure and not quite as upscale. Like "The Drew Carey Show," (Bruce Helford is a creator and producer of both), it is strategically poised between blue-collar and white-collar worlds, one of the few shows with an upwardly mobile, working class hero...The situations are utterly predictable.

Assuming the perspectives of its characters, the series avoids cliches and condescension; the performances are remarkably free of the cheap mannerisms actors often resort to when playing addicts. But this insiders' view is still undermined by the tone of a cautionary tale. The fact that the series makes a plea to understand the characters' humanity, rather than a judgment about them, doesn't make it less didactic.

An extraordinary 10-part series that masters its greatest challenge: it balances the ideal of heroism with the violence and terror of battle, reflecting what is both civilized and savage about war. [7 Sept 2001, p.E1]

Dharma and Greg are so cloying they make the happy, well-adjusted Buchmans on "Mad About You" seem like Bonnie and Clyde.

This quirky new Fox drama, with traces of wry comedy, sometimes tries so hard to be clever that it turns silly.

The secret of "The Practice" is that it cloaks these workaday attitudes in just enough glamour and heroism to make an entertaining drama. [4 Oct 1997]

Display[s] more wit, emotion, humanity and brutality than ever. Even measured against insanely high expectations, the series is as good as it has ever been.

Even this early 'The Sopranos' has displayed the depth that is its most stunning quality.

"EZ Streets" may sound depressing, but its fiercely dark vision keeps viewers off-kilter and engaged and makes this one of the season's most exciting new series. [26 Oct 1996]

'The Wire' has become one of the smartest, most ambitious shows on television. With its attention to detail and its shifting points of view -- we spend equal time inside the heads of cops and criminals -- it is also one of the most novelistic, now more than ever before. [19 Sep 2004]