Ginia Bellafante

It thrives as radical comedy because it challenges one of our most preciously held assumptions: that parenthood is ennobling, rewarding work; that it grounds us and makes us marginally better people.

An imaginative departure from the sea of indistinguishable sitcoms on the networks this fall.

On Melrose [Place] the characters are so unfailingly stupid that they remain dumbfounded every single time they are blackmailed or cheated on. In comparison, the CPW crowd is rather sharp and as a result less fun to watch. Still, there are snippets of irresistible dialogue.

Caroline lacks the quirkiness and edge of its fellow NBC sitcoms. It also depends on the sort of hoary comedy devices that have made decades of TV sitcoms embarrassing to watch.

VR.5 is a science-fiction TV show that Patricia Highsmith might have written. For all its vividly colored effects, it is above all an exploration of the unsolved mysteries of Sydney's interior life.

There is probably more incisive humor in one hour of TV Nation than in a season of Murphy Brown.

Third Rock's creators, veteran Saturday Night Live writers Bonnie and Terry Turner, have described the show as "Carl Sagan meets the Marx Brothers." In reality, it's Maude meets Mork & Mindy.

Murder One remains a fine legal thriller with a robust, well-observed appreciation for the egotists who are drawn into the web of splashy criminal trials.

The show is too pat and tidy to make you check under the sofa during the commercial breaks.

Yet as over the top as Millennium can get, the show does succeed at creating a marvelously unrelenting sense of unease.

The conceit is absurd, to be sure; the focus on ill-suited lovebirds-in-the-making, well worn. But the show somehow manages to mine subversive comedy from this unpromising vein.

Mad TV has an edginess that Lorne Michaels' once revolutionary show [SNL] has long lacked. ... Of course, Mad TV is not without its lapses. Though it has steadily improved since its unpromising early episodes, there are still sketches so heavy-handed in their attempt to appear politically incorrect that they are virtually unwatchable.

An incomparable thriller.

The most maddening aspect of the show has been the increasing and incongruous presence of real-world issues.

As homage to the unclean gymnastics of p.r., Spin City is certainly the season's most believable new sitcom. And also by far the best.

EZ Streets sustains a mood of despair unlike any other drama on television. ... And yet, for all its solemnity, EZ Streets somehow manages to avoid melodrama.

The show lacks the vision of The Simpsons, the snappy rhythm and the kind of far-reaching humor that keep it dizzyingly smart even after a decade on the air.

Worth watching.

While refraining from slapping the comedy on too thick, creator David Chase has made Soprano's inward search surprisingly affecting.

Awkward is a wry show about longing--for love, certainly, but also for consistency, that great intangible in the ever-morphing world of high school life.

There is little resistance to cliche in all this, but the cliche is so visually appealing that you'll feel like a spoiled child if you complain. And you're given such a treat that you'll also feel like one, begging for more.

The series hardly tweaks the formula, though it does so just enough that the more generously inclined might claim that Love in the Wild is an effort at democratizing the reality dating show.

Though the series begins amusingly enough, it quickly descends into cloying buddy escapade, in which the full-of-heart slacker seeks to teach his careerist boss how to care, and the careerist boss teaches his moldable young thing about cunning and diligence and clothes that cost a mortgage payment.

Yes, boys and girls, Teen Wolf has more to say than "Jersey Shore."

And so begin the one-night stands, screaming matches, freedom affirmations, back-seat seductions and enraged exits of this largely absurdist but not entirely useless almost-postracial soap.

Current TV turns out to be less serious than one would have predicted, and in some sense 4th and Forever might have benefited from some of the aura of earnestness that used to surround Mr. Gore before he took to making uncannily great guest appearances on enterprises like "30 Rock."

Call Me Fitz doesn't tax its thinking mechanisms, a fact for which we are not ungrateful. Instead it deftly draws a world in which sin and sexual charisma come at full new-model cost.

If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.