Peter Swanson

Each season of Dexter has started slow before building momentum, and this season is no exception. Hall continues to impress with his sly comic skills and unreadable face, while Carpenter continues to enrich a character whose emotions--contrary to Dexter's--are completely transparent.

We're ostensibly supposed to see Eaton Place as a warm haven holding out against the cold wind of history, but a show built around the humanity of strangers would be more convincing if the characters displayed more humanness.

United States of Tara smothers its characters and situations in layers of quirk and sarcasm, like an expensive steak drenched in Velveeta.

This season, the writers have taken her even further away from the cliche of the incompetent boss--currently being flogged to death by The Office. Leslie is now both realer and more amusing, the humor of her character stemming from the fact that she's good in a profession that no one, including her boss and her subordinates, seems to care too much about.

For every Mrs. Patmore, the cook who wants nothing more than to stay in service the remainder of her life, there is a housemaid such as Gwen (Rose Leslie), who dreams of becoming a secretary in a modern office. It's these dichotomies, and the way they exist within both the Abbey itself (half the rooms have electricity and half don't) and its multifaceted inhabitants that make Downton Abbey not only the best soap opera currently on television, but one of the most relevant as well.

The Cape falls into a wasteland of its own making, where neither the stakes nor the jokes can distract one from the thinness of its writing.

Hopefully the hyperactive series will mellow into a slightly less frenetic version of itself--out of budget necessity, if nothing else.

In The Big C, cancer is simply an excuse to sell the vicarious thrill of on-screen narcissism.