1. Mad Men (AMC)
2. The Wire (HBO)
3. The Shield (FX)
4. 30 Rock (NBC)
5. Dexter (Showtime)
6. Lost (ABC)
7. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
8. The Office (NBC)
9. How I Met Your Mother (CBS)
10.Ugly Betty (ABC)
1. Mad Men (AMC)
A corkscrew meditation on gender, all retro visual pleasures and sideways rhythms, the second season focused on the collect-’em-all triad of Betty, Peggy, and Joan, earning every bit of the series’s insane buzz. Also, I have this weird thing for Pete. Go Pete?
3. The Shield (FX)
As if to say, “Take that, David Chase,” Shield creator Shawn Ryan mounted a 90-minute finale to his bleakly brilliant L.A. policier that also deposited its anti-hero in a self-imposed purgatory. The crucial difference: Ryan and his magnificent muse, Michael Chiklis, left us clutching our hearts, not cold and stunned.
4. 30 Rock (NBC)
A screwball zinger machine, as well as a surprising contemporary workplace romance between a suit (the incomparable Alec Baldwin) and an adorable sellout (Tina Fey). Sample killer moment: Liz Lemon’s flop-sweat “date” with a co-op board (“We have so much in common! We’re all white!”).
5. Dexter (Showtime)
Michael C. Hall’s brilliantly hot-cold performance elevates this serial-murder drama from a queasy curiosity into something funkier and more unnerving. If this season’s Jimmy Smits friendship-gone-awry plot proved limper than earlier seasons’ psychodramas, the series still satisfied with its wry metaphorizing of ordinary male intimacy-impairment as flat-out sociopathy.
6. Lost (ABC)
Bring on the cliff-hangers! Shrug off the meaning. This show is all about story, not character, and the writers continually raised their narrative ante with standout episodes (like the Desmond time-leap) that had fans gasping. The writers deserve extra credit for tolerating a wave of angst-ridden, entitled fan-whining that would have sunk another island.
7. Dr. Horrible’s
Sing-Along Blog
Joss Whedon’s bold experiment in truly independent TV, available this month on DVD. Filmed in six days and distributed online, starring Neil Patrick Harris as a supervillain wannabe, Whedon’s musical masterpiece is romantic, melancholy, funny, original”not to mention a voice in the wilderness for the future of auteurist TV.
