tv lists

28 things that especially delighted and/or tripped me out about Mad Men's glorious return to form.

"If it's a Cinderella story, we fight on that Cinderella story." - Slim Charles

We love our Downton Abbey but some things were just off in Season Two and we have specific ways to fix it.

The responses are both varied and illuminating, running the gamut from drama to comedy and from old timey legends to contemporary masterworks.

A look at what's made Alcatraz a much tighter mid-season drama.

Eight suggestions for how to make the television world a better place in 2012.

Or, you know, of the top seven Doctor Who specials of the past seven years.

We're here to nitpick at TV plot blunders and in 2011, we saw quite a few of them.

There are a lot of TV lists flying around this time of year. Top this, top that. A lot of them don't seem all of that relevant or interesting to me, so I decided to dig in and think about the things that I learned from watching television during 2011.

From Gustavo Fring to Fat Mac, we break it down.

Dexter's dive in quality (and his "dark passenger") spurs a discussion of other shows that need a mercy killing.

A great TV theme song does a few different things at once: it sets the tone and whets your appetite for the story to follow while thematically meshing with the style and vibe of the show.

NCIS is ignored by critics, but shouldn't be.

What are the SAG members thinking? Are they clueless or just lazy?

As the band Trainwreck, featuring Tenacious D's Kyle Gass, sings in "TV Theme": "It's a train wreck, oh yeah... wrong way down the one-way track."

Does Deadwood make the cut?

While there are arguably great shows on the air on any given night, it's pretty clear that right now Sunday is the absolute king of television nights.

TV executives have broken many a heart with these early cancellations.

The idea is to to do a fun sweep around our great nation and try to pluck out some familiar shows in regional locales and some surprise selections as well.