"The year's best new show is a time machine: It recreates the style, mores and ideas of 1960 with astonishing detail and even more astonishing clouds of cigarette smoke."
2. Flight of the Conchords
"Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie send up everything from David Bowie to French film to their own beloved homeland as "New Zealand's fourth most popular folk parody duo" scratch out an existence in New York and belt out instant classics about racist dragons and killer robots, plus the most killer (and only) binary solo you've ever heard. "
3. Tell Me You Love Me
"Sex, they say, is mostly in the mind. Well, that's not literally true, as this hardcore relationship drama shows graphically. But it is as daring and honest in portraying the minutiae of its characters' inner lives as it is in showing the details of their sex lives. "
4. Planet Earth
"This breathtaking American presentation of a British nature miniseries was remarkable for high- and low-minded reasons: It was a vivid argument for preserving Earth's biodiversity, and a great justification for getting a big-screen TV."
5. Pushing Daisies
Playful, fantastical, and art-directed within an inch of its life in candy colors by Barry Sonnenfeld, Daisies is as romantic as it is outlandish. "
6. The Sarah Silverman Program
"Whether adopting a homeless man as a pet or sleeping with God (and then blowing Him off), Silverman puts the most adorable face imaginable on clueless self-centeredness. "
7. The Riches
"A family of backwoods grifters on the run comes across a fatal car accident, and they do what comes naturally: swipe the dead man's identity and the McMansion he was about to relocate to. So begins a darkly rollicking story of opportunity, identity and class. "
8. Yo Gabba Gabba!
"The most delightfully bizarre kids' show since Pee-Wee's Playhouse is a marriage of club music, edgy animation and surreal imagery that will convince you someone slipped something into your Fruity Pebbles."
9. The War
"This 15-hour documentary — a docu-elegy, really — relied on the memories of surviving soldiers and contemporaries to bring the emotional truth of the war to life (a much harder job, after 60 years of war movies)."
10. Kid Nation
"It was buried in controversy before it ever aired and received indifferent ratings once it finally did. But after all the posturing, this reality show about 40 kids repopulating a ghost town in New Mexico turns out simply to be an intriguing, even earnest little show about group dynamics and ethics (free of the usual "voting off the island" competition)."
