30 ROCK'S TINA FEY

Eric Liebowitz

TV: KEN TUCKER'S 10 BEST OF 2007

5. TELL ME YOU LOVE ME (HBO)
Some of you may sneer, but these weekly couples-therapy sessions (conducted by Jane Alexander's soothing shrink) quickly became irresistible, even when I cringed at the selfish or callous behavior creator Cynthia Mort imposed upon her characters. The hype centered on the graphic sex, but I stuck around more to hear the fumbling fornicators talk about it later.

4. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (NBC)
Yes, it's too bad the show veered a bit into melodrama with the Landry-killed-a-rapist subplot. It was a ratings ploy that didn't quite work. What I did love, however, was the increased screen time for college-bound Smash (Gaius Charles). And you could still count on Emmy-worthy acting from Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler, every week.

3. CSI (CBS)
The seventh season brought us a notably subtle arc starring Liev Schreiber as an intriguingly gloomy Grissom sub, and the spry eighth season smoothly dealt with the exit of Jorja Fox's Sara and tucked in a fine comic hour in which the lab assistants took over for a week. In short, this remains the most inventive mainstream procedural on network television.

2. THE SOPRANOS (HBO)
Everybody talks about the stubbornly unresolvable final episode, but what preceded it was a series of often quiet, contemplative hours in which David Chase's Mob saga went out as sharply observant as ever about the entanglements of family life. I enjoyed all the bang-bang stuff from the Bada Bing! bunch, but I loved all the suburban-Jersey crises James Gandolfini and Edie Falco took us through.

1. 30 ROCK
I can't think of another TV show that didn't merely improve but skyrocketed in quality and pleasure in its second season the way 30 Rock has. Alec Baldwin is justly hailed for his volcanically comic performance, but Tina Fey deserves much praise for turning Liz Lemon into her generation's Mary Richards. In sweatpants.

Want another perspective? See EW TV critic Gillian Flynn's picks for TV's 10 best in 2007

See more of EW's Best and Worst of 2007:
Music: The 10 Best Albums of 2007
Music: The 10 Best Singles of 2007
The 10 Best DVDs of 2007
The 10 Best Fiction/10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2007