Best & Worst Television

Extreme Close Up
A teen (Morgan Weisser) stared at home movies of his mother (Blair Brown), seeking the reasons for her death, in the season's most technically accomplished TV movie.

Mother Love
Diana Rigg was wickedly funny as a dignified Englishwoman who wouldn't let anyone get close to her son.

Killing in a Small Town
Barbara Hershey was unnerving as a meek woman accused of a grisly murder.

Most Amazingly Unembarrassing Performances

John Wesley Shipp as The Flash
Michael St. Gerard as Elvis

Most Creative Use of Violence

Bob/Leland punching Madeleine on Twin Peaks
Lance Henriksen thwacking Kevin Tighe's fingers off in the ''Cuting Cards'' segment of HBO's Tales from the Crypt.

Best Line

''Now, Marge, maybe our little foreign friend here is right: Maybe the engines of capitalism are greased by the blood of the workers....''
Homer Simpson

Worst Line
''Sammy, when I think of you, I think of me.''
Goldie Hawn on Sammy Davis Jr's 60th Anniversary Celebration

Most Underrated Actors

William Windom in Parenthood
Laurie Metcalf in Roseanne
Homer Simpson in The Simpsons
Lisa Simpson in The Simpsons

Good Sport of the Year

Late Night With David Letterman watchers know that on Tuesdays he frequently picks up the phone and calls Meg Parsont to find out what she did over the weekend, how her boyfriend's doing, and maybe to send a few Polynesian fire-dancers to her Manhattan office to amuse her. For putting up with such monkeyshines, Parsont is our choice for the Good Sport of the Year.

Letterman found Parsont by chance this season. As a stunt, he had a camera trained on an office building across from NBC's headquarters in hopes of giving a jokey ''Employee of the Month'' award to someone working late. The camera spied Parsont, publicity coordinator for Pocket Books, laboring away. Letterman got her number, called, and was so taken by her combination of articulate aplomb and good-humored mortification that he kept rolling her.

What do Parsont's coworkers think of her minicelebrity? ''They get a big kick out of it, I think,'' she says. And what does she think of Letterman? ''He's very nice...but I never know what he'll say or do.''