6. Friday Night Lights: It’s about a small town in America, perhaps the best such series ever. A loving and realistic married couple stands at its core. It celebrates hope and achievement without being cheesy. It’s never too late to start watching!

胜利之光》：这部电视剧讲述的是美国一个小镇的生活，或许是迄今为止同类电视剧当中最好的一部。片中的主角始终是一对有爱心同时又很现实的夫妻。它颂扬希望和成就，但表现手法却毫不粗陋。什么时候看这部剧都不晚！

7. Battlestar Galactica: Using a campy old sci-fi series as the source material for a thinly disguised examination of post-9/11 America? Great idea! The folks at what is now Syfy almost certainly never expected what they ended up getting here, as a huge cast of near-unknowns, many of them playing robots, mostly set aside geek talk and dealt instead with the most basic of human concerns: love, fear, courage, paranoia¹, and despair.

太空堡垒卡拉迪加》：将一个滑稽古怪的老版科幻片作为素材，稍加改造之后用来审视9.11事件之后的美国？是个好主意！那些现在在美国NBC环球旗下的科幻频道工作的家伙们根本没有想到结果会是这样：一个由名不见经传的演员组成的庞大剧组，其中很多人扮演机器人，他们通常一边说着滑稽可笑的台词，一边却在演绎着人类最基本的关切：爱、恐惧、勇气、偏执和绝望。

8. The West Wing: This series makes the list primarily on the basis of its brilliant first two seasons and the nice way they wrapped everything up in the end. And of course, there’s that cast, as good as any major network series has ever had. Our real leaders might rise to the occasion sometimes, but they will never match the banter² here.

白宫风云》：这部电视剧上榜的主要原因是它出色的前两季以及它最终结束故事的漂亮方式，当然，剧中演员班底同其他主要网络电视剧的班底一样优秀。美国的真正领导者或许有时在口才上也能得体地应付一下，但他们可不如戏中人那么能插科打诨逗人发笑。

9. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation³: The series that kicked off the procedural boom is such a part of our landscape now that it’s easy to forget how trippy its innovations seemed in 2000. CSI also became the first series in decades to really take advantage of its Las Vegas setting. The formula is finally showing its age, but it was fun while it lasted.

犯罪现场调查》：该剧掀起了一番刑侦悬疑电视剧热，而这种电视剧成为现今的电视剧类型之一，可我们却忘了2000年的时候我们看这部剧时其新颖的叙事方式弄得我们如堕云里雾里。《犯罪现场调查》也是几十年来第一部将拉斯维加斯设定为拍摄背景的电视剧。这部戏现在看来还是有些过时了，但当时播放的时候还是蛮好看的。

10. Breaking Bad: One of my criteria⁴ for this list was that volume matters: a series with over a hundred episodes is to be preferred over one that just began. But I had to mention Breaking Bad on the basis of how incredible its first twenty episodes have been. Bryan Cranston is amazingly good as the chemistry teacher gone bad, but eccentric touches such as an episode kicked off by a Mexican folk song about the mysterious meth dealer⁵ lift this show above the competition.

《超越罪恶》：我罗列此表的一个标准之一就是电视剧的长度，一部超过100集的电视系列剧肯定要比一部刚刚开始播映的更受青睐。而我要将《超越罪恶》引入此表是基于它前20集实在是太棒了。布莱恩·克兰斯顿惟妙惟肖地演绎了一个变坏了的化学教师，而剧中一些怪异的表现手法也令这部剧在竞争中更胜一筹，比如有一集是以一首墨西哥民歌开篇的，这首歌讲述的是一个神秘的毒贩的故事。