Television

1 DAVID LETTERMAN'S POST-SEPT. 11 RETURN Irony was dead, they said. Humor was unseemly. And late-night comics, those unacknowledged legislators of America, no longer had anything to say to us. Yet it took a late-night comic to voice, movingly and indelibly, how we felt. "We're told [the terrorists] were zealots fueled by religious fervor," said the subdued but resilient host. "If you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any goddam sense?" And just as important, he--and his counterparts at The Daily Show, South Park and Late Night with Conan O'Brien--gradually came back from comedy's self-imposed mourning period to show that topical, cutting satire wasn't just appropriate; it was downright American.

2 HBO'S SUNDAY NIGHT Some of its efforts were mixed (Band of Brothers) or complete misses (The Mind of the Married Man). But with strong additions Six Feet Under and Project Greenlight, returning stalwarts Oz, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Emmy-winning Sex and the City and an utterly transcendent third season of The Sopranos, the cable network laid claim to the true must-see--albeit must-pay-to-see--night of TV.

3 UNDECLARED (FOX) The characters are freshmen, but the comedy is far from sophomoric. Producer Judd Apatow (of the much mourned high-school drama Freaks and Geeks) got a well-deserved, and more commercial, second chance with this college sitcom. Undeclared, starring Jay Baruchel, above, takes the eccentric sensibility of Freaks and applies it to smart, sharply observed coming-of-age stories of self-discovery, romance and beer.

4 CONSPIRACY (HBO) In a year of high-profile Holocaust dramas (ABC's Anne Frank, NBC's Uprising), an understated movie about a meeting in which Hitler's lieutenants planned the Final Solution outdid them all. Not a shot was fired, but the cool bureaucratese with which these officials rationalized mass murder showed how language can be humankind's most insidious weapon.

5 ALIAS (ABC) Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner, below left) is a waifish grad student who looks as if you could knock her over with a heavy textbook. And she's a karate-kicking, gadget-wielding double agent. Ridiculous? Yes, and wonderful. Reveling in '60s spy chic, this stylish, turbocharged and emotionally charged CIA serial grew more addictively complicated, involving and suspenseful with each episode.

6 JUNKYARD WARS (TLC) Comedy Central's robot-war show BattleBots has the testosterone and buxom babes. But this U.K.-imported engineering challenge has the real geek appeal. Turning teams of amiable tinkerers loose to build hydroplanes, rockets and the like out of scrap parts, it combines good-natured competition with just enough pseudo education that you don't have to feel guilty for not watching Nova instead.

7 PASADENA (FOX) Underpromoted and endlessly pre-empted, Fox's twisted rich-family saga is harder to find than Dick Cheney's secret secure location. But intrepid viewers are rewarded with a great cast (including Dana Delany, Martin Donovan and Philip Baker Hall) in a darkly funny story of a powerful media clan with a skeleton--perhaps literally--in its walk-in closet. Not everything in Pasadena, we learned, smells like roses.

8 THE BERNIE MAC SHOW (FOX) On network TV, it turns out, you still cannot say motherf_____. In every other respect, however, this fresh sitcom stays true to the foul-mouthed Original King of Comedy's riotous stand-up voice. Playing a comic (surprise, surprise) who takes in his sister's troubled kids, the gruff, unsentimental but likable Mac takes the cuddly out of family comedy.

9 "ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING," BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (UPN) You could apply the title of this audacious musical episode to the whole season of Buffy, which survived an acrimonious move from the WB to return smarter, funnier and dramatically richer than ever. Who'd have thought creator Joss Whedon (who taught himself piano to write the episode's surprisingly tuneful score, as well as the nimble lyrics) studied his Sondheim along with his sarcophagi?

10 24 (FOX) Even before the war made heroes out of CIA agents, this thriller was the talk of TV. Deservedly so: its pulse-pounding premise (a counterterrorist agent--Kiefer Sutherland, below--has 24 hours to stop an assassination), gimmick (each episode is one hour in real time) and look (a split screen is used to relate concurrent story lines) made its pilot the most exciting of the year. Some later episodes had a draggy, shaggy-dog quality, but at its best, 24 had us counting the seconds.