The year’s 10 best TV shows

Life on ‘Mars’
Last season, the titular character of “Veronica Mars” (Wednesday, 9 p.m., UPN) was haunted by the murder of her best friend, her break-up with her boyfriend (the best friend’s brother), her mother walking out and the memory of being date-raped at a high school party. With all those mysteries neatly and brilliantly wrapped up by season’s end, fans couldn’t help wondering what creator Rob Thomas could do for an encore. This season, in a Möbius strip of a season opener, he showed us: Yet another Neptune High student is murdered, class warfare becomes fairly literal, Veronica starts the summer with one boyfriend and ends it with another and oh yeah, in the last few minutes of the episode, a busload of Neptune High students goes over a cliff.

In addition, each episode contains its own mini-mystery, solved by Veronica with the help of her friends and her private investigator Dad. If that sounds too twee for words, it’s not — this show’s sensibility is much more “Rockford Files” than “Nancy Drew.” And for all the soap-opera-like drama, it’s the wit and humor of the characters that makes you care about them. Don’t worry about coming in late: While “Veronica Mars” is one of the best shows out there when it comes to continuity, new viewers will catch on pretty fast. You know how you never watched “Sports Night” or “Buffy” even when your friends kept telling you to? This is that show.   —L.S.

‘Galactica’ is out of this world
Why does the new “Battlestar Galactica” (Fridays, returning in 2006, SciFi) work so extraordinarily well? Because it’s more than the sum of its parts: more Beckett than sci-fi, and far more than just a great reconsideration of the beloved (but cheesy) ‘70s original. Quite simply, there’s nothing like it on TV. That said, the revisions are brilliant.  Fans balked when Starbuck was recast as a woman (Katee Sackhoff, with her sexy mix of swagger and lost-little-girl), but “Galactica” works far better with the women in charge — the good (Mary McDonnell’s President Roslin), the bad (Tricia Helfer’s Number Six) and the conflicted (Grace Park’s Boomer, a Cylon with a heart of gold). That the robotic Cylons look human and harbor far more piety than their flesh-and-blood counterparts allows the show to adopt a “Twilight Zone”-like philosophical edge.

There’s more. Ron Moore and writers craft flawed characters and terse dialogue that give Aaron Sorkin (“West Wing”) a run for his money.  The humans-hunting-for-home theme resonates with its chilling post-9/11 sensibility – as does the endless military-civilian tension, which never descends into the obvious. Tack on a flawless cast (Edward James Olmos’ Adama has a cranky gravitas that eclipses Lorne Greene’s original, I must admit), quietly dazzling special effects and a deliberately outmoded production design — right down to those old-fashioned phone handsets—and you have the makings of a show almost too good for television. Thank the gods someone had the guts to make “Galactica” fly again.    —Jon Bonné

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