Top 10 TV Shows of 2010

As TV programming becomes more diverse and the audience continues subdividing, it gets harder to identify the "best" programming - simply because it now means comparing apples not to just oranges, but to grapes, pomegranates and kiwi fruit.

Does "Glee" do a better job, given its goals, than "Cake Boss" or "The Deadliest Catch" or "The Daily Show"?

Still, there are shows that consistently present compelling television - and more of them than cynics might sometimes assume.

Here are 10, not in any special order, that stood out in 2010:

• "Boardwalk Empire" (HBO). This one lived up to both its hype and budget, weaving a complex story of good and evil as it crashed onto the shores of Atlantic City in the 1920s. Steve Buscemi, perhaps an unlikely leading man, carries the show beautifully as Nucky Johnson, while Kelly MacDonald provides critical and equally strong support as his paramour.
   
• "Mad Men" (AMC). The best show of this century's first decade showed no slippage in season four. The show focused a bit more on Jon Hamm's Don Draper, sometimes at the expense of screen time for other characters, but creator Matthew Weiner has no equal in weaving the flawed humanity of his fictional characters into the real-life world of the 1960s. We always want to know what happens next - and we have no idea what it might be. That's great television.
   
• "The Good Wife" (CBS). This lawyer drama occasionally flirts with the formulaic, but never for long. Julianna Margulies and her strong castmates create a world where it's sometimes hard to know the right thing - never mind do it. At its best, watching "The Good Wife" is like watching a high-stakes, high-speed chess match among a dozen brilliantly talented masters.
   
• "Sons of Anarchy" (FX). It may look like a motorcycle gang show, but it's really about the choices we all make to live our lives and live with ourselves. Even the roughest scenes are never far from moments of painful vulnerability and Katey Sagal's Gemma Teller Morrow, the head motorcycle mama, is the best-acted female dramatic character on TV.
   
• Conan O'Brien (NBC). Yes, I know Conan left NBC. And no, his "Tonight" show won't make anyone's top-anything list. I'm personally not a Conanhead anyway. But his last few nights at NBC, when we were all watching the shoe drop in slow motion, were inspired television. There's no such thing as "no rules" on network TV, but he came as close as anyone could come to the abandon you can afford when you've reached the point of "What else can they do to me anyhow?"
   
• "In Treatment" (HBO). A show about a shrink who sees three patients each week and then sees his own shrink at week's end. Gabriel Byrne and a remarkably strong cast of co-stars made this fascinating for the two years during which it was patterned on an Israeli show - and then did it again in a third season of original stories.
   
• "Movies and Moguls" (TCM). This seven-part series on the history of cinema, going back to 17th-century Europe, is only the latest proof that someone at TCM doesn't just want to show movies, but really loves movies.
   
• "30 for 30" (ESPN). ESPN has made itself the 800-pound nose tackle of TV sports programming, and this year's anniversary series of 30 films on a wonderful array of sports topics was almost uniformly excellent - educational, entertaining, insightful.
   
• "Friday Night Lights" (DirecTV and NBC). "FNL" wraps up in early 2011, alas, but the creators kept introducing new characters and storylines right to the end, and it will finish its run as one of the finest small-town family dramas in the annals of television.
   
• "New York Street Games" (PBS). This fairly modest production is a documentary shown on local PBS stations, which confirms again the value of PBS. It's an unpretentious, straightforward and thoroughly charming look at the games New York kids used to play on New York streets - presented not as nostalgia, but a vivid, riveting snapshot of growing up in the melting pot that was early and mid-20th-century New York.