It has been a grand ride on the great American broadcast machine. Every summer TV Critics Tour brings its own themes, stories and predictably strange behaviour. Still grinding on at Day Ten, this Tour has been no exception, which calls me to reflect fondly on times well spent in the TV trenches. Such memories.

The Best

*Mad Men. That's it. Mad Men. Mad Men. Mad Men. That's all I heard about for the last week. Mad Men was the "it" show of the TV Tour. Critics were frothing over it the second day of cable, when AMC held a press session, and then got excited all over again when they visited the Mad Men set in Hollywood. How very odd for a show that has a peak U.S. viewing audience of a million and a half viewers to get such buzz. Critics haven't officially dubbed Mad Men the next Sopranos, but it's close.

*PBS continues to amaze with its range. This fall they have programs with Sir George Martin covering the history of music and Kevin Kline playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Also Sid the Kid, a pretty cool new science show for younger viewers, the return of The Electric Company and a sprawling anthology series on comedy. Unlike most of the other networks here, PBS took two days to present their new shows, and they deserved it.

*HBO rebounds. Well, sort of. HBO has not bounced back to its heady Sopranos and Six Feet Under heyday, but their program slate was stronger than the one presented here last summer. HBO pushes the envelope edge again in the raw Iraqi-war drama Generation Kills, and has a potential hit in the darkly humorous series True Blood, created by Six Feet Under's Alan Ball. Also looking good for HBO: A new version of Little Britain and a standup comedy special with Ricky Gervais. Nothing wrong with Ricky Gervais.

*The Bonnie Hunt Show. She has a new daytime talk show. I love Bonnie Hunt.

The Worst

Reality television, the scourge of man. It's not the fact there are more reality shows launched here each summer—the tally, according to a source, is 140 reality programs currently on primetime American television—it's because they just keep getting dumber and dumber. The Fox Reality Channel has a new reality show, called Gimme My Reality Show!, that is a contest among D-listers, like Kato Kaelin and manic designer Bobby Trendy, to see who gets to star in a reality show. It's come to that.

Also new and numbing: TV Land's Family Foreman (at home with ex-boxer George Foreman and his sons, all named George), CMT's Gone Country (has-beens like Bobby Brown sing country), VH1's The Cho Show (comedian Margaret Cho further embarrasses her poor Korean parents). My fave: MTV's From Gs to Gents, which has the smooth P. Diddy pal Fonzworth Bentley teaching players to be playas.. or something like that.

*The Hallmark Channel. Far and away the schmaltziest channel on the planet. Hallmark turns out more than a dozen new TV movies a year, presumably for family viewing. The Hallmark movies are always family-valued and sweet, with a happy saying when you open it… wait, that's a Hallmark card. In any event, Hallmark wheeled in exactly two-dozen talent from this year's movie slate—people like Florence Henderson, Ed Asner, Corbin Bernsen, Jane Seymour and other familiar faces from seventies and eighties television. You can always tell it's a Hallmark movie from the dime-store novel titles. This fall: Bound by a Secret, Moonlight and Mistletoe, Accidental Friendship. If Ned Flanders ran a network, it would be the Hallmark Channel.

*Eli Stone. ABC is still hot for the oddball legal drama starring Jonny Lee Miller as a lawyer who fantasizes about singer George Michael. This season sees the addition of Katie Holmes, aka Mrs. Tom Cruise, to the cast. I still don't get it.

The Weird

*Dennis Hopper still appears to be quite mad. He's the biggest name in the cast of Crash, based on the movie, which casts him as a manic record producer in the mode of Phil Spector. Hopper took a little too much enjoyment in revealing the fact his character talks to his penis, even though co-executive producer Don Cheadle was trying to get him to keep quiet.

*The memory of Tony Curtis at the TCM party—frail and old in a wheelchair at 83, though wearing an enormous black Stetson and hitting on the ladies.

*The countdown to digital draws near. PBS held a session for a program called The Digital Transition, which is designed to prepare viewers for the complete switchover next February. No other network even mentioned the word digital.

*David Simon is a crybaby. The creator-writer of The Wire ate up 10 minutes of a press conference for his HBO opus Generation Kills with griping an unflattering magazine article written on him.