1 FOX'S SUNDAY-NIGHT LINEUP Everyone talks about NBC and Thursday, but the best night for television right now is Sunday, when you can watch The Simpsons, King of the Hill and The X-Files all in a row on Fox. The Simpsons is still the cleverest comedy on TV, and King of the Hill creates a world with far more specificity than any live-action sitcom. Both are smarter, funnier and, in fact, more human than Friends or Seinfeld. Meanwhile, The X-Files draws from a bottomless well of inspiration. Two cartoons and a sci-fi show--why are these better than the programs supposedly about real people and real life? Probably because they are imaginative in ways that would be neither possible nor permissible in TV's standard genres.
2 Ellen: The Puppy Episode After the endless media tease, the stakes were high for Ellen's coming-out episode on ABC. To live up to its hype, it had to be a classic--and it was. The hourlong broadcast had wit, charm and great performances by Ellen DeGeneres, Laura Dern and Oprah Winfrey, perfectly cast as a therapist.
3 Diana coverage The death of the Princess of Wales was one of those events in which a unified global consciousness is created through the miracle of television. Billions watched the Queen make her address, the boys walk behind the casket, Earl Spencer deliver his eulogy. Even in a world of 500 channels, sometimes there is just one thing on.
4 Miss Evers' Boys Alfre Woodard starred in this HBO drama about the scandalous Tuskegee study of syphilis in which black subjects were not given treatment. The script was intelligent; Woodard exquisitely captured the conflicting motivations of her character, a nurse involved in the study; and Laurence Fishburne played her lover with rough charm and wisdom. The film justly served a terrible event.
5 Town Under Siege This CBS documentary with Ed Bradley was a dramatic, well-argued exercise in muckraking. A little-known loophole exempts oil companies from laws on hazardous-waste disposal, and cbs showed how one poor town suffers as a result. Forget Matt Damon in The Rainmaker--the kid lawyer in this case is twice as appealing.
6 Everybody Loves Raymond In its second season, this CBS sitcom is coming into its own. The star, Ray Romano, is an amusing, hangdog Everyman, and his relatives are funny oddballs rather than the more typical tiresome ones. Family shows have been done over and over, but Raymond can surprise you.
7 The Practice Set in a small, scrappy law firm, ABC's The Practice is a very entertaining melodrama, even if it breaks no new ground. The cast is good, especially Michael Badalucco as a struggling personal-injury lawyer, and the scripts are smartly plotted, with some humor thrown in too. As our hero, Dylan McDermott manages not only to have good hair but also to seem genuinely savvy and charismatic.
8 The Mill on the Floss Ah, if only all Sunday-night TV movies dealing with women in peril could be as subtly haunting as this PBS version of George Eliot's 1860 novel. The filmed story of Maggie Tulliver (played by Emily Watson) features no stalkers, mind you, but evokes poetically the inescapable dangers of possessing a divided heart.