Best of Tv

The Civil War (PBS). Even if it hadn't inspired a national craze, filmmaker Ken Burns' 11-plus-hour documentary series would rank as one of the medium's towering achievements -- a lucid, comprehensive and poignant narrative of the nation's great calamity.

In Living Color (Fox). The scripts have grown more erratic since the debut last spring, but Keenen Ivory Wayans and his talented family have perked up prime time with their sharp impersonations and satirical derring-do. Two snaps up.

Twin Peaks (ABC). Has it really been less than a year since FBI agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) first heard the name Laura Palmer? After its stunning two-hour pilot episode, David Lynch's oddball soap opera wavered a bit, wafted into mysticism and dragged out its who-killed-Laura? mystery too long for some impatient viewers. But the show has retained its idiosyncrasy and its hold on the imagination.

Maniac Mansion (Family Channel). Dad (Joe Flaherty) is an amiably incompetent inventor, his four-year-old son is a hulking six-footer and Uncle Harry is a housefly. From such nonsense a group of SCTV alums have fashioned the looniest, sweetest family comedy of the year.

A Killing in a Small Town (CBS). A repressed Texas schoolteacher (Barbara Hershey, in a shattering performance) pays a visit to her neighbor, who is later found hacked to death with an ax. This disturbing TV movie took the overworked true-crime genre and infused it with a sense of spiritual desolation.

Red Hot + Blue (ABC). To benefit AIDS research, 20 rock stars took a crack at Cole Porter, and several contributed striking videos as well. Among the best: David Byrne's high-spirited collage of faces for Don't Fence Me In and Annie Lennox getting misty-eyed over home movies in a heartbreaking Ev'rytime We Say Goodbye.

Elvis (ABC). In the realm of unpromising ideas, this one looked like a lulu: the King's early life recounted in half-hour chunks of musical docudrama. The surprise was that star Michael St. Gerard created a character, not just an Elvis impersonation, and the short-lived series was a lovely evocation of the American show-biz myth.

Criminal Justice (HBO). Forest Whitaker, portraying a man accused (justly or unjustly? We never know) of slashing a hooker, struggles through the grinding, $ insensitive and frequently unfair legal process. TV's docket is jammed with courtroom dramas, but few have been as unsparing, or as moving.

Eyes on the Prize II (PBS). Henry Hampton's first documentary series about the civil rights movement stopped at 1965, just when things were getting complicated. His sequel continued the story, from the Black Panthers to busing in Boston, and sorted out the issues with the same insight and evenhandedness.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Comedy Channel). While we watch campy old movies (Rocketship X-M; The Corpse Vanishes), three outer-space wisecrackers provide tongue-in-cheek patter from the front row. This goofy stunt, first cooked up for a Minneapolis UHF station, is funnier than it has any right to be.