The L Word: Generation Q

Industry (HBO/Max) is a razor-sharp drama set inside a cutthroat London investment bank, following a group of young graduates who will do almost anything to keep their jobs.

Marti Perkins lost her scholarship to Lancer Universities law school and finds she must get one some other way. Cheerleading can provide just the financial boost for her pre-law schooling she needs in the way of a scholarship. Along the way she befriends the team cheerleading captain (Savannah Monroe) who becomes her roommate. Vanessa Lodge (played by Sharon Leal from Dreamgirls) is the cheerleaders coach who has high hopes of winning the national championship. Gail O'Grady (NYPD Blue) is Wanda Perkins, mother of Marti and an embarrassment to her daughter quite often with behavior more expectant of a young child. Marti Perkins is played by Aly Michalka (Easy A, Bandslam), a determined young woman who is wise beyond her years and dedicated to becoming an attorney at any cost. Ashley Tisdale (High School Musical, Aliens in the Attic) is coach of the cheerleading team Savannah Monroe and when Marti comes applies to join up realizes the able young woman is just what the team needs to get into and ultimately win the cheerleading finals. This comedy drama ultimately shows how dedication and hard work will pay off big time!

One of two intense medical dramas NBC introduced in the fall of 2009, "Mercy" had all the advantages its one-named rival "Trauma" did not. First, it had talent behind the scenes. Liz Heldens from "Friday Night Lights" created the show and led the writers, proving once again that the best way to dramatize the real world is to show it realistically"”ugliness and all. Second, it had attitude and guts to stay true to its revolutionary premise, the well-informed notion "that nurses remain [not only] more generous caregivers, but that they are more intuitively apt, smarter, more committed and as technically able as their [physician] superiors, with none of the accompanying arrogance." In a winner-take-all ER smackdown, you always would go all-in with the Mercy Hospital nurses. The main character, nurse Veronica Flanagan Callahan, has just returned from a tour in Iraq, where she clearly learned more in each day than the pompous, presumptuous doctors learned in all five years of medical school. Of course, Veronica gets neither the respect nor the reward she deserves, but "Mercy" dangles the possibility of true love as just recompense for Veronica's skill and compassion. Taylor Schilling plays Veronica with exactly the right balance of toughness and vulnerability, skillfully juxtaposing her consummate skill as a nurse with her intrepid ingenuousness in matters of the heart. If only "Mercy" had survived into a second season, all the tangled threads in the story might have come to their proper denouement. If only.

The pretty young Cassie Scerbo (Make It or Break It, CSI: Spring Breakdown) knows very well how to play snobbish and mean. She even says it's absolutely fun to be that never boring and totally spicy character. Proclaiming herself to be the "Queen of the Beam" in her high school, Amber Pollack (Scerbo) is confident to a fault. Amber Pollack is also deceased! Apparently she died after a freakish accident on prom night but must come to the aid of a rather unpopular girl named Lisa, played by Lindsey Shaw (Pretty Little Liars) before she can ascend to heaven. Tim Gunn (The Smurfs, Sex and the City 2) is an angel who gives Amber Pollack the orders to help out the less than popular young girl and give her the self confidence to go on and become the new prom queen. As she works on Lisa's personality she finds some of her own worse qualities are becoming part of Lisa's own dreadful qualities and comes to realize she was a truly poor human being before she died.

One critic characterized "Breaking Bad's" dark humor as "Thelma and Louise as seen by Dostoyevsky" and that was one of the perkier, more optimistic descriptions. A seven-part AMC series, "Breaking Bad" TV show tells the story of Walt White, high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine cooker and dealer. Of course, as Glenn Frye crooned, "The lure of easy money has a very strong appeal," but "Breaking Bad" does not allow for even a split-second of sunshine through the abysmal darkness. In this corner of the universe, crime never-ever pays. Walt, expertly portrayed by Bryan Cranston of "Malcolm in the Middle" fame, is neck-deep in problems, complications, and flat-out ugliness from the minute he lights the Bunsen burner. Although the writers have woven-in some amazingly ironic lines, known in the trade as "comic relief," the characters deliberately deliver their quips in such a super-slow, slack-jawed drawl they seem more tragic than funny. Of course, "Breaking Bad" TV series make some pretense toward allegory of the American middle class struggling through the throes of deep recession, and it scores some hard hits. Most of all, though, "Breaking Bad" shows that even when fine writers, directors, and actors can find humor and pathos in displaced white-collar workers' undignified struggle for dignity, it still looks awfully damned dreary and ugly.

Oh Hell is a TV series that follows the story of Helene, a 24-year-old woman who is going through a quarter-life crisis. Helene, who is also known as "Hell," is struggling to figure out who she is and what she wants in life.