TV is getting better and better.

1. Temple Grandin (HBO). I’d read Oliver Sacks’s story about her and seen a BBC documentary about her. This was far more moving.

2. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist (Bravo). A competition. Each week the contestants are given a task (make a portrait, make art from junk). The person who does the worst job is eliminated. Bravo’s great The It Factor followed actors in New York and Los Angeles and made you feel the constant rejection. This has the same vibe in the sense that much of what the contestants make is heavily criticized (“a middle-school art project”).

3. Undercover Boss (CBS). A head of a big company works at a low-level job in his company. Week after week, it has some of the most touching moments I’ve ever seen. When this or that employee learns that someone noticed their hard work or talent, they start crying. Because it relied on deception (“we’re making a documentary about entry-level jobs”), I wonder if there will be another season.

Here are my favorites (better to worse):

1. Mad Men.
2. Glee.
3. Lie to Me.
4. The Good Wife.
5. Survivor.
6. Amazing Race.
7. Ugly Betty.

Most seasons I might like three shows as much or more than I like Ugly Betty this season. In most seasons Amazing Race would be in the top three. And 60 Minutes, Frontline, 30 Rock, and Modern Family are watchable. Lie to Me and The Good Wife have both managed to make a case-of-the-week show seem fresh, new, and complex.

In the latest episode of Mad Men, one of Betty Draper’s friends wants to know who someone is. She consults a book. Oh, he’s a bigshot, she says.

Was this deliberate? A not-very-in-joke? In the 1960s — even in the 1980s! — there was no Google-like book that said who living people are. You had to go to the library. It used to be fun to read the New Yorker Christmas poem (“Greetings, friends!”) and try to learn about the people you couldn’t identify. It was hard.

More In light of the first seven comments below I reviewed the scene. The mystery man, an advisor to Governor Rockefeller (not in advertising), is listed in a thin spiral-bound notebook. Who’s Who was much thicker and never spiral-bound. Here is the 1962 New York Social Register — much thicker and not spiral-bound. A later comment suggested the notebook contained “a copy” of the Register. No way — there were no Xerox machines back then. The woman who looks the mystery man up in the notebook tears his page out of the notebook and hands it to Betty — just like sending someone a link.