Glee is gloriously good - delightful, witty, accomplished and unabashedly silly at times.

Are you positively gleeful over Glee? Did you find The Beautiful Life less than beautiful? Do you no longer hanker for Hank? And are you feeling somewhat lackadaisical about The Jay Leno Show?

If so, you're in lockstep with most people's viewing habits this fall. As most TV dramas and sitcoms wind down their fall with post-November reruns, while preparing for the onslaught of new shows starting in January, now is as good a time as any to take stock of a season that has defied early expectations.

TV viewing is up across the board, for both the conventional broadcast networks and the specialty channels, and not just because of a new ratings- measurement system in Canada that records viewing patterns wherever the viewer may be, whether at home or in an airport lounge or a downtown bar.

The programs themselves are better, and sudden cancellations are more a rarity than a given, all of a sudden. With a handful of exceptions - The Beautiful Life, Hank - even cancelled series such as Dollhouse and Eastwick are being allowed to play out the string, by airing all their episodes, before vanishing.

There are still worrying signs for those whose business is making and showing TV programs. The economic recovery has been slow to take hold, and the advertising market that sustains broadcast television is still soft. The entire financial model of broadcast TV faces an uncertain future, thanks to changing consumer habits and rapidly advancing technology, file-sharing and web downloads.

For the time being, though, the TV business is more stable than it has been in months, possibly years. Here are some of the highlights, and lowlights, from the past two months of fall TV.

* Best new series

Just three months ago, it was inconceivable to think that the stars of a new TV show would be invited to perform at this year's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, only to be disinvited because the TV network televising the parade - NBC - didn't want to promote a show that airs on a rival network. Glee, the wonderful, exhilarating, life-affirming ensemble drama about a high-school musical-theatre company of social misfits, airs on Fox in the U.S. and on Global in Canada, where it has become the most improbable TV success story since The Office proved that a TV idea can be imported from the U.K. without turning into an embarrassment.

Glee is gloriously good - delightful, witty, accomplished and unabashedly silly at times. Its goofy charm has won over an audience perhaps jaded by too many dead-body-in-the-morgue crime dramas and witless reality shows.

It's also one of the few conventional prime-time TV dramas with genuine joie de vivre, as evidenced by Glee cast member Mark Salling's - he plays football star Puck in the series - big-hearted response to being disinvited from the Thanksgiving parade, as reported by E! Online. ``I got no hard feelings,'' Salling said. ``I'm going to watch (the parade) from my home, with family, which was allowed to happen by NBC not inviting us. So I'm not complaining. Thank you, NBC.''

Here's another sign that Glee is here to stay: Late last month, Madonna gave Glee's producers the rights to her entire catalogue of music. Glee is positively Madge-ical, evidently.

* Worst new series

It would be easy to point to a show that has already been cancelled, whether it's off the air already - The Beautiful Life, Hank, etc. - or just marking time until it disappears: Brothers, Trauma, Three Rivers, etc.

At this time of year, though, it's probably more helpful to single out a program that showed great promise initially, only to fall apart in the weeks and months since.

This season, it's hard to single out a program that had a more dazzling, bravura opening, only to become plodding and predictable, than FlashForward. Is it possible to jump the shark in just four episodes?

TV is facing across-the-board budget cuts, so it was perhaps inevitable that FlashForward wouldn't be able to sustain its eye-filling opening act, with its epic canvas and thrilling emotional arcs. Even so, the speed with which FlashForward devolved into a weepy soap opera - and a weepy soap opera set in a hospital corridor, at that - is profoundly disappointing.

There has been major upheaval behind the scenes on FlashForward in recent weeks, with one showrunner departing and one of the series' original creators, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight writer David S. Goyer, now being given sole responsibility for the show.

Any change Goyer makes won't be evident, however, until FlashForward returns from its Christmas break in the new year.

* Series that should have been renewed

If TV were judged purely on hindsight, there would be no need for a Hank or The Beautiful Life.

Even so, the fans often know better than highly paid network executives when a struggling show should be allowed room to breathe and grow.

Based on last year's cancellations alone, it's now clear that Pushing Daisies, Life, Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, Life on Mars and Samantha Who? all deserved another shot. Hank was specifically programmed to replace Samantha Who?, a show fans fought to save.

Similarly, Eastwick will not return to ABC once the current string of episodes has aired. Eastwick replaced Pushing Daisies, Eli Stone and Dirty Sexy Money, all of which look like better financial bets now, in hindsight.

No broadcast network is given to more peculiar decisions than NBC, though. NBC is the network that decided it didn't need Medium - an Emmy winner now in its sixth season on rival CBS - because it had the promising police drama Southland waiting in that time period, instead. But then NBC cancelled Southland before airing a single second-season episode. Now the network has been reduced to shovelling in editions of its newsmagazine Dateline, while scrambling to find something to replace Southland with. Meanwhile, Medium is a Top 40 hit for CBS.

* Most promising new performer

The easy answer: Throw a stick at the cast of Glee and whomever it hits - Cory Monteith, Lea Michele, Amber Riley, Dianna Agron, etc. - there's your promising performer. Glee's ensemble of relative unknowns, like the show itself, is crazy-cool, across the board.

For a change of pace, then, look in a completely different direction to The Vampire Diaries, a vampire-themed melodrama that's so much better than anyone had a right to expect. The Vampire Diaries is right up there with Glee as one of the fall season's most sensational surprises, and the whole show turns on whether the young actress who plays star-crossed, hard-luck, high-school senior Elena Gilbert can act.

Toronto-raised Nina Dobrev - her parents emigrated from her native Bulgaria when she was just two years old - can act, and how. An alumni of Degrassi: The Next Generation, a kind of proving ground for young Canadian TV actors and actresses hoping to break into the big leagues in Los Angeles, Dobrev is understated but deeply textured in a role filled with potential pitfalls. Dobrev is not just another wafer-thin, airily light Hollywood ingenue, and it shows.

Initial suspicions were that The Vampire Diaries would turn out to be Twilight Lite, and Dobrev would be cast as the poor man's Kristen Stewart. Instead, thanks in no small part to Dawson's Creek creator Kevin Williamson - and to Dobrev herself - The Vampire Diaries turned into something much smarter, sexier and more profound than anyone could have expected.

* Most welcome TV trend

Here's a switch: The TV networks have become more patient, all of a sudden.

Even when a show is officially cancelled - Joss Whedon's luckless Dollhouse, for example - the network is keeping it on the air until its full complement of 13 episodes has been shown.

The situation has been forced on the networks at least in part by economics. If a show has been bought and paid for, it only makes sense in hard economic times to show the episodes that have been produced - although, as NBC proved with Southland, there are always exceptions.

The other welcome trend is the growing number of adult, challenging serialized dramas on the specialty channels, whether it's Dexter on The Movie Network, or Damages on Showcase, or True Blood on HBO Canada. The cable dramas are moving, too, toward a European broadcasting model: fewer episodes per season, with more time, care and attention paid to making 10 or 13 really strong episodes, instead of 22 mediocre ones.

In a meeting with TV critics this past summer, The Shield creator Shawn Ryan - now the executive producer of Lie to Me - surprised his audience by saying he found making 10 or 13 episodes of The Shield more stressful and labour- intensive than making 22 episodes of his (now cancelled) network drama The Unit, because he put so much more time and effort into making every second of The Shield count.

* Most annoying TV trend

Commercial creep is both maddening and dangerous to broadcast TV's long-term survival - dangerous, that is, if consumers continue to use commercial breaks as an excuse to channel-surf, pop in a DVD, or turn off and tune out entirely.

Commercial interruptions seem especially distracting this season. The catch- 22 of TV programming is that, the more absorbing and engaging a program is, the more the commercials seem like a distraction.

It isn't just the commercials. Drop-ins - those persistent, in-your-face reminders that tell you what you're watching, and then promote a completely unrelated program on a completely different day and time - give viewers another reason to weigh their options.

The solution? Fewer ads, better ads and more expensive ads, with advertisers willing to pay a premium to reach a premium audience. The Fox network has experimented - with mixed results - with scaling back the commercial time on its supernatural thriller Fringe, and charging a premium for ad time. Fox is also telling viewers up front - again, with mixed results - at the beginning of each commercial break that ``Fringe will return in 60 seconds;'' ``Fringe will return in 30 seconds,'' etc. So far, none of the Canadian networks has followed Fox's lead, and Fox has not tried to expand the experiment to its other programs - yet.

It's either that or a wholesale shift to the pay-TV model - think HBO Canada or The Movie Network - where subscriber fees cover programming costs, and the only promotional ads are those between movies and shows.

* Leno at 10: Loser or winner?

The numbers were respectable to start with - the curiosity factor alone was worth a few percentage points to The Jay Leno Show's early weeks - but those same numbers have been dovetailing ever since.

That's true in Canada, as well as in the U.S. In a twist few could have predicted as recently as four weeks ago, History Television's Ice Pilots NWT - a homegrown docu-reality series on a specialty channel unavailable in many Canadian homes - handily beat The Jay Leno Show, roughly 450,000 viewers to 300, 000.

NBC, The Jay Leno Show's parent network, is committed to keeping Leno where he is for a full year before making any decision about the show's future.

That decision - like the decision to give Leno a 10 o'clock talk show in the first place - will be purely financial. The Jay Leno Show costs around $500,000 US a night to produce, as opposed to anywhere from $2 million US to $4 million US for an equivalent hour of TV drama.

Still, there are other factors in play. The early ratings in the U.S. indicate serious audience erosion for NBC affiliates' local newscasts at 11 p.m. , following The Jay Leno Show. That's affecting the local affiliates' bottom line. Even in Canada, local stations make most of their revenue from local newscasts.

The early indicators are that the Leno experiment may be cost-friendly, but it's not giving viewers much of a reason to keep watching.

No matter what happens to Leno, it's been a crazy season so far, full of surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant. New hits, more viewers - Leno aside - and more glee all around. January looks a lot more interesting, all of a sudden.

astrachan@canwest.com

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