It's been a slow summer. How can I tell? I was away from my digital video recorders for almost two weeks and neither was full when I returned. Nor did it take me a particularly long time to catch up with the few shows I am monitoring this season.

"Flight of the Conchords" is my favorite thing on TV in ages. The more of a music geek you are, the more you will appreciate it (particularly the last episode which was pretty much only funny if you were an intensely studied David Bowie fan) but for the most part it's a sweet and harmless show that is way more than the sum of its modest ambitions. The first couple of episodes were so perfectly formed (plus frontloaded with the best songs) that it's kind of seemed in decline ever since the mugging show, but I think if they finish the season and put out a well-appointed DVD set in a few months they'll have done all they need to do to secure their places in my all-time pantheon. Man, "Business Time" is a great song. Maybe they don't have a great song for every episode (I couldn't remember the songs from the "Yoko" episode even after watching it several times), but in the ones where the music serves to drive the light point of the spoken comedy home, like the pilot and the Bowie episode, it's small-screen magic.

Then there's "John from Cincinnati," about which I don't know what to say. I haven't had the intention of giving up on watching it for a second, and maybe that's all you need to know. With all of the television I have absorbed and memorized over the years, I can't remember the last time there was a show that completely eluded me the way "John" does. I don't know what it's about. I don't know where it's going. I don't know why the characters interact in the patterns that they do or what David Milch intends to do with all of the ex-"Deadwood" actors who are amassed in Imperial Beach with no instructions other than to enunciate and to look haunted a lot. I do think it's significant that the last few episodes have gained a lot of narrative momentum, such as it exists in the "John from Cincinnati" world at all, by conveniently getting rid of the Bruce Greenwood character for a couple of days. They should do the same with Rebecca De Mornay's hugely tiresome Cissy. But who would have guessed that Luke Perry's Linc would get a substantial storyline so quickly? And what is the deal already with the blonde girl with the camcorder? And the "Day 5" episode with John rearranging the whole dramatis personae, alive or dead, into TV's weirdest-ever 4th of July barbeque? Enjoy the confusion while you can, I guess, because there is no chance that this completely opaque work of... whatever you want to call it makes it to a second summer's worth of episodes. I already anticipate a DVD set boycotted by an again-rehabbing Milch, leaving a hapless Luis Guzman and Willie Garson two commentary tracks to try and satisfactorily explain exactly what they or anybody else on the show was doing, precisely.

I may be alone in this but I'm enjoying ESPN's "The Bronx Is Burning" quite a bit, particularly for a Yankee hater. There's no reason at all for the detectives and reporters from the Son of Sam case to be castmembers in a running subplot, but the TV versions of Billy Martin, Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, and Thurman Munson we're shown are compelling even if inauthentic. It's a good story and once you get past the poor costuming decisions (Oliver Platt sounds and dresses like Larry David's "Seinfeld" Steinbrenner and John Turturro's prosthetic Martin ears are distracting) and TV-quality acting (except for Turturro), you can follow the version of events being presented fairly well. If I was more familiar with the time period I might be likely to skew more critical.

I have watched on and off since its inception but something always bothered me about "Entourage." Specifically, I didn't get why something billed, paced, and budgeted as a comedy was hardly ever funny. The last couple of episodes of the new season (its fourth, rather murkily distinguished from the end of its third by a one-week absence) have made me laugh out loud more than any in memory. Perhaps the writers are overrelying on the device of dividing the central foursome into a Vince-and-E A-team for hefty stories and a Drama-and-Turtle B-team for comic relief, but that division works every time. Kevin Dillon gets too little credit I feel for crafting a character of pure comic misery in Johnny Drama; normally I feel more bad than tickled by hapless types in comedy, but Dillon makes John Chase so richly deserving of his multiple comeuppances that I don't feel in the least bad taking joy in his pain. And yet somehow he's still just likable enough that part of you roots for him. It's a difficult and thankless role on a show whose cast dynamic and storytelling logic demand that Drama must always suffer. I feel your pain, Johnny Drama.