"Actors and Their Roles for $100, Alex" -- Top 10 scripted series of 2009

Edie Falco stars in Nurse Jackie

"Reality TV" again ran wild in 2009, with the fractious Gosselins appearing here, there and everywhere.

But let's not forget that this also has been a big, bold, bracing year for scripted  TV. You know, the kind that actually costs a little something to put on and requires actual actors instead of posers.

An array of bright newcomers has joined a nice collection of sturdy holdovers, making this Top 10 list a tough one to nail down. But in reverse order, here's my best effort, with a few honorable mentions at the end.

10. MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE (TNT) -- Ray Romano has a second act after all, in this strong serio-comic drama about three fortysomething pals in various stages of arrested development. The former star of Everybody Loves Raymond plays a discombobulated party store owner with two kids and a dissipated marriage. He's joined by fellow TV vets Andre Braugher (Homicide: Life on the Street) and Scott Bakula (Quantum Leap, Enterprise), who respectively play a car salesman under the thumb of his father and a fading actor.

9. HUNG (HBO) -- There's lots of endowment fun to be had in this semi-dark comedy starring Thomas Jane as a well-appointed, divorced high school basketball coach who sells his principal asset with help from a neurotic female "pimp" played perfectly by Jane Adams. Jane, who played Mickey Mantle in the HBO movie 61*, finds it harder to hit home runs with his disparate list of pay-for-play clients. But in a downer Detroit economy, he'll try to hang in there.

8. NURSE JACKIE (Showtime) -- Edie Falco segues from Carmela Soprano to a tough-talking, pill-popping emergency room caregiver. She seemingly has a perfect marriage, but may be destined to throw it all away. An angel of mercy one minute and contemptible the next, Jackie Peyton seems hell-bent on self-destruction. Still, what would her patients do without her? The cast also includes newcomer Merritt Wever as apprentice nurse Zoey Barkow. She's good enough in the role to steal a scene or two from Falco. And that's quite an achievement.

7. GLEE (Fox) -- Gotta sing, gotta dance, gotta marvel at how Fox has made a buzz show out of an hour that has nothing to do with crime, jeopardy or week-to-week doses of "mythology." Matthew Morrison shines as peppy high school music man Will Schuester while Jane Lynch ably gnaws scenery as acidic cheerleader coach Sue Sylvester. The kids are more than all right, too, led by Lea Michele as super-needy songstress Rachel Berry.

6. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (NBC/DirecTV) -- Under-appreciated at awards time, under-watched in prime-time, this Texas-set high school football drama is the hard-hitting flip side of Glee. Kyle Chandler as tough-minded coach Eric Taylor and Connie Britton as his steel-backboned wife, Tami, remain a married couple worth cheering for as FNL works its way through a fourth season on DirecTV before reprising it this summer on NBC. A fluid cast of terrific young actors assists in driving the on-and-off-field drama. But where oh where are the viewers?

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5. LOST (ABC) -- I've given up hope that this will end well. The impossibly tangled Lost "mythology" surely won't be tied in a neat, explicable bow when the series ends next spring. But at this point, who cares -- as long as it's not one long dream sequence. This has been the most captivating, infuriating broadcast TV series of the last two decades, with characters bedeviled by "smoke monsters" one minute and their own demons the next. When it's good, it's sublime. And when it's bad, it's still worthier than just about anything else coming your way. Either way, I wouldn't miss a minute.

4. MODERN FAMILY (ABC) -- Fractured families are sitcom staples, but this one's a revelation in times when broadcast network laughers appear to be on the comeback trail. Modern Family's most familiar face, Ed O'Neill, used to go for broad belly laughs as knuckle-dragging Al Bundy on Fox's first successful comedy series, Married . . . With Children. Now he's gone wry with age, serving as the nominal patriarch of an off-centered brood. Today's "smart" comedies mostly get by without a laugh track, which Modern Family does with flying colors. Credit the revitalized O'Neill with being funny without seeming to try. That's the beauty of this show, a descendant of Arrested Development that so far is getting what that show deserved -- an audience big enough to sustain it.

3. MAD MEN (AMC) -- Its third season started very slowly, even languorously. But you might say that things picked up down the stretch, with Don Draper (Jon Hamm) separating himself from both wife "Betty" (January Jones) and the sold-out-from-under-him Sterling Cooper ad agency. Viewers caught some ugly sides of Draper/Dick Whitman in the past season, most notably his "you people" contempt for a gay ad man and his branding of Betty as a "whore" for her lone dalliance. Now Mad Men must pick up all these pieces while on the surface reinventing itself in the manner of The Practice morphing into Boston Legal. That was done largely for budgetary reasons, with ABC insisting on trimming a high-priced cast before gradually taking on another one. We'd like to think that Mad Men's changes and motives are purely creative in nature.

2. DEXTER (Showtime) -- The arrival of John Lithgow as the so-called "Trinity Killer" took this bloody well done drama to a new level in its fourth season. Michael C. Hall's serial-slaying Dexter Morgan found himself bedeviled by both a new foil and the ghost of his naysaying father. Chills and spills abounded, with Dexter juggling newfound family responsibilities with his long-held need to kill and kill again. Lithgow's entrance, also as an erstwhile family man, both crimped Dexter's style and provided him with a worthy and supremely demonic adversary. The twists and turns kept coming all season long, with Dexter's homicide detective sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter) also at a loss after suffering her own numbing loss.

1. TRUE BLOOD (HBO) -- Dare it be said that the Twilight movies are for sissies? Well, they are compared to HBO's blood-curdling saga of vampire warfare and the telepathic waitress caught in the middle. That would be nubile Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), whose love for vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) went much more than skin deep in a tumultuous Season 2. True Blood perhaps went a bit over the top at times. But it nonetheless remained spellbinding and spine-tingling, with new villains and alliances emerging while Sookie and Bill fell deeper into each other's grasps. Another cliffhanging season finale created yet more daunting complications for both of them. Vampires can be a helluva challenge.

HONORABLE MENTIONS -- The Big Bang Theory, The Good Wife (CBS); The Middle (ABC); 30 Rock, The Office (NBC); House (Fox); White Collar (USA); Breaking Bad (AMC).