Reality TV and disaster movies were nothing compared to Mother Nature in 2005, so it’s only fitting that a hurricane tops the list of the year’s most memorable television programming.

1 KATRINA COVERAGE | As the world watched, Hurricane Katrina brought misery to the Gulf Coast and a massive career boost to CNN’s intrepid (and fabulously groomed) Anderson Cooper. But the real storm hit when the sun came out and the failure of government at every level lay exposed in the glare of the 24-hour cable news channels. The effect of seeing poor African-American residents of New Orleans begging for food and water was something no amount of Bush Administration voodoo could exorcise from viewers’ eyeballs. Jolted by this glimpse of a separate and unequal nation amid the floodwaters, Americans responded to the celebrity appeals of hurricane-relief telethons and turned thumbs down on the preside

David Brent started a revolution. Ever since 2001, when Ricky Gervais made waves as the pudgy, petulant boss in The Office, America’s interest in British comedy has been reinvigorated. Maybe it’s a matter of freshness. The Office and Extras are uncomfortable and contemporary, the British answers to Curb Your Enthusiasm, whereas before we’d been getting Are You Being Served? reruns. Or perhaps it’s just that basic cable has now put BBC America a click away — we’re light years from the old rabbit-ear days of Fawlty Towers on PBS. Or it could be simpler still: Britcoms are now making the leap to Region 1 DVD faster than ever, sometimes mere months after the series finishes airing. Nothing breeds obsession like accessibility.

Of course, there’s no better way to ensure viewers’ future allegiance than showing them what they’ve missed in the past. At least, that seems to be the logic behind releasing the DVD of 1994’s Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge

For the past five seasons, Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) of the WB’s Gilmore Girls (Tuesdays at 8 pm) has been that TV rarity: the realistically drawn smart girl. She’s an indie-rocking reader who wants to be the next Christiane Amanpour, and her plot lines revolve around school, with boys a distant second. There are some chinks in the good-girl armor, however, and as Rory has floundered at Yale, Girls creator Amy Sherman Palladino has shown us a young woman becoming unmoored in the throes of an early-20s crisis.

Girls premiered in 2000 on the fledgling, critically maligned WB and established itself as a reason to watch. Rory and her hot thirtysomething mom, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), are more like best friends, trading quips and coffee in bucolic small-town Connecticut. Runaway Lorelai had Rory at 16, and she’s trying to reconcile with her snobby society parents while her daughter tries to figure out her own relationship with them.

Last season ended with Lorelai proposing to

Time to face facts: HBO owns me.

It's a realization I came to about a year and a half ago as I sat on my girlfriend's couch almost — almost — shedding a tear for Carrie Bradshaw. That should have been the end to a string of wasted wintry Sunday nights. And it would have had my clicker finger been quicker.

But the TV stayed on, and I sat transfixed as previews flashed in front of my wide eyes. Before I knew it, seasons were flashing by outside the window, the only constant being me, anchored to the sofa every Sunday, watching whatever piece of immaculately acted and beautifully filmed melodrama Home Box Office chose to put in front of me. The Sopranos turned to Carnivàle turned to Deadwood, and I was powerless to stop it. The trademark static tone that announces the opening of each HBO series episode doubled as the death rattle of my social life, a new season of one show starting just as its predecessor ended.

Finally this fall, with Six Feet Under

On the Cartoon Network, a quiet revolution is taking place. Airing from 11 pm to 6 am every night except Friday, the Adult Swim programming block — aside from being designed for insomniacs and the unemployed — seems to be nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. That coveted 18-to-34 demographic is not only the main audience but the creative force behind Adult Swim. Which makes it one of the smartest, freshest, and most consistently hip line-ups on TV. Some of the earliest Adult Swim shows — Harvey Birdman and Sealab 2021 — were recycled from failed Hanna-Barbara cartoons. Characters whom the core audience already knew and loved from childhood were retooled, recut, and redubbed with current references and lewd innuendo. And though cheap animation and raunchy jokes aren’t exactly novel, Adult Swim has set itself apart from similar shows via bleaker settings and adult humor. (That’s " adult " as in jokes about small-town government bureaucrats, not explosive diarrhea.) As on South