The fall 2006 television season brought us everything from a serial killer with a conscience (“Dexter”) to the international launch of a 24-hour news channel (Al-Jazeera English) that, in this country at least, could only be watched on the Internet. There were sad farewells (Helen Mirren in “Prime Suspect”) and welcome arrivals (Alec Baldwin in “30 Rock”). As always on the box, it was the best of times and the worst of times, with good shows and bad crammed together like runners at the start of a marathon. Herewith a guide to some of the season’s high points (and a couple of the lows).

FIRST PRIZE FOR AMBITION: NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” was the fall season’s big network attempt to recapture a vanished concept of classy entertainment and make it fly in a landscape dominated by sitcoms, gimmicky reality shows, and all the rest. This isn’t to say “Studio 60” was the only program to try for class, but simply to point out that it was the only one eager to let its audience know about it.

In that sense, despite the liberal politics, “Studio 60” was reactionary at heart: Something had gone wrong with network television, and good writing and smart dialogue were going to help fix it. That was the message. “You’re raising the bar pretty high, aren’t you?” Bradley Whitford asked Amanda Peet early on. Answer: “Clear it.” Matthew Perry established himself as TV’s smartest leading man, but some people are still waiting for Aaron Sorkin’s feet to leave the ground.

LEAST EFFORT, MOST LAUGHS: “30 Rock,” also on NBC, also a television show about a television show, came equipped with wings of gossamer: Its feet never touched the ground. Satirical points were made swiftly and neatly. Told to pick up a prescription tranquilizer pronto for a freaked-out comedian at a “Rite Drug” on 46th Street and Eighth Avenue, the show’s gopher arrived at his destination, looked around, and saw a “Rite Drug” on every corner. The comedic point — which “Rite Drug” — meshed effortlessly with the satirical one: the corporate takeover of Manhattan illustrated to perfection in, oh, about two seconds. Plus Tina Fey is as wonderfully self-effacing as Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan are hilarious showboats.

WAKE ME WHEN THEY’RE OVER: The fall season was crammed with ambitious network series — ABC’s “Six Degrees” and “The Nine,” NBC’s Heroes,” CBS’s “Jericho” — so pregnant with sprawling story lines and an implicit threat never to come to an end (you could sense, even after one episode, that they intended to go on forever), that most people threw in the towel after a couple of rounds. (“Heroes,” about real-life comic book superheroes in New York, caught on for some reason.)

BEST NEW DRAMA: Fortunately, NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” arrived to provide some real excitement, both intimate and athletic, driven at a furious pace that never detracted from the richness of its characterizations. Apparently, the fact that it’s about a high-school football team in a nowhere Texas town has damaged its ratings capabilities, but the show can be so visually and emotionally potent that it made many of the shows set in Los Angeles or New York look positively somnolent in comparison.

BEST ONGOING ODE TO INDOLENCE: Not that being a little laid-back is necessarily a bad thing. If you were looking for something offbeat to while away the time, or just a really good actress to watch, that was probably Season 3 of “Weeds,” the Showtime series about a perky, pot-dealing widow portrayed by Mary-Louise Parker with a loosy-goosy style that is uniquely her own. Set in a perfect little California suburb ripe for send-up, “Weeds” may be TV’s most decadent show. It takes place in an America where nothing matters, or could conceivably matter, which makes it something of a guilty pleasure, since that manifestly is not the case. But it’s so well acted and so succinct (each episode is only 30 minutes long) that it’s possible to sit back, enjoy, and not care.

MOST COMPELLING PSYCHO: Showtime offers two nominees for this award, and we’ll call it a draw between Oded Fehr as the terrorist mastermind on “Sleeper Cell” and Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan on “Dexter.” Mr. Hall plays a “blood spatter expert” for the Miami police department who is also a serial killer, but only of other serial killers who evade the law. “One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead,” Oscar Wilde wrote, but Dexter would appear to be in the peculiar position of leading both his real life (killing people) and the fake version (pretending to be just another guy on the Miami police force). But now doubt has arisen: Perhaps forcing his murderous urges through a moral channel (killing other murderers) is itself a kind of fakery? That particular dilemma looks set to become the theme of next year’s installment of this uniquely creepy show.

BEST CHARACTER: Easy: LAPD Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) of TNT’s “The Closer.” TNT recently treated us to a two-hour out-of-season special in which Johnson moonlighted for the CIA in unraveling the murky background to the mysterious death of an Arab teenager. I know one is supposed to admire Johnson for her mental brilliance — and I do, I do — but I can’t help recalling with particular fondness an episode early in the first season when, for strictly police-related reasons, to be sure, she was forced to style her hair, wear a lot of makeup, and try on lots of revealing dresses. Maybe we could have just a bit more of that when next season resumes? No one’s as good as Ms. Sedgwick at being smart, sexy, and funny all at once, and somehow getting all those categories mixed up in novel ways.

BEST LATECOMER: A new twist on the sitcom formula and a surprise late-season pleasure was the arrival of Jordana Spiro as P.J. Franklin, the tomboy sportswriter heroine of TBS’s “My Boys.”The boys in question are a bunch of pizza-munching slackers who make use of her roomy Chicago pad for poker and other entertainments like an army of Kramers bursting into Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment. Though undoubtedly fetching, P.J. is so much one of the boys that the boys never look twice at her. Other men do, however, and though friends-as-family is a well-worn sitcom premise, this one tugs with particular, even neurotic, persistence on the theme of the pleasures of the group versus the needs of the individual — and how the former conspires against the latter. You could read Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” for a more rarefied treatment of the subject, but “My Boys” has a pleasing if lowbrow authenticity.

WORST NEWS: One of the most prescient writers about television, George W.S. Trow, died November 24 in Naples, Italy. I missed the December 18 episode of “Studio 60,” but I hear Trow’s most famous book, “Within the Context of No Context,” was referenced. Kudos to Mr. Sorkin for that.

bbernhard@nysun.com