Best of '88

BABY M (ABC) With an intelligent script, restrained direction and riveting performances by JoBeth Williams and John Shea, this docudrama about surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead became a stark thirtysomething nightmare.

DEAF AND BLIND (PBS) Cinema verite specialist Frederick Wiseman took his cameras to the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind and came back with four enlightening, often heartrending documentaries.

HOLLYWOOD: THE GOLDEN YEARS (Arts & Entertainment) RKO, the studio where King Kong, Fred Astaire and Orson Welles once roamed, was celebrated in six beautifully crafted, impressively researched episodes. Imported from the BBC, alas.

KENNEDY RETROSPECTIVES Twenty-five years after J.F.K.'s assassination, specials on CBS, PBS and elsewhere reminded us movingly -- if excessively -- of the days when Presidents, and television, could be heroes.

LIP SERVICE (HBO) An old-school TV anchorman (Paul Dooley) finds himself teamed with a shallow New Wave co-host (Griffin Dunne). Howard Korder's script for this made-for-cable movie neatly skewered television, but also located the tragedy beneath the tackiness.

TANNER '88 (HBO) While voters slogged through an uninspired presidential campaign, Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau invented their own candidate (Michael Murphy) and fashioned, in this eleven-part series, the year's definitive satire of media politics.

THE TENTH MAN (CBS) A rich lawyer imprisoned by the Nazis in Paris bargains to save his life and later faces the consequences. Anthony Hopkins made the viewer feel every moral pang in Graham Greene's engrossing story.

VOICES & VISIONS (PBS) TV and poetry usually do not mix. But in this series of 13 thoughtful and evocative essays on American versifiers, the alchemy was just right.

WISEGUY (CBS) Ken Wahl is Vinnie Terranova, an undercover cop sniffing out Mob bad guys, in TV's roughest, toughest, most flamboyantly entertaining crime series.

THE WONDER YEARS (ABC) The nostalgia is ladled on a bit thick, but this wry, affectionate comedy about a twelve-year-old's angst in the late '60s has wit and insight -- and the most believable family scenes on TV.